Karola Lüttringhaus - Choreographer, Director, Scenic Designer
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Meaning in performance - estados de vulnerabilidad

4/24/2023

 
Thoughts on a performance of 'Estados de Vulnerabilidad' at UC Davis, CA, USA

'States of Vulnerability'

January 18th, 2018
7pm
Arena Theatre, UC Davis

'Estados de Vulnerabilidad' was a performance created by Victor Viviesca, Professor of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in collaboration with Research-Creation Group Pensar Sonido Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Teatro Vreve. The piece was live performed by Victor Viviescas (main actor), Javier Giraldo (Light performance) and Federico Viviescas (sound performance).

Description – The Scene
When entering the space, Victor Viviescas was already on stage, sound was playing. The audience flows into a blackbox space that is reduced in size by a black curtain that transforms the space into a square, which, by division of audience and performance space creates a playing field for Victor that is a rectangle, wider than deep, about 50' x 30'.

The scenery suggests a landscape, everything is arranged in parallel lines to one another: three rows of audience seating run parallel to the downstage edge, conjuring imagery of a street, or a landing strip. The audience's feet are only 12 inches away from the first set element: a chain of light-bulbs, like those used at yard parties. After about 20' a second row of lights, also laying on the floor, stretches across the entire space. Upstage of those are two long sheets of construction paper, the ends turned up and the half full rolls standing on edge upstage right, next to two or three rolls of black Marley flooring, also standing on edge. Next to them are several plant containers with shrubs and grasses. Upstage center on the paper, downstage of the black curtain and upstage of the upper row of lights are two approximately 1sft rocks, next to that two metal buckets. Upstage left are a pink towel, a blanket, a water bottle, and other items we can not see at the moment that will be revealed later (makeup and gauze for wrapping his head). The downstage floor is black. Two lights are positioned on boxes to shine across the middle section of the space at about chest height.


Description – The Action
The main action area is the downstage playing field. As we enter, the actor is within this space. He is dressed in white underwear type pants and shirt, a white jacket, under a dark leather jacket, under a brown or green felt coat. He wears big boots. Two buckets are in his space, one filled with dark potting soil, the other with a light gravel or salt-like material. He takes handfuls of either and spreads it throughout the space, dividing the space into smaller sections, dark and earthy on one side, light and dry on the other.


Reflection
Although the creators of this piece said that there is no one meaning that they intend to get across, I attached a number of narratives to the actions I witnessed. It is nearly impossible not to assign meaning and connect supposedly random events with one another.


Mostly I saw a human's, or to be more precise, a man's relationship with materials, earth, water, light, glass; and with us, the audience; immediate accomplices and witnesses to his unfolding. He begins heavily clad in boots, pants and thick felt coat. Over time, he sheds layers, individual items of clothing get meticulously placed within the space, and rearranged numerous times. He begins with spreading earth and rock, crushing the rock with his boots. He covers his head four times, twice with one of the buckets, once with a blanket and once with gauze that he wraps around his head. Upon the blanket and the gauze he paints crude eyebrows, eyes, cheeks and a mouth with makeup, by scooping the paste out of a small makeup container and smearing it onto he general areas of the eyes and mouth. He seems to be searching for these parts of his body; blinded. Alone.


He crushes a light-bulb and later, although barefoot at that time, has no regard for the danger or the likely sensation of shards in his feet. But his encounter with sharpness and injury does not make me feel offended. I simply witness. Trust.


The Nature of Things
He disguises himself; and reveals himself. He vocalizes, perhaps speaks simple words. His voice and all sounds from the stage become echoed at one point, evoking a valley surrounded by mountains. Suggesting cause and effect. He disappears behind the black curtain to drag a dead Christmas tree (I suppose he found it on the streets of Davis and recruited it to become an actor in his play) to the downstage area. He interacts with the uncooperative tree as if he is trying to get it to sprout roots and hold itself up again. It keeps falling over. He begins to shake the tree, the branches; he extends his efforts from the center out; he shakes all the props the clothes he has shed, the socks. Nothing continues to move on its own everything simply absorbs and embodies the passively inflicted movement. Limp.




