LSLSLS

Repetition. Is it a notion of being? What is it with instructions that teach us how awareness needs to be habituated for us to insert ourselves within repetitive cycles? Matej Kejžar, who in recent years has been intensely shaping his artistic approach towards an emancipated form of dance — most notably with his latest piece Dance, which was selected by the Venice International Arts and Architecture Festival 2018, is continuing to do so with LSLSLS. LSLSLS reaches out for the destabilised environment. 

LSLSLS had his first regarding experiments starting back in January 2018. At the time it was called Dance, which was dance event done for three dancers and sound installation, and which had its first public appearance in September 2018 at Spider festival in Ljubljana. Since then we change the name for LSLSLS regarding to our extended experiments in the fields of music and sound installation, and experiments with written and spoken words. Journey took us over various constellations and presentation venues, ranging from working with 3 dancers and participating at CCL (Choreographic Coding Labs) organized by ICK in Amsterdam, to working with 5 dancers at the residency at Summer Studios at Rosas/PARTS, to its last but not least public presentation in September 2019 at Spider festival in Ljubljana. Documents below are a display of written documents, which were made for various occasions, such as opening text for the festival, performance invitation, applications, open panels, and documents which came out of experiments in studio.

WHAT IS LSLSLS?

The name LSLSLS stands for a struggle of a determination in singular activity. LSLSLS is the volume of activities, which are on one hand largely steaming from the field of Dance and Dance making, but are, on the other hand, not merely an artistic practice – LSLSLS is “life” practice. LSLSLS is neither training nor process, but rather continuous in-between activity that is performed on regular basis. LSLSLS is motivated by curiosity, an open question, a wish to experiment. LSLSLS does not mean the product, the performance or the piece, although that action my result with various results and consequences. Instead of pro-ductive, LSLSLS is pro-active. It spans many artistic activities and in that sense, life-like processes, which are tending to escape today’s omnipresent logic of art projects. While escaping the logic of art project, LSLSLS brings the sense of continuity, otherwise compartmentalized in spatial, temporal, contextual, and personal categories. LSLSLS doesn’t provide framework for artistic activity expected from the requirements of the market and the institutional system of production houses, venues, festivals and theatre houses. Although LSLSLS might not have a particular goal, it is motivated by discontent with the commodification of artistic work and products.

LSLSLS IS BARBARIC

Our greatest difficulty is to find the tools to express in written words what LSLSLS is. To start from we have a difficulty to address the regarding issue from singular stand point. We, as the singular agency, is comprised in the form of plural entities. We, as the capacity, are revolting the singular and simplified determinations, determining according to species, gender, color of skin, or any other geo-political limitations. We de-notes the awareness of the fact that human beings are not in the centre of the world, and that human being is an event existing, among the other events, all existing at the same time. We are fully immersing in LSLSLS activities in order to connote expressions which are existing beyond the borders of dominant epistemology. The “We” trespasses the rules of engagements: a “barbaric” act(ivation) which allows for the imparting or exchanging of information (by speaking, writing or using other medium) while inventing the criteria of Our own rules of assessments. Our struggle to compartmentalize LSLSLS in comprehensive way is accompanied by lacking the vocabulary. On the way of inventing our discourse, the term Language Sausage allows for cultivation of alienated entities. The determination in the unregulated entities are troubling, hence challenging/confronting the territory “guarded” within the walls of dominant epistemology. LSLSLS is an activity of bringing those walls down.

LSLSLS IS NOT AN INDIVIDUAL MATTER

We live in the time of involution, trying to liberate oneself through looking inwards, for an essential core is suitable for a hegemonic culture, as it is a good way of making structural problems personal and excellent way of reinforcing the idea of the individual self as an independent being with potential. With such a narrative, inequality looks more like a consequence of individual performance, than a result of historical injustice and structural circumstances. Saying so, even our very discourse, our language, our way of communication, feels like deprived from tools of expression necessary to address alarming issues reaching beyond individual (political) realm. The needs of self-expression, the feelings of being politically incapable, of not having enough space for the ideas, etc., all of those psychological realms, LSLSLS (as a state of “out, but at the same time extremely present, in this world”) overcomes by striving towards (un)certain outside and in between, where these feelings are shared and eventually manifested as a social and not only individual matters. LSLSLS is the ground allowing for the processes of externalizations, of going out. LSLSLS is the environment where New subjectivities could emerge.

