Androniki Marathaki

By looking now for the foreignness in myself and in my practice, I can start but not finish...


CV
Androniki Marathaki (1981) works as performer, performance creator and dance teacher. After studying Conservation of Arts and Antiquities, she decided to study dance professionally in D.Grigoriadou dance school. The scholarship of I.K.Y (National Scholarships Institution of Greece) gave her the opportunity to continue her studies abroad in a postgraduate level, in C.S.S.D. (MA Performance Practices and Research).  Androniki’s practice as research evolves under the name “modulated choreographies” and her interest, as a creator and as a dance teacher, is focused in the relation of danc-ing/mov-ing and perform-ing.


The stimulus/the origin
I was researching for a stimulus that should
  • ·         embrace the Deleuzian notion of singularity,...should  “ move from a unique site of consciousness to an oceanic one...[or to be as] in sensing music that accompanies the dance of dust” Deleuze/ The fold: Leibniz and the baroque.
  • ·         reflects automatically on motion
  • ·         is in proximity with the “where am I” that Ana proposed
      For almost one month... the phrase “let me get out of your skirt” became my starting point. Words such as birth/death, blood/flesh, womb, crucifixion were playing around my head and through my dance, but none of them could fill in my origin gap, none of them could reflect all the above. Simultaneously, I started researching a theme about a competition for a solo performance under the theme “What do I like in crisis”. Memories and uncontrolled conceptual links lead me to think about, and compare, the enormous amount of pairs of shoes that we have today against the one pair of shoes that my grandfather used to have.

      It was not a different project!
   
     Automatic movement: “Tying my shoelaces”

    Decision made: This project examines the bipolar relation of binding and unbinding.
    Stimulus: the sense of binding


By looking now for the foreignness in this project, I can sum up...
1st Layer 
Title: Umbilical Lotus
Summary: To release the umbilical cord after the cord has stopped pulsing, a cut is needed. Umbilical cord separates naturally only in the lotus birth after the third day of the birth. In both cases, severance is more like a process of transformation formed by stages, which can only appear entirely when it becomes a necessity.  The bond changes, the bond evolves. The emphasis on the filling of primary necessities/needs due to crisis, activates the unbinding of the illusory bonds and the change of our relationship to them. Against a hollow and invisible reality, daily stepped, this may be the prologue.  “Umbilical Lotus” is a solo performance that examines the process of transformation of a clear lotus umbilical connected.


Movement dynamics
During the solo competition the movement material evolved and allowed interconnections inbetween performer’s strand and motion’s strand to appear. Four “movement dynamics”/tasks created the score for the piece.
Each “movement dynamic” could be illustrated in these pictures.
During the first week of the lab I wrote:
The only image that I have is that tasks are formed from subtasks which are like centres that vibrate a kinaesthetic knowledge. In between these subtasks there are small gaps. I love these gaps. The centres are not lined up. Some of their vibration rays might. Some others are lost when time passes while performing, but I am on alert: I don’t want to miss the generative ones. That ‘s all I know till now in words.  (28.1.11).

If I could propose one comparison between the first week of rehearsals and the last one, these two images would reflect my experience as close as possible. The red parts are kinaesthetic material that are enscribed clearly on my body/me. The other colours illustrate the vibration of the first material. As I said before, the most interesting part for me was the journey from the one red point to the other. It reminds me ...

“Οτι αγαπω γεννιεται αδιακοπα, οτι αγαπω βρισκεται στην αρχη του παντα” Οδ. Ελυτης.
The everyday engagement narrows down the dynamic and particularizes it. I was able to move during the rehearsals and performances into depth, while performing each dynamic, and progressively transform them into sub-dynamics, more clear and specific dynamics. Focusing on the movement dynamic, I was able to observe more the “how a movement is performed”, rather than what is it in space and time as a form. The observation of the journey to reach rsecific kinaesthetic material allowed the transformation of an invisible dance to a haptic one, and the opposite. The research of this journey was not absent during the performances, but a continuation to what was rehearsed.

The method “modulated choreographies”(an effort to summarize 12.000 words)

The score is based on the method “modulated choreographies” which is also the name of my MA thesis. It can be related to the method of structured improvisation (just to give a broader sense of how I worked), despite my disagreement with the practicality of this term.
The solo presented, the dynamics proposed for the score and the way of performing them were influenced by choices that were made in “modulated choreographies”.



A. Departing from
What inspired me for this research were questions that I wrote once in my journal (2 years ago):
Is the body, the core of contemporary thought, distanced from the sense of experiencing? Is dance, the art of embodiment, made to be accessed visually as a representational art only? Is the latter question adding distance to the former one? Have dancers in front of the audience become aliens or this is a factual result?

My intention in this research was not to prove the rightness of that kind of research and not to state, but to question the thresholds in the image of choreography.

B. Fragments From the intro of MA thesis
Dance scholar Cooper Albright refers to dance as the “double moment of representation: somatic identity and a cultural/social one”(1997: 11). The practitioners and researchers Dunlop and Sanchez claim that the “dance practice is one of embodiment” (2000: 7). The art of dance is referenced as a representational one and as the one of embodiment but the subject of these definitions is the one that changes: representational art for the audience, embodied art for the performer. As Hamalainen claims, “dance is created in a different medium from the one that is presented” (2009: 107).  According to Jaana Parviainen (1998) also, in this dual nature, of the dancing body and the one that it is visible, audible and perceived by the others, there is always an abyss.

