 So next we have Leigh Yellen, who's also being supervised by... We're getting a message from the back that we would like full swing. She mentioned that Leigh is also being supervised by Randy Cutler, and Randy is not able to be here today, but there's a good chance she's online in Berlin right now. And so we can have her in mind, even if that's another question she might have. And the title of these presentations is Between Gesture and Order. So welcome. So, I'm from Montreal. I think I can move. I don't know what I can move from. And I started off as a sculptor at Concordia, and then went into theatre design. So I've been doing theatre design before coming here, making puppets, and one out of my stuff to be able to move this. And I've been, I guess, driven by a desire to be somehow a part of storytelling. And, yeah, I mean, I have multi-vailing interests, but there's something about being multi-sensorial and having an experience, and having art be experiential. And something that is open to inquiry and spark curiosity. So, this is work for Tatyine Pinae that I was doing in Montreal before coming here. It's a little bit more experimental, but working with them in traditional theatre, it's a little bit more hierarchical, where the main director is like the artist, the main artist is the director, and they base it a lot on the text. And, I guess, I felt maybe a little bit alienated within that process, and I was looking for something to be able to relate a bit better. So, I wanted to involve myself in a more participatory, collaborative process to feel less of that. And also, I guess I'm searching for a more sense of vitality, a more playful approach to collaboration, a way to integrate cultures and differences, things like that. So, that brings me to here, and within Emily Carr, my methodology has become working through contested space, negotiating some kind of free-flow gesture on the one hand, and organization on the other, kind of similar to Jay, in a way, towards new artistic experimental collaborations to frame the ongoing inquiry of values and structures. So, I've been working through several projects, which are explorations of negotiation and collaboration through the process that questions to which extent organization is really needed for the sense of vitality. And I'm exploring thresholds, I guess. So, I'm looking into applications of interdisciplinary work. One of the first projects within Emily Carr came about in a sort of playful aimlessness last year during the intensive, and we were in Lai Wan's class, I don't know if anyone met Lai Wan here, but for those of you who know her, it brought about a kind of spontaneous desire to share some writing that I hadn't shared with anybody for 10 years through our conversation. And some collaborative work came about from that kind of spontaneous gesture of sharing that work later in Montreal. And so, I'm asking, what is that kind of spontaneous impulse? And I guess I'm looking at John Cage as an example. I mean, here's somebody who was working through non-intention and I started with spontaneous response. So, a chance-determined interview with Frank Scheffer, this is images from that. Basically, Cage uses a machine to determine how long he will talk on 19 questions and then spontaneously responds or improvises his answers within a lot of time as part of his non-intentional performance practice. And Richard Schechner also interviews Cage and he says, this is earlier, he says, you say that these things should be somehow like everyday life and yet, on hearing you talk or listening to the composition they're anything but like everyday life. So, the action... Oh, I can do it there too. The action, the oral effect, the visual effect becomes unusual and strange. And Cage responds, yes, but I think that when non-intention underlies it even though it is strange and special and therefore, you know, suitable for celebration, it does relate to everyday life. And I guess it's this sort of relationship to life, this contradiction of how art gets staged through non-intention or spontaneous gesture and how it makes strange, I guess, that intrigues me in relation to my questions on order and organization. Forget that. This is, I have fallen, I must get up, this is the collaboration that came from Sharon Battex when I went back to Montreal. The participants in the collaborative process were self-appointed, so it came about, again, through casual conversation and we became interested within the conversation on the subject of marginalized, the marginalized voices of women and the way that women get pathologized. So our work was not a direct challenge to theatrical methods, exactly, or it wasn't, like, so much this effort at giving rise to marginalized voices, but it ended up doing that because we were sort of core creators or voices were emerging together in a conversation, in a negotiation. And it was kind of an experiment to see what new would come of others from each other. And this is the rigorous discussions of excess, excess, not access, but excess, and multiplicity with regards to the body were useful as an approach in our process. We wanted to be avoiding repression or a sense of shame, so we were trying to allow ourselves a phenomenological embodied opening, I guess, exploring onto loose ends that don't fit perfectly into something, so not something singular, but not something that's complete already but something that's ongoing a bit like the way that Jane was talking. And this is a quote she says, for a low