LANGUAGE SAUSAGE (LS)

My first language is Slovenian. I was born and raised in Slovenia, when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia. At that time Yugoslavia had 3 official languages: Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. My mother is from Croatia, and Croatian is my second language. I moved to Amsterdam to study at SNDO in my 20’s and English became my language of communication. Now I live in Brussels. All the words I am using to write about LS are coming from somewhere or someone else, and that’s what language is, anyway. I write in English and my English comes from picking up phrases found in variety of books, internet, social networks, articles, songs I like, lines from films, conversation snippets, and current political messages. I use this textual mesh to blend into the experimental and the communicative possibilities of reading, listening and seeing.

My first dance classes were release techniques. I moved to Amsterdam to study at SNDO where I got training in modern, post-modern, BMC, Alexander, and new dance techniques. I finished my 5th  semester with Trisha Brown Dance company mostly studying the intelligent body and Klein technique. After Amsterdam I moved to Brussels to study at P.A.R.T.S. with mentors that assumed to be most prominent choreographers. 9 years later, I re-moved to Brussels to work with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker studying tight relation between music and dance. Now I live in Brussels. All the Dance(s) I am using to write in, in the LS are coming from somewhere else, and that’s what dancing is, anyway. The language I am using to speak, when I speak about Dance, is English. Writing Dance is writing new modalities of togetherness. Those modalities are found in margins of current political and economic frames such as clubs, street, schools and studios, video recordings, traveling and dancing across the globe, dancing at parties, and readings on movement research. I use this dancing mash to blend into of the experimental and the communicative possibilities of reading, listening and seeing.

I first fell in love with the song used in video game called Ghost’n’Goblins done for Commodore computers. As a kid my sister made me listen to the Beatles, Amanda Lear, Luv and bunch of folk and pop Balkan music. In the beginning of my youth I first kicked off with CC Catch, Duran Duran, Spendau Ballet, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bros, Europe and Billy Idol. Billy made me turn to punk music and hardcore, but remained total fan of Balkan music, and here and there I was listening to some speed and death metal. Turning 17, I swapped moshing and pogoing (slapping and hitting each other on the dance floor) for the music of Technotronic, MARS, Bomb the Bass, S-Express, Public Enemy, Run DMC, Soul to Soul, De La Soul, Depeche Mode, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, DAF, getting down on the dance floor as crazy house and EBM dancer. Moving to Amsterdam I became total fan off Underworld, The Prodigy, Meat Beat Manifesto, Fluke, Leftfield and Chemical Brothers which exceeded to the extent of becoming total Techno Head, but still fan of Balkan music. After coming to Brussels and due to urgencies I started to like classical music, Mozart and Bach being the top two. Now I live in Brussels and I am still fan of Balkan music. All the music I am using in LS is coming from someone or somewhere else, and that’s what music is anyway. I can’t use any music language because I can’t sing, though I did record my screaming solo from performance Cesena which was released in 2015. I am a DJ. The language I use when I speak about music are sounds and words. I don’t use this music mash. I use one song or just a sound or recorded or live spoken words in order to configure the experimental and the communicative possibilities of reading, listening and seeing.

LS had its first presentation at Spider Festival in Ljubljana called LanguageSausageLanguageSausageLanguageSausage (LSLSLS). At the residency at Buda we would like to further the experiments with LS, exploring the new modalities of togetherness in the frame of LanguageSausageLanguageSausageLanguageSausage (LSLSLS): The Arena of Communication (The A of C)

Foreign doesn't happen only on the layer of the language, foreign happens between the layer of the language. All the dances, sounds and words we are going to us in LSLSLS: The A of C are coming from someone, somewhere else and that’s what LSLSLS: The A of C is anyway. We use this mash to blend into the experimental and the communicative possibilities of reading, listening and seeing. Foreign is our language. 

LSLSLS: The A of C is a punk, shaman, weird, ritualistic, crazy, erotic, queer, abstract, words of sound and twisted poetry of delight, extremely presence but hard to locate, alien, raw dance encompassing traces of choreography where no-matter-what is already something and non-sense is the sensation. LSLSLS: The A of C is a creative environment, the entangled reality, where dynamic territory of a dance floor is the modality of the exchange, and where dancing is not shaped around representation per se, but it is rather a lived dimension of communication.