Vulnerability
Gradually, he becomes more vulnerable, more meticulous, feet bare, underwear, t-shirt, his left hand bleeds from handling the tree and the rocks. He interacts with these things, perhaps in no specific way, perhaps with no specific intention, but he ultimately interacts with them like a human being does. He does what his nature demands of him he do? He animates, changes, moves, destroys, rearranges, yells at, longs over, coordinates, thinks, seeks to form connections, meaning within us. And in the end, he takes the big, long rolls of flooring and covers up the entire, messy, devastated scene. He 'paves' over the tree, the clothes, the rocks, the dirt, the make-up, the plants. Everything disappears underneath an artificial layer of shiny vinyl flooring.


I can't help but be moved by the destructive forces of our species, our tendency to change, destroy and exchange natural things with our own inventions, our own materials. We make everything foreign and in the end the space is completely devastated.


Mechanics
His sense of timing was excellent, repeating actions, envisioning, wanting, and miming actions before doing them, showing intent and execution, desire, the physical and the ethereal, the labor. The cause for it all is unclear, seems utterly arbitrary and simply based in opportunity.


Futility
Such it is human nature to continue to try something until it works or we have another idea to replace the old one, and to get what we want some other way. Our will always succeeds. We rule. Yet there is nothing left to rule over.


Innocent evil
He plays with space, with lighting, with audiences. He incorporates and notices everything, each morsel of dust, our gaze, the air behind the curtain. He opens and closes the space, he creates and destroys distance. He segments the space into smaller compartments, little territories, lines to step over, little barriers to build, reconfigure, or destroy and rebuild. He plays with light, shadow and darkness, stepping in between the lit objects and the source, his shadow getting bigger, his shadow darkening the space, darkening our own space, the audiences space, our common space. He connects all elements in the room, makes eye contact with the people repeatedly and distinctly. We get drawn in further and further into detail, closer to the epicenter of his living flesh, only to leave us alone with the devastation of his actions and our complicity. Was he expecting us to act? To prevent, to help? We just sat and let it all happen. Such is our nature, too.


Final thoughts
In the Q&A, the artists revealed that the concept behind the performance was that everything was random. That there was no planned or definite meaning behind the performed actions. The main performer tells us that the elements used are always the same, but the order of them changes with every performance.


I have to admit: I do not understand what they mean. Do the elements used on stage not have any meaning? Or does the arrangement of the different elements on stage, which in themselves have meaning, not combine to a pre-determined narrative?


I never could relate to the 'Oh, it means whatever you want it to mean' statement. I know that ultimately I will only be able to view and interpret things through my own subjectivity, but I am interested in the intent of the artist. It's a conversation, no? Between the artist and the audience. Perhaps the artist is not aware of what they are saying. This could be; very valid, a sub-conscious process.


Perhaps there is now the need to discuss narrative and story. Does narrative suggest a linearity of events? Does a story or a narrative get created by doing actions in a specific order, or can the same narrative be conveyed out of order? Do elements hold narrative or story? I could follow the fate of the white gravel like material and write it's narrative. Is it possible to not have narrative? Does narrative include logic?


The artists here are using elements that remain the same with each performance. They seem to connect logically, meaning, they do not appear to be selected randomly and are quite archetypal: trees, dirt, water, clothing, make-up. I suppose, it could have been that the artists decided to use the first 50 items they encountered upon setting foot on campus. I don't know. I think that the selection of elements is strongly narrational, and interconnected. Either way, I think the message is that we cannot not express, or maybe, to be more precise, that we can not not interpret.


Inevitably, meaning is assigned; at least to some of the elements of the performance. Then those elements that have meaning are combined to create a narrative by the audience.