nature, of course, does not lack energy, it is nonetheless incapable of possessing more of force in itself, of enclosing it in all its total form. Thus fluid is always in a relation of excess or lack vis-à-vis unity. It eludes to the dollar that this is indefinite identification. You can see examples of use of multiple voices in these two works. One of them is more of a text-based work. It's something published by Robert Brinkhurst called The Blue Roofs of Japan, but there's something in the design of the text where there's an invisible text behind a main text, so you get the impression that there are different voices speaking at once through the text. And then this next one is by Janet Cardiff and George Miller, and it's called, Scored for Interpenetrating Voices, and there's something about the guided walks of Janet Cardiff and George Miller that resonate in terms of multiple voices because often there will be several voices speaking at once and there's a negotiation within an environment, so that's something new is emerging and listening. And the text for our project, we started thinking of it as well as a score. I mean, it was a score something that's both set and provisional, so there were different readings of it as a multiplicity of voices emerged from the text. So I requested sort of a non-explicit approach when we were reading this text that I had shared, and one that allowed for open projection and departure. We scheduled time for improvising both unplanned shots in this video collaboration and a random reading of the script of the text, and so they were invited to do that, and so sometimes they would cut each other off while they were reading it, or they would speak in unison, or they would use their own voices. I don't know how to pause that. Oh well, that's okay. We can let that play. I was wavering, I guess we were wavering between gesture and organization, and that seemed crucial to create agreements. I think this goes by some question of contracts, like how do we create agreements that incite actualization? Because when too much permission during our creation process led to floundering suggestions and decisions were made to get organized to be able to feel momentum and stay energized, this usually meant working together in a direction towards something specific. So respecting delegitimized impulses on the one hand, but moving forward with clarity together in search of energy stimulation, playfulness, and a sense of completion and celebration. So there's a kind of contradiction. And so this last little clip that I played is an example of what came about from the shot schedule that we created together was also kind of a score. So we created these image event ideas that were provided by all the participants, and we decided to know what we would do first when we were on site. And like an example of that is you're looking at each other with increasing speed with the aim of avoiding by contact. And that's what you just experienced there with the eyes moving quickly. And while they were saying that, they were also saying I am trying to imagine what it feels like to be you, which is part of the text. Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Felix Guattari. And their ideas about non-hierarchical thinking became important. They were trying to understand how to develop social space through multiple entry and exit points. And it was onto interpretation so different ways of coming into interpretation of it like a rhizome. And so a rhizome has no beginning or end. It is always in the middle between things. A method of the rhizome type can analyze language only in de-centering it onto other dimensions and other registers. So for them, desire is a spontaneous, liberal energy without centralization. So it's a force creating interconnections openings and assemblage as Jaya was pointing out. And I guess they were attacking what became relevant, especially for the project on I Have Fun, because it dealt with voices of marginalized women, pathologization of women, was that they were attacking uterus segment analytic concept of the uterus complex. And its repressive logic and the idea of desire as lack is a feminine passivity. And so new boundaries are always being put into the matrix according to them. So again, this relates to irregularities that are opening onto usands. So some people know that when I came here I was super fixated on this thing. It's like then door, originally it was collections that changed to order of things. And I kept thinking about how I could use this as a way of moving through this process, this negotiation between something fixed and something open. And so they were kind of metaphors. So the first one bed came to represent gesture, so being bodily spontaneous, spontaneity, silence. And then collections which became order of things start to represent something more specific in speech and door represents luminality. So yeah, these things became metaphors to organize the conversations and the readings I was doing. So my computer files had these titles, these three titles, and as I was going through the readings I would collect quotes that related to each of these three sort of areas. So they were kind of like, it's like a semiotic set design I guess. And so I had to wait for the discussion and think about my artistic practice. So I was actually printing the quotes off for a while and taking them to like my real life things like, you know, as my partner these are quotes in bed and this was my door. So I had quotes from the door