.... What if in the art of dance the experiential element could be emphasized, for the performer and for the audience also? what if the aim of making performances could disregard the norm that dance primary is made to be seen?( Fabius: “the art of the moving body[that] is made to be seen” (2009: 331))
......As John Martin announced in his early lectures in 1930s (Lepecki 2004:121) modern dance’s “beginning was the discovery of the actual substance of the dance, which it found to be movement”. In this finding Martin claims that dance founded itself. As:
 “Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation”( Deleuze 2004: 67), staged choreography diminish the tangle points of view into these presented in one “front”.
....Adding movement on stage suggests a partial addition of movement in the entire performance space. Either set or improvised choreography, on a clear visual and kinaesthetic division, positions movement secondary, adding nothing at all according to Massumi’s observation: 
“When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes problematic second. After all is signified and sited, there is the nagging problem of how to add movement back into picture”...Adding movement like this adds nothing at all. You just get two successive states: multiples of zero.( Massumi 2002:3).
This topological division emphasizes the actual act of visual perception of movement, and is a division of the kinaesthetic experience also, of the experiencing of motion. The kinaesthetical division is one that alters the mode of appreciation from a kinaesthetic one to an optical, introducing dance to an interpreting mode for the audience. By neglecting experience in the presentation of performances in staged dance, motion is translated by audience members into snapshots, self reflecting the negation of the true substance of dance, motion. If the realm of movement becomes secondary, dance practices have only helped in the diffusion of a chasm between dancers and audience. Dancers, in front of the audience have become aliens. Their performances, despite the fact that dance practice is also one of embodiment, refer more, and I am not implying it is right or wrong, to visual and narrative appreciations. If staged dance “performs” more the snapshots rather than the movement, right or wrong is not the issue. The issue is to mobilize “the sphere of applicability, especially when the “ground” upon which it operates is continuously moving” (Massumi 2002:7).
....Installations, paintings and sculptures welcome the audience towards the opposite direction. They force the audience to create movement “to combine a superficial and a penetrating view, or to ascend and descend within space as we move through it” (Deleuze 2004:67). 

My interest relies on the middle path, which does not follow a topological spatial division. If I am interested in movement itself, in change, then movement’s dynamic of the entire performance space should be challenged. The emphasis should be on the process and on the dynamic, before the one that is represented as positions to us, and before the one that excludes our being in it, negating the subject of affection to be evolved.

....Trying to locate dance, place dance within positions, results, products and representations, deletes the primacy of movement as its actual substance and it also generates misinterpretations. Fragmented and dislocated intentions allow fragmented and dislocated responses, and clear and located intentions also allow fragmented and dislocated responses. What can then be named common ground or theme of a performance? In a divided room of two realities, dance itself does not clearly allow its actual substance to be revealed, it does not allow movement to present its majesty. “Dance falls prey to that true “apparatus of capture” known as choreography” as Lepecki commented (2007:120) on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term: “apparatus of capture”(1987:424-73), and this results the reduction in perceiving  dance’s true substance. It is “the mechanism that simultaneously distributes and organises dance’s relationship to perception and signification”(Lepecki 2007:120),a determination of an outside, as that of an apparatus.


2nd Layer and Umbilical lotus(plural)
Despite my uncertainty to publish all the above because of their “fragmentary” reference, I believe that it provides the primary purpose of how was “umbilical lotus” presented in the lab presentations in 6th April. As I only had two weeks to add the second layer in umbilical lotus, I admit that the result presented was more like an experiment based on my previous research rather than a performance filled in with clear intention (from creator’s point of view).....and certainly not a successful one.
The goals of this second layer were

  • to create a performance space where coexistence was present. The topological borders and the kinaesthetical ones should be redistributed. Performer’s movement should coexist in the space with audience’s movement in a mobile space always in process that is shared kinaesthetically.  
  • to synaesthetically and kinaesthetical share the stimulus(binding-unbinding)
  • to allow on the one hand audience members to modulate the movement dynamics, and on the other hand to transform the performer to a modulator of the set material, and to the modulator of the performances when is additional stimulated by audience members.



By looking again for the foreignness in this project, I can sum up...
2st Layer
Title: Umbilical Lotus(in plural). Ωμφάλιοι λωτοί

Umbilical Lotus
To release the umbilical cord after the cord has stopped pulsing, a cut is needed. Umbilical cord separates naturally only in the “lotus birth” after the third day of the birth. In both cases, severance is more like a process of transformation formed by stages, which can only appear entirely when it becomes a necessity.  The bond changes, the bond evolves. “Umbilical Lotus” examines the manifold responses of the transformation of the stimulus-binding, and the possible encounters that unfold in a performance.  The performer, being a mobile reference point, claims the ownership of the performance space to allow the becomings of a stimulus unique and common.  Through an effort of destabilizing bindings, “Umbilical Lotus” is a solo performance that examines the process of transformation of a clear lotus umbilical connected....
within many others.