Continuation

SIX MONTHS ONE LOCATION

By Bojana Cvejic

The following text is the first draft of a project initiated by Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejic. The history of the project dates from a working group which emerged during MODE05, conference on education in dance and performance held in Potsdam in march 2005. The conference followed an open-source logic of taking part, contributing and shaping discussion in immediate ways on the basis of direct involvement, where topics and interest/working groups arose, assembled and disintegrated daily. Six Months One Location is the offspring of one of these formations, and it continued to develop into a project, which will be realized in 2008.

A What a cheap rupture traveling and jumping from one project to another!

B Was it dumb to think that changing places of residence would challenge my work? I am so tired of displacement ...

A Displacement is no movement. Movement is continuity. B Maybe we should explore the "countries" of our work. A What do you mean?

B Our own foreign territories.

A We lodge in one place against being forced to travel seeking new projects new jobs new opportunities, and we take time for immobility.

B Only exiled emigrants are nomads in the sense that we like to use. We are just parasites of leftism trying to make the free market a smooth space for surfing without too much compromise.

A Either I'm using the opportunities I get by trying to make the best out of it or I am rendering services: a lecture here, a lab there, once a symposium, then a workshop, one residency, another residency, and yet another residency, while there is less and less budget for production. Can I make this itinerary more consistent? In the meantime I do manage to do my work.

B Do you know what makes one a good surfer? Being able to choose waves, and elegance in style. A But imagine there wouldn't be any waves without surfers. B You're idealistic. A I want to propose a project to you. The project is called Continuation or Six Months One Location.

This is a conversation between an artist and a theorist working in the West European context of performing arts in 2008. They were both proud of and happy about the freelance work+lifestyle they once – ten years ago or less – fought for. It gave them time and room to develop their work on a project basis. Each project entailed a focus on another problematic and required and enabled a different set-up and a different production/presentation strategy. To engage in a long process of research and collaboration was a matter of choice to struggle for and negotiate, if one was going to stay "open", "mobile", "volatile" and not settle for one way, one concept, one method and ultimately, one aesthetic.

In the course of ten years or less, theaters and other venues for the performing arts learnt that an institution can renew itself if it adopts a project-based freelance and residency-system as a dominant mode of production. Having always a new name to discover would guarantee diversity in the programme but diminish production resources in the room for curation that was already being narrowed by the neoliberal economic pressure. All that which once had been a movement of deterritorialization – working in different places at more than one project at a time – became an obligation. Projects could only be co-produced, and then artists had to reside in order to fill the venues that would show the work with artistic activity. Artists are forced to constantly reinvent themselves as the desirable commodity in competition for a limited number of opportunities in the narrowed spaces of curation. So this mode of production turns more and more into a mood of reaction, opportunism and cynicism of the question: what is always already there that I need to deterritorialize? What happens when a condition becomes a constraint, a choice an obligation? How to create a constraint that will act as an enabling condition?

If every condition is a constraint, not every constraint is a condition, and, therefore, it's only important to discern when a condition becomes less enabling and more frustrating for work. Every creative process has a built-in constraint, a "terminus" which drives the process, but doesn't determine it. Experimenting with the constraint that conditions the work may not causally determine the process and its eventual outcome. But what is possible is to deviate from the procedures that produce known effects. In practical terms, it's only possible to experiment with conditions once you deviate from those procedures that constitute the known ways of making, performing and receiving performances.

Continuation: Six Months One Location is a project that sets up special conditions in order to examine what they produce in terms of procedures, working methods, formats, discourse and ways of working together. The essential conditions are that the work take place 1) in one location 2) in the duration of six months without interruption and 3) involve a number of people who each apply with a project of their own.

One location. Staying in one place for a long period of time will let us explore the effects of conditions opposed to the itinerant project-based habitus: concentration in isolation, focus on work in one place rather than dispersing in several projects in several locations, another pace and sense of time, no distractive escapes in trips. It will also imply temporarily leaving the institutional market and becoming less visible and present in the performing arts scene.

