Staging Afternoon Landscapes // Eva Schaller (AT), Nimrod Poles (IL/PL/AT), Elena Peytchinska (BG/AT)

Wed 8.5.2024

NEW DATE: Sat 11.1.2025 // 19.30

Work-in-progress showing // Bräuhausgasse 40, 1050 Vienna // pay as you wish // bar & buffet

Performance and research: Eva Schaller & Nimrod Poles

Spatial scores, research and documentation: Elena Peytchinska

With the project Staging Afternoon Landscapes, we propose a collaborative practice of simultaneously approaching performatively embodied dynamics of kinship and siblinghood, staging/spacing of dramaturgical fields beyond the margins of the performance space by adopting drawing as a method for spatial practice, and the relational potential between performers and the performance site, merging the agencies of bodies, materials and places.

Activating a multisensorial exploratory apparatus, we engage with practices of reading (a body, a line), listening (to a site, a texture), writing (a place, a relation), seeing (an intention, a sound), drawing (a text, a movement) …

What if we focus on the processes of transmission and exchange as generative tasks and let them become the material? What emerges from such a feeding-forward-looping, from the attempts of physical understanding, getting close and joining each other? What happens in the attempt to share and embody information, pass on patterns, phrases, movement – and make them available to the other? This care and curiosity of sharing and transmitting information between two dancers inform our entanglements with meanings and materials: Caring for each other and carrying each other amalgamate throughout our practice.

By experimenting with different spatial scores, we explore the elasticity of a landscape as an undisciplined event of spatial multiplicity. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s discussion of undisciplined landscapes (a term she borrows from anthropologist Barbara Bender), we engage both semantically and materially with words, sounds, lines, tactile and non-tactile agencies, transgressing the geometry of body and space. In this context, the medium drawing becomes a method for experiencing, tracing, transposing and analysing spatial events and formations, activating multiple layers of interaction between performers and sites.