LSLSLS’S SOCIO-POLITICAL COORDINATES: THE ZONE OF COEXISTENCE

Choreography is everywhere. Its epiphanies ramify from subjected daily routines to large-scale socio-political structures. Over time, choreography stepped forward as a crucial agent in the formation and dynamics of our co-existence. As a means of progress and prosperity it is accompanied by advanced tools of technology and it plays a crucial role in the formation of the rules of engagement. Choreography is closely tied to the space–time continuum and empirical evaluations. Choreography is knowledge embedded in contemporary being. It belongs to statistics and quantification. It can foresee, predict and announce. Choreography teaches us how to be and how to exist in our environment. As a system, it conditions forms of co-existence. Choreography stands for and represents a system of stability. Choreography is the knowledge in our world. Or, to be more precise: it is a condition for our (limited) knowledge. Choreography is a specific epistemology. Choreography is a way of collective being. But why is it that, despite our possession of such highly sophisticated knowledge about the systems of co-existence, time feels anything but stable? At the same time, could it be that choreography is in a way static, even though we know that everything in our world is in constant motion? Could it be that a collective occurs by default? Is choreography, as a way of perceiving our co-existence, perhaps neglected among and deprived of other systems of ‘togetherness’? We shall say: the regulated rules of assessment are a seemingly bulletproof wall of a bunker set up to protect its own territory. New forms of being are emerging beyond the dominant epistemologies, thereby challenging the knowledge and perceptions of our co-existence. These new forms are not in favor of the dominant structures which (still) propel exploitation, gender inequality, fear and racial intolerance. Throughout history, we have developed and mastered the choreographies of hurting and damaging each other. Even more, we know that choreography can serve as a wall for preventing us from reaching each other. It feels like some sort of blindness has arrived. Modernity is providing us with highly sophisticated technologies, again and again, and yes, we understand that we are more and more in this world – but why is it that we are still oscillating around the same blind point, still in denial of other existences and other cultures’ contributions to the variety of co-existences? Why is it that our knowledge is still deeply focused on surveillance of territories? Could it be that choreography is a way of taking control over the space-time continuum? And what about findings that teach us that space and time are two separate entities, both acting as agents in their own right? If material is changing independently of time, and if we are dealing with the reality of dependence and independence at the same time, what is choreography in that respect? And then: what does choreography depend on? What are the rules of its assessments? Human and natural resources? And yet our obliviousness has brought our existence to the edge of distinction. Is induction that natural phenomena which keeps life in balance? Could it be that choreography has come to its induced finality? On the other hand, we know that choreography exists. We apply it to facilitate the very systems that have proven to work in favor of limited knowledge. The burning of witches, for example. We know that, in order to make us blind, we must build walls. We know that, in order to keep our co-existence choreographed and stable, systems will be applied. We also know that our existent epistemology, our choreography, our system of co-existing, is a system that engineers would term a very poorly constructed system. We also know that a ‘choreography of blindness’ is much faster and much more effective than investments in distribution of knowledge. Knowledge takes time, and time is independent of space; yet choreography is all about keeping knowledge in place. So, if we possess certain knowledge, and if choreography does exist, why can’t we accept that? Evidently, the very acceptance of our ability to hurt each other and that the fact that damage has been done seems to remain our greatest challenge. Acceptance is probably not a key solution, but it has the capacity to bring down the wall. Could acceptance contribute to the construction of structures which would enable a different perception of our environment and a possibility to reach beyond the choreographed wall? Acceptance wouldn’t heal any wounds, but it might have a large impact on the forms of our co-existence. We can not experience these forms, which lie beyond the wall of existent epistemologies, if we don’t bring down the wall. The surface of Earth is dense and filled with living organisms that are all there at the same time. What a marvellous cacophony. Our cultural differences are face to face with one another. But, despite knowing that – or perhaps precisely because of that knowledge – a progressive vision of tomorrow seems to elude us. Once we have realized that we are more and more in the world, and if we know that there are holes in the realm of collectivism (hence collective thinking turns out to be difficult whenever error emerges, as well as appearing to be a highly regulated domain in its search for errorless and sustainable structures; yet error is a part of a learning curve), how are we to think and cultivate our forms of coexistence? Could we think about forms of togetherness in a domain of aggregate structures full of empty holes to be filled? Could we fill them together? Could we perhaps focus our thought on traces of choreography as a core structure? Aggregate structures are part of our environment, they are part of our human environment, and our environment is the knowledge we possess about our world. An aim to provide compact forms without any regard for our environment will always result in limited knowledge and walls. Gaining knowledge is challenging knowledge in itself. We are aware that we are heading towards the 2020s, towards the significant environment already experienced as the roaring 20s, années folles, which ended up in horrifying totalitarian systems and World War II. We have a deep understanding of what effects a wrong perception of time can have. A dance floor is a condition which plausibly shifts from the realm of intention to that of attention. We are different and we are in the roaring zone.