A quote from Diana Taylor's book 'The Archive and the Repertoire: performing Cultural identity in the Americas” reads:
”instead of focusing on patterns of cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think about them as scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description.”
This is a different way of looking at the same thing, with different possibilities, and a different level of involvement on the part of the audience, who in the narrative is supposedly an observer, hence 'removed', and in the scenario a 'participant' and a creator of narrative. We always are creators of narrative, except in this approach, the agency of the audience is known and intentionally applied. I would say that the audience needs to know in advance that that is their role to really fully engage in the meaning of the piece; otherwise it will lead to confusion, such as on my part. I am confused about the intent and the meaning of the piece. But not because of the actions on stage, only because of the statement that there was no meaning.


So in this experiment on narrative, the artists offered options that could be combined in any random way, but really were about as random as putting a knife, some blood and a dead body into the same room. Surely we are not talking about a fashion show. The actor manipulates, moves, sheds, destroys, bleeds, etc. My opinion is that if the narrative is truly random then the choice of elements needs to be completely random as well, the staging different every night, audiences in different places, maybe even different performers, different sound, etc … otherwise by giving archetypal elements that lend themselves to specific/common interpretation, it just seems like self deception to proclaim that there is no meaning.


By the way; I absolutely loved the performance.

New participatory project

5/5/2022

 
Please take part in my "Tracing Gesture" project by giving feeback on a series of short films I have uploaded here:
https://www.karolaluettringhaus.com/tracing-gesture.html

"Tracing Gesture" investigates meaning and meaning-making.
​
Thanks a lot.

Karola.

TRACING GESTURE

4/6/2022

 

Healing

5/1/2021

 
​If you can't change the way you think, change the way you act.

My work talks about

11/15/2020

 
Picture

April 26th, 2020

4/26/2020

 
The beauty and the pain of life
Bring tears to my eyes
I dissolve in you, world
The beauty in the uglyness
And the ugly in beauty

To help in vein
And the vanity of help

The awe for your life, your power, your wisdom
Your whole body smaller than my fingernail
Not afraid of me
I listen to the sound of your wings
Friedolina forever

Hydra

9/3/2019

 
I am reminded of my truth today
​https://vimeo.com/14917924

HYDRA TEMPTED - the film from Karola Lüttringhaus on Vimeo.

Dancing...

8/26/2019

 
Picture
Dancing in attunement
dancing a breath
a lineage
a life
a thankfulness
a gift.

dancing presence/presents
​to the body
dancing presence to the mind
for the mind
for the body.

Dancing from a need to feel every moment
every space
every nook
every emanation
every possibility
every time
every instant.


Dancing to celebrate life
dancing to express spirit
psyche
abundance and lack
need.

Dancing to connect
dancing to float
and be carried
by air.

Dancing  to accept
to give...

Why I love Walking (and what happens when I take the first step)

8/17/2019

 
Picture
Raised body mass on two feet
Potential kinetic energy
I slightly disengage a number of muscles and my torso tips forward, the web of tissues that make up my body responds, 
Moving the center of gravity out in front of me
Bringing my leg forward in anticipation of a fall
I resist and give in to gravity, at the same time
The smallest impulse sets a series of events in motion,
Each action is a result as well as a cause
Stepping one foot in front of the other
I fall through space
I control direction, speed, rhythm, 

Undulations traveling through the entire body
Toes spreading out
Massaging against the ground
Tarsals sliding, gliding against each other
Muscular contractions pumping blood back to the heart, moving lymph
Movement nourishing cartilaginous surfaces
Undulations, micro movements encouraging fluid to nourish the inter vertebral discs
Collaboration
Delegation
Love
Fluidity, a sense of floating across the ground
The pelvic girdle undulating in a figure eight type fashion, together and individually, each half, mobile subtle movement,  anterverting and retroverting, tipping forward and back, 
A subtle, detail oriented dance of the components of the entire body
Pushing off with my back foot to lift that half of the pelvis up and over so that it's leg can swing through
Allowing gravity to assist me and guide my leg in front of me to fall in line with my other foot
Psoas, like a slingshot assisting it's propulsion
Slinky