Uninterrupted process. Although our freelance style merges life and work, leaving no leisure time outside of work and framing almost all daily activities instrumentally into the purpose of the current project, the periods that are solely and without interruption devoted to work are rarely longer than three months. Doubling this period will hopefully deflect the process from gearing itself efficiently towards the product of performance. It's not about stretching the time for "allowing more doubt, trial and error" and improving one's initial concept in experiment. The time is there to stimulate more than one line of research, where production can proliferate in by-products and side-effects, where more than one format – and certainly not out of thinking what is most appropriate – can emerge. What do we do when all we have is what we never have enough of – time?

Projects. The main condition to join C:6M1L is that each person propose a project or any kind of work that would have the focus of a proposition, a statement of intent or desire to work. The projects, understood in the broader sense of work, could range within the performing arts field from performance to theory, and they could also vary concerning their state of development: whether they are in the state of preparation, one phase of development, postproductional, or a side-line. They are not "programmed", i.e., chosen on the basis of promising a certain product, so presentation is entirely optional. It should also be mentioned that presentations do not carry the label of C:6M1L, but are signed by the person. Having each person responsible for their own project avoids the dead-end blockages of collectivity: there is no transcendent project above all projects everyone is working on, and so authorship and ownership are not an issue. Everyone agrees that working in C:6M1L involves the ethic of open-source to a certain degree: ideas will circulate and pop up and flourish in many (and often unexpected) places.

Intercessors. But who are we? And why do we meet to work together? We are all intercessors. In “Pourparler“ Gilles Deleuze introduces the figure of the intercessor, describing his collaboration with Felix Guattari: “Ce qui est essentiel c'est les intercesseurs. Sans eux il n'y a pas d'œuvre. Ça peut être des gens – pour un philosophe, des artistes ou des savants, pour un savant, des philosophes ou des artistes – mais aussi des choses, des plantes, des animaux comme dans Castaneda. Fictifs ou réels, animés ou inanimés, il faut fabriquer des intercesseurs. C'est une série. Si on ne forme pas une série, même complètement imaginaire, on est perdu. J'ai besoin de mes intercesseurs pour m'exprimer, et eux ne s'exprimeraient jamais sans moi : on travaille toujours à plusieurs, même quand ça ne se voit pas ... Il n'y a pas de vérité qui ne « fausse » des idées préétablies. Dire « la vérité est une création » implique que la production de vérité passe par une série d'opérations qui consistent à travailler une matière, une série de falsification à la lettre. Mon travail avec Guattari : chacun est le faussaire de l'autre. Ce qui veut dire que chacun comprend à sa manière la notion proposée par l'autre. Se forme une série réfléchie, à deux termes. N'est pas exclue une série à plusieurs termes, ou des séries compliquées, avec bifurcation. Ces puissances du faux qui vont produire du vrai, c'est ça les intercesseurs ..." We would prefer not to call it collaboration, but working with others who intercede, interfere, fold, twist, translate and transform the work, so that it's never calculable how it changes and affects. All participants - apart from working on their proposed work – offer themselves to one or more projects shifting their role; therefore, a multiplication of choreographers, dramaturges, theorists, performers ... The point is not to even out collaboration in symmetry or reciprocity ("I give – you give") but to discover potentialities beyond the known competences. To enforce a differentiation, a heterogenesis between extensive quantities (people, concepts, actions, languages) and intensive qualities (transversal sensory modes and events of thought), between forms of expression and forms of content.

Politics of friendship. The group of people comes together in an open chain-series. Instead of initiators deciding on all members and thereby closing a group, we invite two more persons each and we delegate each of them to invite one more: 2+4+4. Maybe this protocol of invitation is too stiff and some negotiations between everyone will be necessary. However, it is important to base the coming together on affinity, curiosity and the desire to work together, as an open call for participation would emphasize the meeting and the mistake of collaboration taken for the method "we come and we see what happens". We hope to start the project CONTINUATION: SIX MONTHS ONE LOCATION in January 2008. Although it is a project in itself with a fixed duration, we are curious what methodology it may produce and what consequences it might have on our long-term working strategies and habitus.