c h o r o s – How to create a social technology of belonging

open Call for participation
Metaformance Workshop 22 to 26 November 2021
public presentation

Ontohacking/Metaformance - Choral technologies for Planetary Health
workshop by Jaime del Val
Ort: Villa Wigman für TANZ, Dresden


pictures from https://metabody.eu/khoros/

The workshops presents the Metabody techniques and theories developed by Jaime del Val over the past 20 years as means to reinvent the body-as-movement, in times of a sedentary algorithmic culture that is creating a planetary crisis. The techniques explore the body’s sense of internal movement, proprioception, and its expansion in physical dynamic structures and in digital and electronic systems, in non-reductive approaches to interaction design that allow the body to unfold its capacity to vary its internal motion and perception, as choral practices for a gradual disalignment from the unsustainable systems of global sedentary culture, towards a planetary health.

Ontohacking is about challenging what we think reality is by moving-sensing in new ways. Metaformance is the art of sensorimotor plasticity that affords more open worlds. ---- Ontos is the ancient word for being, ontology is the theory of what things are. This workshop hacks millennia of belief in being and proposes that there is only movement. This is also described as Ontological Therapy.

target groups: any

what I have to bring as a attendee? your body (but please don’t bring your »mind«)
which preparations I have to do before participation? none
inscription / contact person: Thomas Dumke, dumke [AT] t-m-a.de
there is no participation fee



The workshop-experience proposes at least three levels of involvement: like in the ancient Dionyisian chorus Jaime acts as mediator or catalyser, the satyre. Then there is the group accompanying the satyre (and challenging its dominance) and finally the “audience” that we will seek to involve and immerse in an immanent experience from within that challenges their role as spectators.

1. Ongoing during the week: Jaime del Val will do a 5 days long durational metaformance consisting of symbiotic practices indoors and outdoors around the Villa Wigman, inviting to explore disaligned ways of sensing the world. Participants are invited to join Jaime in this symbiotic process any time. Movement practices will de done more or less continually, with specific dedicated times.The process will eventually involve:

1. doing long movement improvisations and long immersions in the Metabody systems


2. communicating nonverbally and through proprioception, co-sensing


3. improvising non-verbally with the voice as part of the movement


4. coupling to things and feeling them propriocetively,


5. moving at 1cm per second inside the Villa, in the garden and moving through the city in the streets of Dresden, etc. --- eventually interacting with homeless or sleeping/staying long periods in the streets.


6. cooking, and buying/getting, vegan food.


7. eventually sleeping in the space, (this will be decided on site day by day)


8. reflecting on our alignments with the Planetary Holocaust


9. reflecting on a “Dacalogue for Planetary health” that involves rethinking our ways of dwelling and building, of clothing (or nudity), of food and energy, of kinship and non-binary trans-species families, etc... towards a culture of naked gatherers developing unprecedented architectures of life and of BI (Body Intelligence)


10. doing critical documentation/reflection on/of the process, with a critical use of writing and images or other recording modes, with focus on kinesthetic memories


11. interacting and exchanging with other local artists, particularly in the c h o r o s constellation.

2. The workshop modules (SEE BELOW FOR DETAILS) traversing the 4 Metabody techniques coming together into a 5th element as choral Metatopia metaformance are presented as 5 becomings/bodies that imply also major disalignments:

1. becoming trans-species/metahuman,


2. becoming microsexual/postqueer,


3. becoming autistic/neurodiverse,


4. becoming mestiza,


5. becoming molecular swarm, by activating proprioception as entangled mode of sensing, reversing the dominance of the fixed point of vision, developing BI (Body Intelligence).

3. The public presentation: The creation of an emergent metabody/chorus/space/experience that will be shared with a larger audience at the end of the final day, avoiding to place the audience as spectators followed by a metareflection and introductions to the Theory by Jaime del Val (and a presentation of the upcoming book ONTOHACKERS).

WHAT IS A CHORUS? ... A chorus is a nomadic group of dancing-singing bodies improvising together and creating an immanent space-time, without spectators. Following a whole intellectual tradition coming from Nietzsche the chorus was ubiquitous phenomennon in all cultures and the one associated to Dionysian rituals in ancient Greece was the origin of the tragedy and the theatre. At first there was only chorus, no spectator, nor actor, nor preexisting work. In a time of homogeneous consumption of prerecorded products the Khoros project proposes the urgency of recovering the chorus as generative matrix for a creative culture and a sustainable society.

This event happening in and around the Villa Wigman is also an HOMMAGE TO MARY WIGMAN who was a pioneer in proposing improvisatory practices for emergent movement, challenging formalist aesthetics, focusing on sensation, and promoting the idea of space as a projection of movement, not as a container for it.

 

Schedule 22-26 Nov 2021

22.11., Monday

starting time: 2.00pm ... ending: 5.00pm

WORKSHOP MODULES - intro to Metaformance - Special one to one or small group sessions can be organised with participants. The programme schedule is subject to final agreements with participants. We kindly ask for participation in the modules the entire week.

Introduction to the Khorós concept by Jaime del Val. Why we need choral arts in the age of algorithms? What is the age of algorithms? Regaining proprioception in the age of atrophy? The culture of immobility and the Planetary Holocaust (the current extinction process and climate crisis that is including killing of hundreds of billions of animals, mainly in farms, linked to an excessive consumption of sedentary bodies and to an excessive human population which in turn is linked to an oppressive heterosexual regime that paradoxally leads us to extinction!). Towards a metahuman, metasexual r/evolution.

• Introduction to Jaime del Val’s theories of


• Radical Movement Philosophy


• Propricoeption and BI (Body Intelligence)


• The Algoricene (Age of Algorithms) and the planetary Holocaust,


• Swarming Chaosmology and Planetary Health.


• Metaformance: a Dionysian aesthetico-politics.

Introduction to the Metabody techniques:::
a.
Disalignments techniques for regaining proprioception and developing BI (Body Intelligence). This fundamental module will be repeated every day with variations.
b.
Flexinamics - physical, flexible and dynamic architectures as body extensions (+ telematic version with robotics)
c.
Amorphogenesis – anti-VR system - digital architectures and sound as amorphous proprioceptive avatars - how to design of emergent VR environments with non-reductive approaches to embodiment, with focus on proprioception and counteracting control aesthetics - focus on sound interaction only is part of the process (+ telematic version).
d.
Microsexes - surveillance cameras on the skin and processed voice for a post-anatomical body (+ telematic version) - (plus the previous techniques building up).
e.
Metatopia - putting it all together in a unique Metatopia environment as choral metaformance (immersive and hybrid installation-performance).

Friday, 26 Nov, 18:00
public presentation: immersive, choral metaformance experience followed by exchange, talk and book presentation.

references:

https://metabody.eu/khoros/

https://metabody.eu/khoros-dresden-2021/