Undulating through space
Head bobbing on atlas like a cork on water
Contralateral action, arms swinging in rhythm against the feet, supporting inhale and exhale, helping ensure my forward trajectory
A wave traveling up my spine: from the tailbone tipping under ever so slightly, the fascial and ligamentous pull moves the sacroiliac joint, pulling the left ilium into a tiny retroversion, the tailbone swinging back while the resulting undulation travels upward, lifts the chest up towards the sky, lifting my heart, bringing my chin down, and back up as the tailbone yet again translates and tips forward,
The stepping motion of the legs translates to a stepping motion of the two halves of the pelvis
With each step the forward leg is externally rotated at the hip, while the back leg is internally rotated, the rotation at the spine, in combination with the rotation at the hip allows my feet to remain facing forward

With each step, each tip, each tilt, each rotation sends an undulation through the body that follows it's unique direction of activity, down and up,  forward and backward, around to the left and the right
The spine leaning forward and up and over the future support, the front foot, spiraling up and over it, stretching and recoiling each time
My body is dancing
Polyrythms sprouting up everywhere
my arm, raised mass in front of me helping me up and over the hill, potential kinetic energy stored, in my arms and legs, ready to play, I can't wait to let go again and hitch another one of a million rides on the perfect wave

Twisting, spiraling, counterrotation massaging my intestines, my lungs, my heart, which thumps beautifully along, sending little waves through my elastic tissues, creating millions of interference patterns through the water of my body
60% water
Two thirds of water is intracellular
One forth plasma
Four fifths interstitial
The rest gastrointestinal, cerebrospinal, ocular fluid






I am
Swimming along




Landing on the foot
Lateral bias
The receptive foot, the outside, ready to absorb the shock that I negotiated carefully to be distributed so it, my center of gravity, can float in the air somewhere in between my feet, reaching forward and remaining in the past, being in the moment,  testing for ground, finding future, sensing the surface, touching down, plantar fascia expanding, toes expanding, arches springy, pulsing, tickling the nerves, sending piezo electric signals to my brain, bones bending, requesting  osteoblasts to build more bone, density, strengthening with every step
Body responding to demand

Like a fish through water, the forces travel through the foot
Feeling the air caress my skin
Feeling the speed of falling through space and reinventing each step, like a fractal, not a copy, not redundant, but anew

Negotiating falling, muscles assisting, they are not movers, but observers and my response team to subtle changes in speed,  surface texture, incline... 
Managing the body masses on their way down towards the earth and up away from it

(Pause) stillness. Close your eyes.
Lateral compensation
My spine leaning, swaying like seaweed in water to one side and then the other, front and back, up and down, and everywhere in between. 
Fibonacci spirals, helixes, a complex web of tensile strength. 
And I fall again. 
fascia holding it all together, enveloping the spinal cord, the nerves, the blood vessels, organs, the skin, the lymph ducts, the muscles, muscle groups, fibers, fibrils, the bone,, the cells, the water, 
Tensegrity
The whole body is a floating structure of Tensegrity
Semi rigid components floating in an elastic, web of enormous strength
Sesamoid bones
Space in joints, synovial fluid
No columns here
There is not a single straight line in the body




Timing
Breath
Thoughts running along side me, playing around, not needing to walk, they can fly
Air being sucked into my lungs
Mobility in all joints
Every articulation responding to the slightest pull of structures happily moving around

Roots to stop and massage the bottom of my feet, the curb, a rock, searching for the most interesting path
Thoughts connecting to a more ethereal existence that is connected by the particles of the air
Which is like water, but thinner
Exhaling
Inhaling
Exhaling
Inhaling



July 08th, 2019

7/8/2019

 
 Karola Luttringhaus
Reflections about a live performance by Slater Penney that was entitled “The Other Show” 
Performed, April 12th, 2019
at UC Davis Arena Theatre

BEFORE THE SHOW
Slater Penney is dressed in work overalls. His demeanor is serious, rude.
We are waiting in the hallway to be let into the theatre. Slater comes around and takes people's names down.
As he comes to me, I ask him: 'Why are you so unfriendly?' His grumpily rambled answer involves reasoning around if I wanted to get paid for the job I needed to give him that info.