and of course my doors became the order of things. So I guess this design has become a method of integrationist interdisciplinary collaboration. It's a way to approach other kinds of work. And so going back to gesture of Georgio Agamben's discussion on gesture and notes on gesture became useful for me. He connected gesture to the cinema which he writes is made up of movement and movement within movement. And so for Agamben the prevention of gesture was crippling within culture. So I started to play more in this site bit and I was thinking of decomposition of passivity and of excess. And trying to embody her reflection on exploratory excessiveness within my multiple self I guess. So a spontaneous expression using combinatoric gesture practices including drawing, art, painting, pastiche, making videos stop-motion and introducing a kind of impulsive freedom to my expression. So what is the order of things? It may be closer to Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition which was a book that he wrote Difference and Repetition. It's not something I guess difference it's not something because of governed laws it's something that involves difference as lines of escape. So Repetition for Gilles is not the same every time but can only describe a unique series of things or events. And as Foucault puts it in the order of things which is the title of this book if language exists it is because below the level of identities and differences there's the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions and natural cross-crossings. So he's referring to a hypothetical result of a foundation and I guess that's I'm providing kind of a hypothetical foundation in this design called bed, door and order of things it's like a map so it still manages to structure performance but it involves both contingency and logos. I'm going to skip through these I'm a little worried about time so I'll just I made a clear question. So Erica Fisher-Litch writes about desire of artists to transform non-aesthetic liminal experiences into aesthetic liminal experiences and vice versa so there's a paradoxical goal of making the journey the goal while failing at non-intentionality and so Light Cage and Capro and others in our history since the 60s she likens art and life so she compares performances of Joseph Boyce to soccer matches and she writes about a radical between, so what does it mean to be in between and she says that being in between requires a transfer participants get transferred into almost an emotional crisis and it's like the dissolution of the individual because she writes artists in particular endeavor to did I miss the there artists in particular endeavor to cross the borders between art and non-art between aesthetic and non-aesthetic so as to blur and erase them entirely they ceaselessly work on creating situations which complicate or render impossible one's ability to view liminal experience itself as the goal. These situations require decision making which refer to goal oriented actions at the same time aesthetic experience that is the experience of liminality as such regulates and structures the non-aesthetic experience of liminality so this resonates because I think of myself as working into practices and cultures spaces in between but I do recognize that I have goals within it as well and this work that I have been out for a long time I read Rosemarie Maturi as a choreographer she had brought I mean in the 60s and 70s she was working a lot in between spaces and interstitial spaces as well as putting dance into galleries and so there would be a performance going on in different rooms at once so that one of the spectators would come through there would be this kind of negotiation about what was happening in different rooms with divides working across borders comes into some of these images and also I guess she also didn't want to think about herself as a dancer she was interested in not really titling what she was doing and I thought that was interesting that she would be working with movement but she wasn't interested in calling herself a dancer and Tino Segal is also working to blur boundaries in a different way by bringing dance as well into the gallery it's very intimate and there's no documentation of the contract that he makes with the gallery so he will bring the artist into the gallery and discuss the contract that he requires witnesses there so that it's legally bound but nothing gets written down so it's only because of the witness that's there that here's the contract between the dancers and the institution that these performances through legal contracts and thank you so much Alan Capro talks about learning of art and life even as we face distinctions between art and anti-art and non-art, our pseudo distinctions have simply wasted our time the sight of an old building recalls Clifford Still's canvases the guts of the dishwashing machine double as Duchamp's bottle rack the voices in a train station are Jackson the claws of poems, the sounds of eating the luncheonette herb by John Cage and so I'll just kind of end I've been working to try and combine dance with gesture so I'll just explain this is sort of embarrassing, that's okay basically the way that it happened is my friend the group of people that got together to play with dance and speech on these two different poles with bed door order things ended up collapsing because of different reasons and so I went to this reading while all this was happening I was kind of stressed out because the plan