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Nikima Jagudajev and Lester St Louis propose an interdisciplinary approach to choreographic and musical composition through game structures. The goal of the class is to support students in the development of their artistic vision through game and play theory. Over the duration of the workshop, each student develops a spatial and / or embodied game as well as an instruction manual to frame it. We build up to this process by reading and discussing the relevant theory, engaging in movement practices, recording music and by experimenting with dramaturgical structures like cause and effect, loops, traps, and races, and problems with multiple outcomes. The instruction manual, which acts as a dramaturgical tool, incorporates aspects such as rules, duration, space, the elements that compose the work and the various actors at play.
We will contextualize the act of composition within the white supremacist history of the white cube, and how performance-based practices can mess with that lineage. We will ask questions such as what is relevant to consider in a big empty room without the codes of the theater but still in relation to it? How does one work with focus, pockets of attention, the role of the visitor as observer but also participant? How do we expand our comfort zone to realize the full potential of the work? Referencing writer and scholar Sara Ahmed, the space in which we reside is whitespace, where white abled-bodied have the inherent ability to expand as the surfaces of their bodies go unnoticed. To take up space is a luxury that not everyone has access to. The white cube, the gallery space, has a conservative, white, Western history. Social codes keep the viewer ‘safe’ from the ‘messiness’ of the art. There is no place for audible expression of emotion, nor for connecting with strangers. Whiteness is lived as a background to experience.
The methodology our class proposes is something messy: a way to incorporate the visitor as a player who is involved in the making and remaking of the game. Choreography and sound offers another way of orienting ourselves in a white cube, a different way of relating to art, not as something that we are separate from but as an integrative, uncontrollable and spontaneous practice of being together, one that is open to contamination.
We want to prompt the participants to consider how musical materials can highlight and be in conversation with choreography and movement. This will be assessed via instrumental and electronic (i.e, ableton live, synthesizers, etc.) modalities. Using Jagudajev’s ongoing, live, collaborative project Basically as a starting point; we will analyze how and where the musical material for a live performance holds analogs to the choreography, and where it holds a meta-contextualization to structures in the work. Along with this, we will look at how the Basically album, as a segment of the work, functions as part of the whole world and as a device that transports you into the world whilst outside of the performance. Collaboration, world building, meaning making, sonic intervention and an embrace of the belief in performance will all be put on the table.
Basically, the exhibition, will open at mumok on 29 August 2024.
Nikima JagudajevLester St. Louis