In LSLSLS: The A of C we want to fully immerse in “foreign”, aiming to dance off the image of correct and faithful communication. In LSLSLS: The A of C we will upfront “alienated” as a force that dismounts the limits of correct expression by being permanent interference to the formalities of the exchange.

We will be embodying the character of a “foreign” as a conceptual character which 1) is capable of creating the state of suspension by interrupting general understanding of situation or problem, and 2) can offer, in a sort of ecological questioning of an environment, forging of new modalities of togetherness.

In order to further our experiments we will explore alienation as a reality for the design of communication to remain not solely a practice shaping consensus, but rather entertain the possibility of assuming modes that are not known in advance, where communication moves from a normative exercise aiming at consensus, to trouble assumptions regarding choreographed communication with different propositions of what communication arena might be.

We will build our communication arena by working with: 1) sound installation , as the frame – the arena –  of “foreign” encounters ; 2) spoken word and written word in the expression of de-contextualization by aiming to paralyze what would be expected correspondences, and to re-configure inhabitations of togetherness; 3) Dance as an abstract and no-verbal communication, which as such, complicates encounters by opening an empty space around it.

“Foreign” encounters are a modality for futures: the modality that embraces ecologies of difference and celebrating the disruption.

PROJECT NAME: DANCE 1
DANCE MAKER: MATEJ KEJZAR
DANCING: MATEJ KEJZAR
SET DESIGN: PETRA VEBER
MUSIC PROGRAMATION: DAVID

I took the opportunity to apply at your call for residency at Live works as a potential for the project to be supported and presented in its raw, extravagant and not ordinary form. I am in the process of making my next Dance called Dance 1 and I am intrigued by the idea of presenting my work at your venue.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I declare my self as a Dance maker. My work is highly individual, but it is also always there for The Expression, not for my sake. I am passionately involved in dance, not in my dance, but in Dance. By expression I mean dance as an expression, dance as a modality of moving towards somebody, or bringing something forth. I have my specific perspective in this production or in this particular dance, but it's still there for the expression – I am working for Dance. While working on dance I don't have to refer to the history of the choreography, I don't have to refer to the history of the interpretation, so making the Dance is not so much about interpretation of established capacities, but it is very much about inventing ways of seeing. I learn about the Dance while dancing, I learn about the Dance by seeing it over and over again. Dance carries the opportunity to pass agency from the subject to dance itself. To dance in this respect implies the possibility to learn from dance, instead of learning how to dance or how to be one’s self. I make my Dance as I would be learning something about the world.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Even if arts institutions are proposing more and more public programmers that investigate other possible ways of live and work together, they are in no way opposing the current system. On the contrary: they are reproducing scarcity on a structural level. (by Bojana Kunst)

Dance 1 as a new operational system

I started Dance 1 with the thought of what looks and feels like career failure. While my sense of failure may have initially emerged from conventional definitions of career success, I understand its implications to be more complex and larger than my possibly misguided life decisions and individual circumstances. My sense of myself as a “failed” maker may largely stem from the precarity and marginality of my position as contingent faculty, but it also stems from the long history of my conflicted relationship with dance institutions and their academic discourse. It was, after all, in dance institution that I first came to intellectual and political consciousness. By using this disallowed terminology – failure– I am referring to the very fact of an opening of a the space of refusal. I found it very important for the term to join a disallowed terminology in general, to resist the terms of debate or the terms of service, to refuse the terms of a contract or the terms of a settlement. Refusal rather than critique, because form me , to be a “critical” dance maker who forecloses other forms of agency and politics that escape institutional logic and recognition is not sufficient enough. By refusal of the terms of service and of the terms of settlement I let myself be wrong, strange, odd, queer, alienated, in order to see and to access the system that we know lie outside the border of existing epistemology. Choreography, as a system of organized signs and symbols is the way of giving the meaning to an abstract form of dance. But also choreography as a domain and as a highly developed “tool box”, as a system, belongs to the very system emerging from and in support of existing epistemology, depicting exactly the demands of existing epistemology itself. To gain recognition, acknowledgment, recognition of a form which is yet to be discovered and it is on the way of its emancipation – thinking dance out of the choreography tool box – what other stands then the dance maker is taking but the one that are naive, wrong, odd, not intelligent or even criminal? So already thinking about new system of dance and proclaiming my self as a Dance maker and not choreographer I am refusing the terms of the knowledge! Indeed I am a dance criminal! If the choreography, that generic tool box of the knowledge, is the organization of the time and space, then thinking in a such a way is problematic, because what then choreography is not? Further more, can we say that choreographer operating and organizing in the realm of choreographic expression ( development in certain time and space ) is producing, crafting in the domain of limited knowledge? At this point as a maker, I don’t want to deal with limitations, as what I should do and what I should not do, but instead I set my self free thinking about expansion, thinking of my self as failed maker, or as being criminal in relation to the choreography demands and limitations. To identity as a choreographer doesn’t automatically make you deal with dance, yet dance is magic! My domain is Dance, so I am a failed/criminal dance maker emancipating an entity, building on new operational system out of the possession of knowledge.

