Maria Francesca Scaroni
technopeasantry
© Ingmar Begman
Field Project
16.7.–20.7.
10:00–17:00
TQW 1
technopeasantry
Dancing is a technology of ecstasy, one that has not gotten extinct, yet there were times where there was much more of it happening. Barbara Ehrenreich asks in Dancing in the Streets, a History of Collective Joy: "If the "techniques" of ecstasy represent an important part of the human cultural heritage, why have we forgotten them, if indeed we have?"
Either from high specialised forms of dancing, or from free movement, we know that dance produces a higher state of consciousness, it can heal the nervous system/makes one more response-able, and keeps us in the habit of being social, since what is special about it is that we can only learn it together. In a studio, in a square, even online, there are always other bodies involved. Dance is a form of entrainment with the surrounding. In contemporary dance, in somatic practices, as in raves or ceremonies/rituals, we enjoy the being alone, and being together, or being alone together. We are interested in pursuing those techniques and be in a studio with people to both cultivate and shift that perspective: we would like to exercise our individual subjectivity yet always consciously moved by others and by the setting (via electromagnetic fields, waves, sounds, smells, concepts, stories...). There is a wish of retrieving the roots, de-atomise ourselves and 'get high', travel to the ancestral roots of dancing, informed by the technologies offered by post-modern dance, somatic awareness**, techno/electronic music.
**approaches and materials drawn from Contact Improvisation, release based body work, osho dynamic meditation, trance, improvisational scores, shamanic journeying, polyrhythm, deep listening.
We don’t wish to only get exhausted together or just dance together. This is rather and attempt at a hybrid form, between storytelling via improvisation, live sculpting, raving, shapeshifting as a large body, being together doing the same, being together doing different things, having a place to play, to practice tenderness, and to mourn our losses. We train and then perform ourselves for ourselves. This is all at once, the training, the performance, the ritual of that specific group. The intentional manifestation of a will to feel alive. Not an escape, rather a landing, on the plane of the consciousness of the now. We will ask: "What can dance do? Of what affects is it capable?" Through having conversations, moving the individual images and mixing the individual songs live, we will be enacting, repeatedly, our temporary collective memory and explore the device of dance and music improvisation as a powerful place to heal the collective subconscious. (we might fail).
One part of the project is about led journeys, experiencing physical states, and the other is a performance (not a public one), a script, that will be constructed together. The research will take place from 10 to 17, with a one-hour break.
We ask the participants to prepare their appetite on the subject by reading the above mentioned historical perspective on ecstatic behaviour (Ehrenreich) and a few articles (will be provided), in order to have a ground of reference as researchers. Secondly, we would like to collect materials from each participant, because that works as a foundation of content upon which the movement and sound material will be developed.
Each person would have to send the following for applying:
- a 20 lines text statement/improvisation, starting with: “I dance because............, I dance because......, I dance because.....” (can be in your own language).
- for the time together in July: 1 to 5 images, on all or 1 of these themes: utopia dystopia entropy - images are linked to the persons’ biography, either personal (own private life events) or as part of the social sphere (for example news or historical events that have affected you, or ads that are imprinted in you) or as artists (bits of archive from dance music photograph cinema, that speak to you). You can talk about them, they are the flat bi-dimensional sign of a thicker story that can be told to the others. Jpeg (still) or animated gifs. (A hint for choosing the images: these images will contain: landscapes and figures of the human, animal, plant and inanimate world, drawing from personal or collective archive, ancestors, art, they will be made alive by a group of people, so search for images that have a sense of assemblage, a polyphony, a pattern, that could be interesting to make alive together. They can be drawings too!)
- a song, or a piece of music or a sound that gives you a reason to live, that you associate with resistance, or that leaves you alone, in peace.
Note: people of all ages and of any degree of physical ability are welcome. The work appeals to people who are into any dance and performance, music or theatre, improvisation. It can maybe interest those who teach in schools or devise activities for groups for the purpose of recreation or healing, as well as thinkers who swing back and forth between the pleasure of speculation and the drift offered by immersive experiences.