LSLSLS: DYNAMIC TERRITORY

Do not expect LSLSLS to teach about how to co-exist. LSLSLS seizes the zone of co-existence on a larger scale, thus allowing for a variety of artistic expressions to emerge: from sound installation to dance, from written words to the readings of poetry, from choreography to music, and from open debates to intimate processes of craft development. Starting from the idea of a dance floor as the grounds on which various rhythms are brought into co-existence, LSLSLS charges from the phenomena of language, language being a complex system of communication, spoken or written, verbal or non-verbal. By embracing various artistic dynamics, LSLSLS seeks to enable the zone of a dance floor as a dynamic territory which allows for these artistic expressions to emerge. Hence, expression takes place once moved away from the grid.

LSLSLS AT WSB

Coming to the residency at Workspace our aim is to experiment further with the phenomena of repetition. Nevertheless, in order to master the rules of language (spoken or unspoken language but both as the box of tools in the domain of communication) it is necessary for one to engage in the phenomena of repetition. Is repetition a notion of being? What is with the instructions that teaches us how awareness needs to be habituated for us to insert ourselves within repetitive cycles? Are repetitive cycles significant aspect of existing? At the residency our aim is to fully immerse and further reach out for the destabilized environment. We will continue to work towards the depiction of that tension. Our goal is to reveal the conditions for the necessary change. Or in the other wards: conditions for how to change the change. In the realm of sending the repetition into action, we would like to further work with repetition as a technique in domain of AV media. While an image of dance is capable of provoking thoughts, wards and sounds, in turn, generate images. But what if there are no more images that would keep all the living organisms together? LSLSLS is a window that my render visible the infinite processes of this tension. The audio-visual form, the genre of music and dance have been practiced as a representational form infinitely extensive and open. Opening representative form of the genre through smaller territories, limited by rules, codes and figures (the regions of possibilities), is a response to the appearance of new, popular and mass arts. The extension, which in turn attributed to recognition of representational form, seems to be problematic: by watching kinaesthetic structures in time and space, the audience remains in a safe zone of known perceptions while reaffirming its habits of watching a particular work and engaging with it. The tension between singular art work and generic one has way passed its necessities of representing the form inbetween. Instead tension stretched over the negotiation between the skills of written discourse and its application to mass consumption. (An example of such a phenomena is the comeback and rise of propaganda, with highly charged content of hate, fear and discrimination.) What can representational audio-visual form “do” and “be” more? Investigating into the Sound, my aim is to experiment with coordinates that allow me to pass beyond “how it sounds” to the question “what is sound capable of doing?” How do we approach the agency of Sound? And what are the conditions for sound to “act”? By focusing on agency, my aim is to detect traces of sound in other spheres of life, which themselves may not necessarily be filled with sound. Thus, I look for ways to extend the decodability of sound. Dance is mainly assigned to the realm of seeing, called upon to unfold visual forms of expression that are meant to represent an image of our time or a utopian vision. But today it seems difficult to develop visions for another tomorrow. As if the time of blindness had arrived. As a form of receptacle, dance emerges in the matter of n’importe quoi (no-matterwhat). In the way of receiving a foreign body and liberated from merely choreography domain, the Dance opens up for being “something” more. (Garcia, Form and Object; No-matter-what is already something) “In Dance, a human body has a form. It becomes a form, receptacle, ora way of receiving a foreign body.” (Garcia, Form and Objects, Chapter VII, Representations, vol 3. Representations in Object-Form) What does it mean to put Sound and Dance together on the dancefloor? Not as another vision of genre, as in the domain of concept and choreography development, but more as the tension of receptacle: enhancing the foreign body, and thus perceiving the environment differently. What can being together, dialog, culture still mean, when there is no structure in time, but rather traces of choreography and the matter of n’importe quoi are set conditions for the form to emerge? What can dancing still mean? Listening as the way to open to another body? Becoming music? As an utopia after the end?