Thinking of new dance system, instead of relaying on capacities of cognitive thinking – epistemological demands – I decided to refer more to the very nature of the things – ontology – where each one and no one can participate with sensing and feeling the vibration and in that sense experiencing of a emerging image production. In that respect I decided to work on, instead of listening, hearing, because such a distinction opened up new opportunities, a failed criminal way of thinking about the system itself.

Dance 1 articulating potential of hearing

I am making Dance 1 produced in a post-critical environment, the Dance gaining momentum through contemporary phenomena, spiritual practices, analogue and digital interfaces and current modes of remixing, editing and combining. Of course, the concept of Dance 1, unsettled, shifted, dislocated and not meant to create a system in any traditional sense has its own gravitational point – potentiality. Potential, as it may happen, but also it may happen not!

Dance in its essence is very abstract, which is a key moment of its interdependence to other media, because in co-relation with other media, its abstraction becomes readable and understandable. Dance carries a vast deal of potentiality, meaning, it can become “something” ( in relation to recognition ) , but on the other hand, it can become nothing. Dance can dissolve, break apart or turn the shit down! So to say, the experience of the media – Dance as independent entity – , where going to nothing, or to become no one, or to become pure feeling, is a very legitimate passage of media experiencing.

As a Dance maker I can not be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the epistemological system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that I deserved to be a the broken part.

For Dance 1 potentiality is not a domain, nor is it a negative domain, it is instead a double negation, it is the negation of a non-domain, but, however mystical it might sound that is where, just before, since forever and always, Dance 1 resides, actualize and transform into something.

While dancing I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to become something, but while dancing I am already in! My responsibility is not to issue subjectivity but instead to become vehicles for the dance, to become anonymous.

In the respect of the content of becoming anonymous, and being freed from the demands of becoming something, allowing no – thing to be already something, Dance 1 is organized ( I chose to use the term “organized” in relation to the claims of being carrier failure, of being criminal dance maker ) around the sense of hearing. Hearing instead of listening, because listening as kind of psychological act involves complex affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Hearing on the other hand, is an auditory perception, the ability to perceive sounds by detaching vibrations changes in the pressure of the surrounding medium through time, through an organ such as the ear, eye, skin, lungs, etc. Hearing as physiological phenomenon is always occurring, most of the time subconsciously.

Dance 1 claims hearing of the space with an arms as its own subject. Giving the dance its specific shape, Dance 1 is not referring to the set of choreographic tool, aiming to produce the system that would give an answer or dictate to how someone should hear, as if it would be the guidance/menu of an exact manner. Instead, it opens up towards the potential of hearing, as the possibility to hear, and consequentially see, feel, ( not ) understand, etc., the liberated abstract form of Dance. Dance 1 in that respect doesn’t seeks for its location, or its particular way of reading! Yes, it has its own subject of study, but its interpretation relays on its abstraction, the potentiality to be nothing, and from no one! Dance 1 is dancing the Dance, becoming anonymous, becoming vibration sensed or not, with or by hearing. One may hear, feel, see things which are as a result of imagination or any other subjective capacity, but which, on the other hand, can be a potential to hear, feel and see things from different perspective. Hearing as a key module, invites and allows to participate and perceive completely out of the tool box of knowledge, where Dance 1 curves the potentiality of Dance, by the agency of dancing.