didn't work and Laura Broadbent, who's a writer was reading she had been doing interviews with dead people and one of the interviews she had was with WG Sebbelt and she asked him what is the song or the refrain of history and so she went through all of his works and collected his voice as an answer and reorganized it into a song with a verse or, yeah, a refrain and then read that song with a refrain so it was a combination of his voice and her voice becoming something and so I keep imagining dance so I went to my other friend, Katie and said, do you want to do this with us let's go up to the mountain and do this and we tried it so she would, Laura would read and Katie asked me to dance but she could mirror my movements I'm not a dancer and that's how we gathered this footage I'll just end by saying that so my work is both set and provisional and in a way, performance what Erica Fisher-Litz writes performance can be thought of both as a life itself and as its model so if articulation matters for organization and if a model matters to form life or transform life so it is flow and movement concepts, practices and entities so flow within bodies matters negotiation towards a sense of mentality matters breathing and space for breath matters co-creation, participation, readiness and respect matter difference matters, allowing for compatibility matters commitment matters, my work is now to continue into the future with these questions and openness to continue my research to see what meaning can come of it show before us yeah I mean it came up in one of our classes not in our class because I think it's really interesting I know this isn't something that you can this is just like maybe a document of your methodology I guess so because there's something about it I have to say that really struck me about it during your presentation which was that so you have these quotes attached to like interior architecture spaces is that how it functions like that map of the bed door and it's idiosyncratic but there's something about an unanticipated system of knowledge production that you're putting together here and you're communicating living with knowledge when you juxtapose these quotations with the interior space that I just haven't seen before and it's making me look again and it sort of stuck it just kept coming back to me as you were talking and I know this is like really just maybe a little sigh that you've done but I just wanted to say that it was very compelling and I don't know if you've explored this much or if this is just a quick moment for you but I would like to hear more about it and I don't know it's just something that has been I want to know more Well, I mean, actually at one point in a conversation with Althea my very first, you know, last year I first attended Althea was one of my very first teachers and she's blowing my mind and so I was getting really into this conversation with her about what I was up to with this like obsession over this like three part metaphorical set semiotic set or whatever and she kept saying just build it build a huge version of it and everything that you're reading put it in there and so it became this sort of conversation about like I saw greatness like what I want to do and you know, I want to take these new concepts and everything that I'm learning and put it in a tactile, real space and when you talk about it I think more about the images and the video that you presented what I guess is occurring to me is methodology is so much a part it's like very much a beating heart to your practice it seems as you articulated in the presentation and I think before when I've seen some of the end products in the methodology I didn't need to see the methodology I just saw the end result but here I've seen the methodology a bit so there's something about that where I'm like okay, I can see how this methodology is coming together and I don't know, there's something about it that I mean because it's also your position being in school I mean really self-reflexive about that position as an artist but also an art student at the same time that it's providing something a little different and I mean we've talked about it in class, someone like Rainier Vanall whose art practice is teaching himself more languages so maybe there's something about this string of artistic production that I've seen also a little bit at work that you're doing but you're also bringing it into space and domestic architecture so it's drawing from your past as working with theater but it's doing something different that I haven't seen yet so anyway I just want to encourage you to keep exploring in that regard if you want thank you I just want to expand on that and I see it also I also see this as there's a tension or there's a I find that you yourself kind of enact like a mass of ideas which I think is really fantastic and there's a tension that I find really fascinating between words and text and ideas and images it's almost like you showed that I hadn't seen it before but it was like there's stills to it but in this one here there is that tension that I the tension is there between this mass of ideas and all these thoughts behind things and then the stillness that's other parts of your life that comes through in some other work but at least that tension is more there if that makes any sense sorry I kind of don't understand the last part the tension is there in this one I see the words and some of them are like it's just really simple like it says explore and approach as a