Residency Nóra Barna and Kocsi Olga Piroska

In the frame of the Dance Hub exchanges ICI-CCN de Montpellier welcomes the Hungarian artists Nóra Barna and Kocsi Olga Piroska, selected by Workshop Foundation, for a residency in Montpellier.

In our project, we research the relationship between the event and the archive and the performativity of the documentation of ephemeral gestures and stories. We want to create an experience where the documentation of a moving body turns the scenography of the performance creating a continuous circular game through repetitive transformation of gestures and stories. Event and archival creation take place in parallel, using diverse technologies such as kinect, photography and video.

We started from the studies of the gestures of Michaelangelo's sketch about the Battle of Cascina.
He sees the mural design as a circular clockwise movement, almost like a dance. As if you were just capturing snapshots of a figure and the phases of its movement.
Using this base, we created a movement research telling imaginative stories playing and dialoguing between the past and future of the characters and between past and future of the performance itself. How much history can there be behind a gesture? Transformation of the meaning of repeated gestures, displaced in time and space. The research playing with migratory movements and gestures which, captured at a certain moment, saw the identity and ownership of an ephemeral event.

The work researches and mixes the languages of movement that were born to experience the pleasure of the body, the pleasure in an ephemeral, vulnerable and political context. How to capture the path of an experience, an emotion or a movement? In performance, action and documentation are created and built together.
We are playing with integrity and contrast between caption and action, between phenomena and narration.
An experience of a hybrid state between performer and observer. The movement creates scenography and the observer creates performance. We create contrasts and dramaturgy between aesthetics, experiences and memories exploring the relationship between visual readings of past movements and movements in the present moment. A game of focuses between trajectories and arrivals, paths and poses through movement and captures with photo, video and 3d scanning. We recycle the movements and images we create a circular dramaturgy playing with subjectivity, readings and languages through experience and archivism.

This work and an experiment to observe the relationship between the file-event-file.
Through performative / theatrical documentation, we question what we preserve and save from an ephemeral experience? A reflection on how the performing arts depend on documentation and how documentation becomes the identity of a work. In 2020/21 we are experiencing these issues more and more strongly because of social isolation.

Links:
- Gestures and characters of Michelangelo: vimeo.com/565363990
- Kinekt experiment: vimeo.com/544048253
- Gestures and movements vimeo.com/565357559
- Kinekt experiment 2 youtu.be/d3oOAw_FSY0

In the residency, we would like to work with dramaturgy and the scenic relationship between documentation and performance, researching possibilities between movements and possible captures/scenographies. We are at a stage when we have already chosen certain capture and movement techniques. Our aim is to experiment with how we create dramaturgy between documentation, movement and changes with the performer and the observer on stage? How we mix scenic and non-scenic actions in the performance?
This residency would allow a time to dive and focus and to share and to try out our idea in front of the public. Maybe possibilities to think how this idea and technology can be an interactive performance?