Dance 1 is not dance performance

In the project Dance 1, I am making Dance, not dance but the Dance with big capital D, with perspective on Dance as advocacy for dance, an advocacy that empowers dance to be an active part of its past, present and future not only as dance, art, decoration and entertainment but as an active force or intensity in our societies, in the formation of social, human, relational, political and economical realities.

Fact is that our time is highly choreographed, calculated and measured. The evaluation of such a processes is highly concentrated in one own subject performing subjectivity, where sense kind of matters ( matters connected with sensing ) doesn’t come across as measurable.

Dance 1 modus operandi facilitates those chaotic and not measurable capacities (such as dancing together ), while choreographed dance performance domaine is to make those processes measurable. Dance 1 is dance not a performance in a classical conventional way, because performance is subject performing subjectivity. In that sense choreography becomes measurement confined in the realm of measurement capacities, in other wards it is not expanding. Dance 1 is dance/matter passing from the subjectivity to the matter itself. Operational system in Dance 1 can be described with phenomenas as dancing together ( relation considering protagonist and spectators ), dancing together as a celebration of hearing, or as mourning, mourning of the end of contemporary dance. Rather then choreography it is more an experience that inevitably invites to hear and see differently and feel a new sense of ( not ) being and ( not ) becoming. Dance 1 in its first stand is a system of Dance that validates and glorify the very fact of letting oneself go and to not produce belongings. Dance 1 is the field of the feel, a social disruption of ontology, or at least of already existing modern ontology’s commitment to a certain classical notion of space/time.

The potentiality that arises from the notion of hearing is not actual only within the Dance 1, but it refers equally to spectators, where viewers bear the equivalent sum of anticipations and expectations. Since the Dance 1 argues and defends Dance and his autonomy, spectators embody the same perceptions as the protagonists. Dance 1 is a dance that is aware of the fact that for the birth of a new medium, new narrations, new ways of seeing it is first necessary to break the conventional contract with the audience as well - to allow the audience an independent and undictated entry into a new media. Dance requires its own specific time, as does the audience who enters Dance 1.

At the moment I am thinking of choreography of inviting audience at the beginning of the Dance 1 to experience Dance feel, by proposing 15 min of practice that I invented to make Dance 1. Practice is very much based on the awareness of the distance between receiver and provider.

What is Dance 1?

As a maker I believe that dancing is learning something about the world and not conducting how to know about the world! Dance 1 is a revolutionary force . By making Dance 1 I found it way more interesting to learn of an experience ( dancing ) with or through a concept ( dancing/hearing ), where the concept and experience come into the world together, not one chasing the other and trying to settle it.

Rather then through conventional choreography and its dramaturgy, Dance 1 communicate with its space in space depth, color, smell, eco, etc., throughout sensorial matter of hearing. In its concept it is not merely depicting space/time architectural design at all! Dance 1 speaks/dances at the juncture that senses that dancing of hearing takes place, has always taken place, makes place, and it suggest that from that temporary dancing-space, experience happens. So what this experience can be is an experience of hearing, that never seeks to settle where the act begins and ends.

On the other hand hearing, among other interpretations, can be also understood as an exchange between provider and receiver. If Dance 1 emphasizes that dance has always been unsettling, how does then the exchange between provider and receiver happens in its unsettled way? Who and what is involved in hearing and how can hearing be depicted? Dance 1 sees its potential in the instances where its dancing tips the unsettling into a revolutionary force of hearing! Hearing as a driving force of the refusal of dictated norms of what one should hear, makes Dance 1 not about choreography per se, but about how dancing in Dance 1, the unwieldy, uncommon, uneasy, makes the forces of the normative tremble.

Where is Dance 1?

