Recap on Research

What I feel most excited about after spending five weeks on studio work with Kenzo is the achieved electrifying tangibility of the seemingly abstract, the materially distant, or the absent, that emerged through the movement. One of the experiences I find most valuable and enlightening as I look back on the shared process is how my cooperation with Kenzo took me back in time to rediscover ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’ or rather, ‘the real virtual’.
It’s been beautiful to experience a fully comprehensive shift relating to the etymological history of the word ‘virtual’ through the physical, studio work with Kenzo: departing from what is presently understood as related to the abstract, simulated or technologically-generated and arriving at the word’s original meaning of: the real in effect, near, practical, or essential.
Our epistemological ‘how known’ took us along the concerns about conditions that make the knower know, and the mover move. We saw a potential in using technology when studying those interactions between the knower and the known and the circumstances of such interactions, especially for introspective observations, but in the end, what we rediscovered was that the ‘virtual’ resides nowhere else but in the ‘real’.
We also had a weird adventure with the time shared. The weirdness in how we perceived our research progress could very much originate in the ‘step back’ dynamics that we set forth with when Kenzo decided it was very important for him to get back to the basics of his own movement, but which eventually acted as a powerful catapult in its effects to the research as a whole. The reverse undercurrents proved to be quite revealing. Here, in Kenzo’s summary:
“It was very strange sense of time that I was experiencing during this 5-6weeks of working process. I must confess that initially I already had an intention that I wanted to feel this way; strange sense of time experience. (…) And that was my intention, or it could even stand as my "purpose", to create such a conscious difference in how I frame my working style this time. I was very curious about the way HOW I would approach to the subject, as much as WHAT I would approach to. Here I don't mean so much about method-HOW, but more about attitude-HOW, to me in this particular case. What if I don't fill up all these hours of research period with maximum intensity and full expectation?,, what if I don't get possessed with the time pressure or the expectation/anxiety for the final outcome? What happens if I, at least, behave that way as if I don't care whatever happens? What happens if whatever happens? Am I capable to take it and say YES to it? What happens if I am exposed to something very unfamiliar and get myself challenged by it? What remains after all this playing around? What emerges out of all these? Like playing myself a quantum-game, will it be creating a interesting crack, the sun-ray through the thick cloud, a spaciousness for new creativity in my development as a choreographer/dancer? Yes, that's what I was EXPECTING, strangely enough. And together with my collaborators, I think we all have won the game, the game of no loser.”
The quality of time was also absolutely unique to us when we think of the two days spent with our special guest Bracha Ettinger. The intensity of those two days, when we got to work with Bracha was very real, and was coming from the sincere devotion (on both sides) to make things happen together. The multilayered inspiration coming from her work is amazing, so I would like to hold up to Kenzo’s words expressing that: “Working and sharing the time together with Bracha was truly inspiring, there has been so much exchanged energetically between us, I have felt a sense of timeless contentment from the pure meeting and encounter with the person, and that fact alone is already far more than fruitful to me”.

Co-emerging I and non-I

I was doing this simple video edit after we have been discussing the concept of 'Otherness' with Kenzo. On that day, in the studio, we were not working with any particular texts. Instead, we were trying to create our own (here, Kenzo's) bodily 'reading' of what it might mean or feel at all, to be 'of plural'.
We were working with the camera on and thinking of it as of an open book, recording not for the sake of registration but for the sake of creation in the very moment.

What happened was as a short story of felt disintegration within oneself (or so I am able to describe what I saw in Kenzo's performance). The visible mechanization and intractibility of movement took charge...

When editing, I was quite literally thinking of the state of the matrixial, expressed best in Bracha Ettinger's own words:

"Matrix is an unconscious space of simultaneous emergence and fading of the I and the unknown non-I which is neither fused nor rejected. Matrix is based on feminine/prenatal inter-relations and exhibits a shared borderspace in which what I call differentiation-in-co-emergence and distance-in proximity are continuously rehoned and reorganised by metramorphosis (and accompanied by matrixial affects) created by - and further creating - relations-without-relating on the borderspaces of presence and absence, subject and object, me and the stranger. In the unconscious mind, the matrixial borderline dimension, involved in the process of creating feminine desire and meaning, both coexists and alternates with the phallic dimension."

citation from: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, "Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace", presented as "Matrixial Borderspace" in Identity and Display, Association of Art Historians 19th Annual Conf., Tate Gallery, London, 2-4 April, 1993; in Rethinking Borders, ed. J. Welchman, Macmillan; cited from manuscript, n. p.