monster whichever you like that stillness as well the words are there as well it's almost like you're more conscious of that of that how those things play against each other or something like that and it's less balanced in a really fascinating way to be it almost feels like the stillness is representative of the you're working between organization and more of a free flow and it almost feels like the stillness is representative of the free flow where you wouldn't think that it would be the other way yeah that's something that really stands from seeing this work with this document we've all noticed or noted a real richness to methodology as Christine pointed out there's a lot of high level concepts you're presenting here really quickly seems like you've got fluency and it was about how for example it made me think about the word practice as opposed to practice and I was suddenly thinking maybe this is partly the way the thesis work has begun to develop because it's a manifestation of some of these concepts that are clearly very inspiring for you and I think to me what this invokes is a question about how it's manifested and some of these ideas are stillness represented in the free flow so this was my question for you a little bit because I felt while during the presentation I really knew I learned a lot about or more about what it's about I sort of left really wanting to know more about what it is in terms of the form so I have a very simple question for example the video is this a work that stands on its own or is it an iterative example product that's on its way to a different form a different manifestation in a space like this I'm curious about the actual manifestation yeah there's something that comes up a lot for me it's kind of like something poetic that I think about a lot keep going back to it to help through lines through lines it could be something different but I think I'm thinking about video and about capturing moments time such a sensitive way to approach being other people and I'm thinking of it in chances kind of like any kind of documentation of something that's in process that is in a negotiation anyway like a little bit that Jay was talking about does it need to remove something from a space that it's in and where it has certain meanings in relation to other things and put it somewhere else and so I'm always thinking about the people who have kind of entered in this almost unspoken quote they are kind of spoken contracts as well but you know maybe how do I consider that when I'm making my artwork so I wouldn't necessarily just want to take the images that I've captured on film and then just do whatever I want with them I would have to consider what does it mean to take our experience and make it go through into another place so it's unresolved and away right now for me it's here and we've talked about it in the collaborators and I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to show these images in the raw materials still right now for us and we're still I don't know maybe something we thought about putting these films into film festivals and things like that or making them into performances where they could be projected and in live performance we've talked about different iterations of how they could go through somewhere else but it's unresolved I think that my suggestion would be that how the final manifestation that can become a window to the methodology that brought to piece to that form it seems then that connection becomes really important to measure that character which manifestations to convey the richness of that is there a final question? I was just going to follow up we're all sort of saying is the methodology is the art it's not the end product so when you show us the end product without knowing about the methodology actually I have to say it's sort of I don't know how to deal with it as a viewer but when I look at the methodology I get really excited like if you just show the end product as a video I just wanted to make that clear because it seemed like as you were talking that's what it was the only thing is the vibrancy of what you're doing is the process of the methodology so I always feel like instead of being you know producing something I feel like record or document or somehow articulate the methodology so this is why this image was so strong because I saw it immediately or you know like one thing I can imagine I think you and I were talking about Schminger and Mosey and they had they worked in the theater troupe about the Vietnam War and they have a theater in the round and the actors keep moving in between the parts and so what's amazing about it is there isn't an end play it's the whole process of the actors moving in between the roles and so I think what's going on here is when I know about the methodology what's happening that's all I want to see I just want to see people talking about negotiating and trying to do and thinking that they're trying to do that makes sense because that's the exciting part because you have a lot of investors and your collaborators have a lot of investors and you see that dynamic of that you know negotiation okay so we'll have a chance to continue this discussion from here on and I really encourage everybody to take notes and questions even if you don't have an opportunity to speak first at the end of the day if you will there's a way to continue to speak back because there's a lot of learning that can happen after an end play so thank you very much take a few minutes to switch over