I’m working on Dance 1 with the image of just before avalanche stops. Avalanche because on the ruins of avalanche mayhem new system can arise. Considering the moment just before avalanche stops, when this violent destructive force it’s about to come to an end, certain kind of peace appears, certain kind of ease, certain awareness of being alive, accompanied with uncontrolled various sounds popping out here and there, behind and in the front. Kind of mystical atmosphere, liberated from the fear and expectations, allowing multiple images to appear. Dance 1 is a proposition of the moment just before avalanche stops, using the feel of hearing of the space with an arms, embodying the “new space” ( new space as consequence of avalanche mayhem ) while dancing. Dancing in that respect becomes new operational system, new emancipated language, depicting situation/moment just before the end of destruction, where on the ruins of a total chaos and devastation, new systems can begin/arise. Now in the turn of my claims that Dance 1 doesn’t seeks for its location, and placing it in a very particular situation – just before avalanche stops – situation is not set to be depicted and presented as such, but it is there as a driving force, a vehicle of emerging Dance, driving force of a revolutionary futuristic ritual dance of becoming anonymous.

Dance 1 and its Choreography

Indeed, there is a need for not just one but two divorces. We need to divorce choreography from dance and equally dance from choreography. However, just because there is a divorce going on it doesn’t say there isn’t love, it is just a matter of breaking the spell and allowing choreography to be something else than the mother of dance or was it the other way around. Choreography and dance are two distinct capacities and it is time to let them shine each on their own and together.

In Dance 1 I am using conventional way of dance writings. I am using Laban cube to depict very notion of hearing. Laban cube, as a very profound set of generic choreography tools, gives me a ground to act criminal, to brake it down and put it inside out! But in its act/domain of conducting the movement in the particular direction, it allows me to think of two capacities shine each on their own and together.

Dance 1 at the End

This is obviously what is happening when neoliberal governance instrumentalizes art, not just to be in the service of the nation or to be part of social democratic decentralization, but are keen to make the experience transformative for or in the spectator, or implicated. Art’s responsibility in neoliberal times, following Bojana Cvejić, doesn’t much differ from the manufacturing of lifestyle, and lifestyle is way foreign to Kant’s aesthetics.

I am aware that I am applying in highly choreographed way, with clear limitations and demands, at the end I am even paying for application itself. Obviously I am not applying in the form of poem! To start working on highly needed changes beyond our existing epistemology, one should stand for that crack in the system, one should be strange, odd, failure and even criminal in the sense of refusal of the settlements. At the end Dance 1 is a new voice in the world, liberated from the demands, looking at the potential future! Dance 1 is an invitation to open towards hearing, before it becomes listening! It is futuristic dance ritual involving in the fact of hearing. Dance 1 refuses to speak for or about established capacities, it rather applies the field of feel, the dangerous unmeasurable matter. Dance 1 recognizes how much, as the matter a fact, we don’t know each other and in that respect stands for unsettled stumbling.

Matej Kejžar's
B-RAVE COMPREHENSIVE PROJECT DESCRIPTION

B-RAVE
Created by Matej Kejžar
Performers-Dancers: Fernando Belfiore, Igor Shyshko, Magí Serra Forasté, Peter De Vuyst, Riccardo Guratti
Performer-DJ: Matija Dolenc
Scenography and Light Design by Petra Veber
Music by Matija Dolenc
Produced by Pekinpah Kink Kong

Expanding the concepts and practices presented in Kejžar's Ravewhich premiered at Festival d'Avignon in July 2015, B-Raveis a performance aiming at finding the present possibilities of creating a utopia based on the notion of divine language of physicality. Establishing the physical interaction as the main way of unveiling and communicating the truth about the world, it tries to discover an alternative to the dominant versions of not only institutional artistic practices but also social organisation. B-Ravedeals with the types of exchange that go beyond the prevalent monetary and property-based economy and challenges the dominant notion of human beings as economic resources.

Following the long-lasting efforts of natural philosophy at discovering the truth about the community, the divine, and the social cohesion, B-Raveembraces a direct, sensual exploration of the existing social and natural environment rather than endless, sophistical disputes and pointless battles over meanings of words. It uses body's imagination rather than false conceptual comprehension. It treats the body as a source not only of dancing and movement but also of experience, sensitivity, knowledge and verbalisation. The body's senses in B-Raveare therefore the primary production units for exchange of the ideas and practices.

