Forms Of Restraint (2023)
ABOUT
“Forms of Restraint” is focused on bondage, particularly bondage as enacted with rope, as well as the restrained and slow-moving dance technique known as Butoh. But it’s also a meditation on partnering.
The work explores combining, intertwining and tethering these forms and further merging them with visual art, music, and dramaturgy. Like other projects, it functioned as a research laboratory to explore the possibilities of cross-pollination, and open up questions around entangled identities through a mix of practices. The actions associated with these forms of practice are performed with technical, theatrical, and aesthetic purpose, which has a deliberate transformative effect on the parties involved, over and above many other forms of somatic practice. These forms of practice set in motion a series of actions that will lead to a state of transmission of energies, responsibilities, sensations and emotions. Like a dance, it follows a score, but the stakes are different.
The workshop performance drew together a creative team of practitioners with deep experience in these various fields of physical, movement and somatic practice. Importantly, all of the performers understood how to work with and within these forms of practice and with the intimacies and energy passed on from body to body, subjectivity to subjectivity. Performers were selected for their ability to absorb and enact the basic principles of Butoh training and technique, not to the point of expertise, but definitely with a capacity to engage with it in a strong and committed way (both imaginatively and physically), as well as for being enthusiastic practitioners of Rope.
As the show opened, some of the performing Tops or Riggers were seen preparing rope for eventual ties. At times, the rope is coiled around them like snakes, while at other times, it makes them appear like a group of rats with their own long tails entangled. Other performing Bottoms are scattered on the ground around a large painted black circle at the center of the room. They are blindfolded and moving with unusual slowness in what seems to be either some kind of warm up exercise or possibly a dance. This slow-moving journey of restrained movement acts as a physical warm up for the body and a somatic warm up for the mind. None of these actions are performed with angst or with any discernible degree of affectation or self-expression. They are necessary tasks done for some reason – though the reason may not be immediately clear to the viewer.
Throughout the three hour durational presentation, performers moved languidly but with precision and in a deeply concentrated and absorptive way. The performance presented scored routines alongside improvised parts and embraced any accidents that would happen (the more that is accidental, the more precise the whole thing gets, because it’s happening out of impulse). In general, there were periods of waiting in between the set pieces or scenes and these transitions between one scene and another provide the opportunity to enact other types of performance strategies. But the waiting and periods of seeming “non-action” were important to the feeling of the whole as extended moments of stasis have their own timbre, and tension.
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David Michalek - visual art / design / direction
Margherita Tisato - movement direction
Alison Clancy - original live music
Performers:
Will Atkins
Kanade Juda
Riven Ratanavanh
David Rubenstein
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“Forms Of Restraint” was presented by the 2023 Prelude Festival at LaMaMa
Special thanks to: Dan Safer, Tony Torn, Mia Yoo, and Frank Hentschker