AFTER THE SHOW
After seeing the performance, another answer to that question forms in my head: He is rude because we don't deserve niceties any more. Each of us is
implicated. We are guilty of contributing to the way the world is stuck amidst of an environmental crisis, global warming, garbage everywhere, violence, consumerism and 'trashism'.

We don't deserve pleasantries or conveniences. We are here to work and clean up the mess that we made.
And, in the end, after seeing the show, and looking at the audience's response, my response: I'm not able to conclude that there is any real hope, either.

EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
A human wearing a helmet with a long stick protruding forward and away from his body, as long as he is tall. At the far end, a small light is dangling off a string. It is the only light in the dark, but it illuminates the scene: cardboard boxes, black trashbags, cardboard tubes and the sound of flies, hundreds of flies.

​As he chases the light, tries to catch it. I think about how we follow thoughts that can't lead to anything, that can't be gotten unless we look way down, further down into ourselves, until our neck's bend so far that it hurts and the long stick attached to our heads finally touches our toes.
Slater evolves in this scene from utterly stupid to smart enough to do this, to bend his head down, to look down, bow and then step on the light and pause the Sysiphian chase. He can take the light and examine it: And we can realize that the answer lies in our own hands. Our actions, always
close to us, attached to us.

​I was disappointed in the audience. The highly sensitive, educated audience that had fun and laughed playing with turtles made from disposable one time use aluminum catering trays, with trash, with jellyfish made from plastic, with cardboard boxes and other items that right or wastefulness. He kept it pretty safe for us, maybe too safe. There were sounds of flies, but there was no real disgusting trash. But there was new trash mixed in. New plastic, new gloves, for those that honestly feared
to get too dirty. Sad. I was disappointed that nobody cried or just stopped having fun. This isn't fucking entertainment, people!

It was so in your face that it made the denial we all live in all the more obvious and depressing.
Yes we are stuck.
We can't change. We can't save the fish, or ourselves.
We are chasing something that is unattainable, like Slater chasing his own light on a stick, an image at the very beginning of the piece, that was reminiscent of a lantern Fish.

OUR OWN TRASH
I recognized some of the 'trash' to be materials from previous shows. It wasn't hard to get all that junk together to fill a stage and create a scene that simulated drowning. Drowning in our own crap. But still everyone was having fun.
We were recruited to clean up the great Pacific garbage patch. We PLAYED.
We didn't DO. We should have DONE. We should have felt bad, not good.
Why is he having us, the audience, clean up? We don't represent anyone outside ourselves, no politicians, no 'people', none other but us. Exactly.

Fucking hell. Plastic is the material we interact with the most. And all this started in the middle of the last century, only roughly 70 years ago. And nobody can imagine ever having lived any other way. Do we really need the convenience of nitrile gloves for cleaning our homes, or for cutting onions?
There is no hope, not from us, consumers. That's what we are. We consume things, ideas, beings, lives, bodies, the world. We poison the 'resources' (a terrible word that indicates our relationship to nature) we need to live because all we see is that little light and the little space it illuminates in front of us. There is more beyond that!

CHANGE
Slater opened the big stage door and a massive wind, imagined, simulated, came in and blew him all around the room. He managed to close the door and shut out the danger. But it is lurking behind the wall, ready to blow down the building, to destroy us, to level all.
Nobody really WATCHED this tragedy. Everyone seems too busy playing with plastic. But I think I remember applause at the end. Bravo, for incorporating something physical and so well done. The reactions of the audience did not lead me to believe that they felt threatened.