In order to not only experience the essential reasons that have made people interact through dancing throughout history, but also revive the idea of communal ritualistic dancing as an inclusive social practice, B-Ravetravels from ancient times all the way to contemporary rave parties, where, on the one hand, certain characteristics of these old rites still endure, while, on the other hand, new types of social cohesion seem to be emerging. An ambition of B-Raveis, hence, to establish a community of utopians who go clubbing with Christ, Muhammad, Yahweh, and all the other monotheistic, as well as polytheistic, gods of various cultures, putting them all under the spell of a series of shamanic hit-singles.

B-Ravechallenges the ways in which recognition, respect and success are encouraged as means to a material well-being today. It criticises the war-like propagandistic, strategic procedures employed by individuals and groups through social and mass media in order to achieve recognition. B-Raveclaims it is this prevalent 'wall of information' that provides the society with supposed common criteria of what respect and success are and how they are to be achieved, making the persons who live and think off the grid seem unprofessional and radical.

This is exemplified in B-Ravethrough a communal gathering of six male figures - five dancers and a DJ/composer - who, curious about the nature of exchange and inspired by utopian ideas from various philosophical and theological sources, try to gain mutual respect through the kinds of relationships that are as far removed from the dominant norms of male gatherings as possible. The possible models of relationships these men create have no ambition in becoming the predominant norms for everyone. Rather they suggest the possible ways through which uncommon communication practices - namely communal dancing - could lead to a series of less disruptive and more humane social relations than the ones that currently exist in the world.

B-Ravedeals mainly with the notion of the divine rather than the organised religion. Where theologians have had no doubt about religion being the most powerful unifying force in society, determining all ties between human beings, B-Raveexplores the practical experience of the divine as a conglomerate of various beliefs and practices, containing a potential seed of the kind of social cohesion that is based on diverse yet somehow subconsciously shared experiences of the corporeal, yet-to-be-verbalised language of humanity. It is the possibility of such a divine physical language, stemming from experiences of one's individualisation and one's socialisation alike, that preoccupiesB-Ravethe most.

B-Raveuses the existing human power, rather than the power of any external force or media, to transform inter-human relationships, on the one hand, and the relationship between humans and the physical world, on the other. It suggests that the sole fact of persons breathing together and moving close to each other brings about the kind of sensitivity and the kind of intuition that could provide the basis of a new, possibly emancipatory, organisation of society. B-Ravestrongly advocates the idea that the long chain of human suffering in the past and current social orders can be addressed through not only a shift of mind but also, and more importantly, through a shift in the way individuals practice corporeal relationships. It is this corporeal shift that could bring about the divine moment, the moment of pure beauty, that might lead humanity towards the type of communal coexistence that values as much the collective need for harmonious relationships as it does the individual humanistic aspirations to unveil the universal truth.

B-Raveclaims it is the dancing bodies that could achieve this change; it is the dancing bodies that could bring out the divine not only in each individual but also in the interaction between them. These bodies might actually be able to try to breathe, sense, and touch the divine. Or rather the divines - in plural - as the divine surely will not appear as a simple, universal entity. The utopia these bodies try to create consists of ongoing observations, constant shifts of focus and endless exercises in exchange, resulting in what are bound to be experiences of, or sensibilities for, a myriad of divine encounters rather than a single one.

Absorbing the knowledge of the unknown, embracing mysticism of all sorts, opening up for the sensorial feel of the surroundings and praising the joy of being, the dancers and singers in B-Ravewill not only articulate new choreographic languages but also try to come up with a new way of articulating their lives, a new way of leading their lives in praxis, both in relation to themselves and others around them. What B-Raveaims at achieving is nothing less than what might be described as a Rave version of a Punk Fashion Show, in which everyone is both a model and a spectator, a rebel and a victim of a rebellion, dancing away to the remixed club versions of Selected Literature on Divinity and Revolution. B-Ravewill probably not provide answers, yet it will try to dig up the long lost questions on the ways in which the avant-garde, off-the-grid, speaking-in-tongues individuals may feel at home on this planet or even take over its social organisation.