Some context and collected thoughts:
Fabiane M. Borges (a.o.) in an interview about technoshamanism (full interview in the link below):
"All communication media, including internet robots, make use of appropriation of unconscious tactics to promote their ideals of world. In this dispute of which world do we want, the collective unconscious is one of the most elementary fields, since it’s where desires, values, ethics, ideological projects and conversions in every level are formed. In this case, technoshamanism with its theories, construction of networks, transcultural projects and immersions tends to fortify a network of free collective unconscious, as well to promote mental health. It is worthy to remember that we work with the idea of a machinic unconscious from schizoanalysis, where the unconscious is seen as a factory for production of world desires, and this factory is also made by external forces, that direct these unconsciousnesses by the intensity of their interferences (control algorithms in social media, memes, association between business and political struggles, etc). So that the building of unconscious communities produces a strength that is capable of resisting against noxious demands and resize the standard of collective desire, thus intervening in the sociopolitical realm; it’s the resistance itself against the zombifying promoted by capitalism. This communities of unconsciousnesses are built from collective experiences, which include work with immersions, dreams, experience of enhancing perception states, that we could call the clinical part of technoshamanism (social clinics for the future)."
https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/questionnaire-about-technoshamanism/The term technopeasantry came up after we read and then performed a version of the anarcha-feminist sci-fi novel Woman on the edge of Time (1976), by Marge Piercy:
"In
Woman on the Edge of Time my time traveller is not a white man. It is a Chicana woman who has had a hard life, but she is what they call a catcher: a woman with an unusually open and receptive mind. And she is the person who visits the future, often as an escape from an agonising present. When Connie first goes into the future she is extremely disappointed. Her image of the future is extremely mechanised, and when she arrives in a place in the future, which actually is a town in Massachusetts, it is a village. At first glance it really looks to her very primitive. They are all peasants, goats and chickens running around and so forth. As she gets to know the place more, the more tedious work is all mechanized. The manufacturing is mechanized, but the agriculture is not. The agriculture and the care-taking is all completely unmechanised. I am not a writer who is afraid of machinery per se, afraid of technology at all. I figure I wouldn't be alive without technology."Woman on the Edge of Time" was an attempt to make concrete many of the ideas I liked best in the social movements of the time it emerged: the women's movement, the new left, Native American movement, etc. And to make vivid and real those ideas, to make them flash."
http://www.republicart.net/disc/aeas/piercy01_en.htmand after that, bits of a wider puzzle started to drop in, and lately we discovered that here is a whole movement that echoes the book’s world, called technoshamanism.
Fundamentally, we find ourselves in a state of constant war, a fierce dispute between different visions of the future, between social and political ontologies and between nature and technology. In this sense, technoshamanism manifests itself as yet another contemporary network which tries to analyse, position itself with respect to and intervene in this context. It is configured as a utopian network because it harbours visionary germs of liberty, autonomy, equality of gender, ethnicity, class and people and of balance between the environment and society that have hitherto characterized revolutionary movements. It is dystopian because at the same time it includes a nihilistic and depressive vision which sees no way out of capitalism, is disillusioned by neoliberalism and feels itself trapped by the project of total, global control launched by the world’s owners. It sees a nebulous future without freedom, with all of nature destroyed, more competition and poverty, privation and social oppression. And it is entropic because it inhabits this paradoxical set of forces and maintains an improbable noise – its perpetual noisecracy, its state of disorganization and insecurity is continuous and is constantly recombining itself. Its improbability is its dynamism. It is within this regime of utopia, dystopia and entropy that it promotes its ideas and practices, which are sometimes convergent and sometimes divergent.
https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/questionnaire-about-technoshamanism/Utopia, dystopia and entropy, could also be our guidelines, or undercurrents.
Improvisation is magic, it has the power to offer a ride on a script that hasn’t been written, a leap into mystery, and at the same time one gets to shuffle in the bag of tools and intuitive knowledge that will allow to journey on inside that mystery.
"Whence the force of Spinoza's question: 'What can a body do?', of what affects is it capable? This is the question: what is the body capable of? What affects are you capable of? Experiment!, but you need a lot of prudence to experiment. We live in a world, which is generally disagreeable, where not only people but the general powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priests, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers, that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious or, as Virillo says, to administer and organize our little fears. The long, universal moan about life: the-lack-to-be which life is...... In vain someone says, ‘let’s dance’; but we are not really very happy. Those who are sick, in soul as in body, will not let us go, the vampires, until they have transmitted to us their neurosis and their anxiety, their beloved castration, the resentment against life, filthy contagion. It is all a matter of blood. It is not easy to be a free man, to flee the plaque, organize encounters, increase the power to act, to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or encompass a maximum of affirmation. To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness." from Jan Ritsema’s Letter on Improvisation
http://sarma.be/docs/807 
