Performance presentation Sergiu Maris - UNRUHE

In the frame of the Creative Crossroad activity, Sergiu Matis was selected by NDA Slovenis to receive a 2 years structural support by the LLB network to work on several projects. He is receiving a residency at MDT Stockholm, a residency at ICI-CCN de Montpellier and a teaching experience and research opportunity at Workshop Foundation in Budapest.

"I often think of my practice in relation to technology. “Body as archive” is one of the central concepts of my work. This archive contains different dance techniques – from ballet to Cunningham, from folk dance to modern and contemporary dance techniques. During the course of my practice I developed tools to navigate this archive, to revisit it, and to rethink ways to perform it. The tools can, for example, explode the archive, and then restructure it from the multitude of fragments that collide and overlap, in a virtuosic dance.

The practice combines sets of tasks, creates systems to check or indicate the multitude of options in motion, and generates algorithms for movement. The analogy would be a computer that runs several programs at the same time and is also able to navigate huge amounts of data simultaneously. This computer-like mind is a necessary imaginative exercise during the practice. How would Artificial Intelligence control the human body in motion? That fresh look on movement offered by a computer-like mind, generates a thinking in the practice that reorganises motion from awkward mechanics to virtuosic algorithms and hyper-organic simulations. I strongly believe in the idea of a virtuosic dancer. The dancer as a cyborg (as in Donna Haraway’s sense of the term) made of flesh and technology with a fluid identity.

This shuffling manifests in performances as a multitude of aesthetic propositions, strategies and means that aim to orchestrate a very precise randomness, and to create noise – structured chaos. This chaos becomes an intense experience both for the spectator and the performers.

I call the practice the Visible Thinking Body (VTB) – a performative process of thinking the body in motion.

In my most recent project, Hopeless. (premiere: 8.2.2019), I turned the practice towards the periphery of thinking, and I was looking for ways to un-think the Visible Thinking Body. This periphery of thinking includes the so-called “3i” technology: impulses, intuition and instinct. These, together with the rational decision-making of VTB create some sort of dialectical thinking in movement. Thus, there are more ways of accessing different layers of the archive, layers that could be hidden, suppressed, unknown or elusive.

In UNRUHE,  the project planned for the second half of 2020, I plan to develop my practice further, focusing especially on the intersection between movement (choreography) and voice (text). The choreography is envisioned as a complex ecosystem, a network of relations that is articulated through a dialectic between VTB and unthinking-VTB.

I often use sci-fi or dystopian scenarios as a starting point to think of extreme bodies, and exaggerated physicalities and performativities in dance. With the real menace of climate change as well as the new political climate, the dystopian scenarios become utterly real nowadays. UNRUHE will be an attempt to mirror the pre-traumatic society of the present, in reflections distorted by all possible dystopian scenarios. The feeling of powerlessness and the fear of uncertain futures, translates into restlessness. The restless bodies in UNRUHE are in survival mode and their actions are powered by the need for radical actions."