Picture
Fish from Slater Penney's performance "The Other Show", April 2019, at UC Davis. Photo by Karola Luettringhaus.
AMAZON PRIME
The trash is delivered from all sides of the room, through all the doors.
It is everywhere. The towers of packages are tall, insurmountable seeming, but they can be disassembled, it will take time....
The piece isn't hiding much, and it hurts.
We descend into the ocean floor, slowly over time, inch by inch it gets darker. Small lights are being distributed to audience members. They are small like the lantern fish light he chased in the beginning, but even tinier. The stage lights change and flicker, until they finally are turned off all the way and the big door opens again to let the waters of the ocean sweep over us.

THE LAST FISH – THE CONATMINATED FISH
A large lantern fish, made from plastic and found objects emerges. Like captain Nero's vessel, Slater sits inside it navigating it through the twirling crowd that is having fun, and the trash, to swallow up bits and pieces of trash that float into his path. He is getting excited screams here and there from audience members when the mouth gulps. The fish's teeth are made of plastic forks. Skin of packaging material. Scales of coffee cup lids. The fish eats and becomes our trash.
Everything has become trash, is enveloped in it, inhabited by it. People are puppeteering catering tray turtles and plastic bag jellyfish... It's all swirling around.

CONTRADICTION?
The clean up crew is making a mess. The crew, us, is instructed to breathe life into these items of trash to replace the lost turtles with aluminum ones, the jellyfish with plastic ones. The lantern fish floats around the room and the audience feeds it trash. Why isn't the audience trying to keep the trash out of its path. We reenact what IS happening instead of playing out a DIFFERENT reality. How are we going to create change if all
we do is reenact that which is happening? Why/how can people do this? Why don't they cry, see the mess, halt the insanity. I suppose we behave according to specific rules. The rules say, in a performance you don't disagree, you don't change the course of events, you engage and follow instructions. Just like life, this is why we will not be able to change course on this plastic avalanche any time soon, or ever.

There were actually no instructions to feed the fish. This was our own choice. It is our own choice to buy, use, and throw away plastic.

THE LAST SHOW
At the end Slater instructs his crew, us, to sort everything by material and bring it to the recycling bins. That's the solution?
Outsourcing the trash to another person. Another country. This shows that we are all in this together, Slater included. Did he order the little lights on Amazon? I ordered a bunch of things the other week...

I attended the last show, which ended differently from the previous night's performances, where all the trash was sorted into bags and put back on the pile for the beginning of the next show. But this ending is a slap in the face, illustrating so obviously the mechanisms of denial. It's beautiful. I love this piece, for it's cruelty, it's honesty. I hate this piece because it feels like a nail in a coffin.

ACTION
In a conversation about what to do with the plastic lights that each of us was given, Slater talks about choice, it being the choice of the person asking. But I don't think the audience member understood that. I think the he was upset about the answer, about the lack of instruction. Left to our own devices what will we do? The piece shows that the crowd will follow instructions, any instructions, good leadership, bad leadership. Within a variable range, that being temporality or severity, the plan of the leader will always be implemented. People enabled leadership goals of dictators until that range was stretched too far, or something went on for too long, or the situation got too dire even for those enabling the leader. But it will be Politics that will have to take a leadership role in cleaning up efforts or it will not get done, at least not on the scale needed.

​by Karola Luettringhaus, June 2019, Davis, CA

Slater Penney has won an Emmy, appeared on TEDx, and successfully toured locally and internationally. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a BA in Theatre Arts, trained at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, and is an Actor-Creator of ensemble physical theatre. Notable devised production companies include the Submarine Show, Naked Empire Bouffon Company, California Revels, Bay Area Children’s Theatre, Kinetic Arts Productions, and Lunatique Fantastique. Slater continues to teach at the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, and has eyes on the rest of the world.
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