For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
This essay intends to explore the existing relationships between sites and performative practices. It examines how a particular site and its subsequent transformations may be inscribed in the bodies of the actors/actresses, how they respond to the contact with the site from an array of perspectives and how this body based research becomes the starting point of a project and the main source of spatial dramaturgy.
In order to test some of my questions, I work with artists from different disciplines who live in different countries and I share with them some of these questions. The intention is to explore with them the relationship between site, the body and the stage in a practical manner. Artists are invited to investigate different performative possibilities the site offers through movement, improvisation and devising. To this end, I create activities using a psychogeographical approach.
Psychogeography can be looked at as a practice that examines how one’s environment shapes the emotions, behaviors, and thinking of both the individual and the collective. One of the core elements of the psychogeographic approach is the ‘derive’. In his essay Theory of the Dérive (1958), Guy Debord defines “dérive” or “drifting”, as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.” Cities are designed structures where desire and movement are managed by advertisements, street directions, property lines, road signs, posters, fences, walls, trees, parks, benches, public art… etc. We move from point A to point B with blindfolds on, barely aware of how the places we move through make us feel, think, imagine, see. The dérive consists of one or more people investigating a geographic location and trying to become aware of the impact of such location on one’s psyche, emotions and behaviors. It’s clear that psychogeography and its related principles are relevant across disciplines, however, there is a void when it comes to applying the practices of psychogeography to performance per se. My artistic project intends to fill this void by seizing this opportunity to apply these practices and concepts to the development of performative experiences (aesthetic, pedagogical, artistic research).
Why Psychogeography?
- Psychogeography as an attempt to break linearity
- To create new routes
- To make the road open for new associations
- Against the dictates of planning – planning that comes with a lifestyle and maybe a mindset, a concept – the city of others planned for others, inviting for others. That also applies to other aspects of life where many things are circumscribed or put in a box or frame that many times restrains in an inconvenient way.
- From associations to my own story.
- What and where are the limits of the city/story or a particular part of the city/story?
- The city as a habitat. What are the aesthetics?
- What is the empirical city and how do we perceive it?
- How do we create community initiatives that involve communal creative devising projects and that could be sustainable?
Methodology
This way of working, which for the purpose of this essay I would refer to as ‘methodology’, does not intend to be a fixed recipe, a template and/or a set of instructions that, if followed, would guarantee any interestings results. The reason for that is that at the core of all my work is the direct contact with bodies and the relationship among them. It may be misleading to conceptualize a particular methodology and believe it will work in this or that way. Rather, as it is the case with any embodied material, it is process of experimentation that demands time, patience, dedication and playfulness. Therefore, the invitation for the reader is to take these words as a reflection of many years of embodied research in the space, working with performers, directors, writers, dancers and researchers. I started to use the notion of psychogeography in artistic training at the London International School of Performing Arts in London (where I was one of the teachers) around 2011/2012. At the time, I was finishing my doctoral dissertation around the theme of Theater, cities and globalization1. Over the years, I have gathered many of the exercises, procedures, notes and techniques in a workshop titled The City Project (which I still hold regularly in different cities). Here is a brief summary of the way I integrate psychogeography and performance in my artistic practice.
On scoring
One of the most important elements I use when I apply psychogeography to performance is the physical score. The concept of physical score is a very rich, thought-provoking and, at times, controversial one. For many practitioners, a ‘score’ represents the very skeleton of a piece, the backbone of an embodied idea. For others, a score is experienced as a complicated, monotonous and dry system of repetitions, a constraint to move away from and, in some instances, as an anachronic and outdated concept. It is not the intention of this section to explore in detail the origins, interpretations, variations and uses of the notion of score, but rather to use it in order to illustrate a particular way of working with embodied material. Nonetheless, some basic historical considerations may be worth sharing. As Eugenio Barba reminds us in The Paper Canoe (1995), in the autumn of 1934, The Royal Academy of Italy organized a prestigious world conference on the theatre:
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