What has happened
is that I have become a listener and the music
has become something to hear.
John Cage,
Experimental Music
It is a hot summer night in August
2013, as the audience gathers near the entrance of the
large Gray Hall at the south side of the former coal
mine Göttelborn, Germany. The sun has set, and there is
only the gray light of dusk in the performance space
inside, streaming through the large glass façade,
falling onto a small array of stones laid out on the
floor. Additional light from a video projector streams
over the stones, and a tiny figure of a dancer is seen
crawling over rocks, moving in the strange, a-syncopated
rhythm of jump cuts. Slowly the sound of rocks
scratching against a stone surface begins to be heard,
it will remain the only sound for a while, then Japanese
instrumentalist Emi Watanabe steps into the empty space
with her flute.
The digital material dissolves, as
Watanabe, having placed her instrument on the floor,
disassembles the rock-screen formation and spreads out
the stones onto the wider stage, then Vanessa Michielon
joins her in a dance duet with the flute player, while
visual artist Hayriye Koç Başara draws a series of
watercolor stones onto paper, her drawing projected via
live camera feed to the west wall of the building. The
flute is picked up by a microphone and processed (via
software) into a second, third, and fourth flute – an
increasingly dissonant electronic sound/noise synthesis.
Near the end of the duet, the dancer has re-assembled
the stones into a diagonal line that crosses the space.
On a structural level, one can think of the performance
as a resonating improvisation that decomposes and
recomposes both visual and sonic dimensions of this
architecture. Throughout, the dancer listens to the
flutes, the musician listens to the dancer, and the
visual artist listens to both.
In the following, my comments on new
theatre publications will emphasize both performance
praxis as well as performance scholarship forming
examples of contemporary reorientations regarding the
nature of scores, 'composed theatre,' and live
choreosonics in performance processes. These processes,
even if they do not appear in print, but for example
take place in workshops and laboratories and are
recorded or streamed (filmed/disseminated on the net),
constitute an important aspect of the kind of resonant
theatre practices I want to draw attention to. My first
example, therefore, refers to a praxis that seeks to
locate the body in an environment to which the performer
listens. Relating to surrounding space is a crucial
technique, or better perhaps, a philosophy that inspired
Min Tanaka – on his farm in Japan's Yamanashi
countryside – to originate a modality of working/living
grounded in the idea of 'body weather.' The primary
focus is on the intersections of the dancers' bodies and
the environments they inhabit, with each body conceived
as constantly changing, like the weather, in complex
relationship to its surroundings and physical
geographical details.
Chilean dancer Macarena Ortuzar, who
lived and worked on Tanaka's farm, adopted her training
into a movement practice that is fully immersing itself
into a search for answers, as she calls it – answers to
questions about that uncertain space between experience
(exposure to the landscape) and performance
(improvisation/choreography). Ortuzar thinks of this
practice as a form of exposure to a resonating
environment, almost as if her body pulses and vibrates
in that space in which a part of the body moves to its
limit, then comes back to its normal physical state.
Space moves and body moves, consonantly. That time and
space in- between is the most intriguing dimension to
her, where actually the body starts remembering
something again that makes it move, coming alive at a
second without thinking. In early November, Ortuzar
conducts a Human Landscape workshop – "Dancing with the
invisible" – in Bristol woods, followed by a performance
at night within a sound installation.
Such exposure is tried out in
particular surroundings, and the role of sound/ing has
increasingly gained prominence. Performance researcher
Marios Chatziprokopiou, currently based at Aberystwyth,
told me in the spring of 2013 that he was to participate
in a 'Geopoetics' workshop on the remote volcanic island
of Nisyros –in a laboratory exploring body, landscape,
and contemporary Greek culture through the specific
experience of moving through natural and historical
topographies of a place. The organizer of the
Geopoetics, Anna Tzakou, claims that the search is for
voice and movement in specific connection to a landscape
that might be mythic or imaginary, in regard to issues
of identity.
We have been working in
experiencing the landscape through body, in
experiencing the notion of meeting (body-mind,
me-other, me-landscape, group-landscape) with
the intention of listening to the hidden stories
occurring from being in open space.
Improvisation both in sound and movement becomes
the main investigational tool. The research is
about inner and outer topography. Meeting is one
of the main 'techniques' in Grotowski's
Paratheatre. At the end of each laboratory (on
Aegina [2012] and on Nisyros [2013]) there was a
small presentation for witnesses, a kind of
opening up of our working process. There has not
been yet a clear performance project through the
practice. This is my intention for the third
project I am planning in my research. You are
right, Anna Halprin's work has a therapeutic
dimension, an eco- holistic side, and this has
been a very clear outcome of the process. But I
do not want to stay there. The bodily experience
in the landscape is about understanding issues
about identity and cultural heritage. And so far
I have discovered that immigration is a basic
topic...(email, July 24,
2013).
Tzakou had studied body weather
technique and thus is familiar with the Japanese
relational aesthetic that grew from the butoh movement,
and Chatziprokopiou provocatively shifts attention to
the idea of being 'ensounded' in a cultural landscape
when suggesting that he plans to examine "contemporary
performances of lament in Greece, in a cultural and
historical setting in which ritual lament becomes a
tradition that disappears, public mourning is censored,
and some lives are not considered as worthy of being
lived, and grieved." In the context of the current
economic and political crisis, in the EU and elsewhere,
he is concerned about the loss of hearing in the forced
or voluntary migration of voices, "the vocal materiality
(within or beyond language) through which the
performances I am looking at either refer to traditional
lament rituals, or recreate new ways of mourning, as
well as in a number of public performances in which
silence becomes an active tool that undoes and/or
recreates language" (email, July
14, 2013).
If we ponder the recent uprisings and
protests in Turkey, Brazil, Iran, Northern Africa,
Greece, or Spain, a vast resonating political landscape
opens out, signaling many bodies in crisis, ungrievable
lives and unmourned griefs that are scattered. The
increasing migrations reflect an enormous sense of
precarity in midst of economic crisis. This scattering
worries me, as it cannot be recomposed into a theory or
philosophy of contemporary theatre, no matter how hard
writers (Badiou, Rancière,
Manchev, et al) might try, since performance
practice on the stage seems removed from revolutionary
movements, or from a politically conscious critique of
its marginal social position and precarious working
conditions (cf. Vujanović, 127).
A deliberate attempt to politicize "artistic labor in
the age of austerity," as it was proposed by the
Croatian journal Frakcija (issue
60/61: Umjetnicky rad u doba stednje), is
relatively rare, but Vujanović suggests that we can
observe the emergence of a new
understanding of politicality in art under the
theories of immaterial work, biopolitical
thought, and cultural initiatives related to
digital technologies, primarily the internet. In
these frameworks, the issue of work has become
the basic political question of contemporary
Western society...Moreover, in the framework of
digital and internet culture, numerous
new-leftist practices have emerged, from free
software and open source through hacker
activism, piracy, and gift economy, to copyleft
and creative commons licencing, which have also
compelled the artists to (re)direct their
political attention to the protocols and
procedures of their own work. Thus the questions
related to the technologies of authorship, the
principles of sharing and exchange, knowledge
production, distribution and access, various
forms of cooperation, models of organization and
decision making, licencing of artworks etc. have
been raised in the performing arts during the
last decade – moreover, as political issues,
rather than merely or "purely"
production-related ones. (Vujanovic,
125)
From this perspective, Matthias
Rebstock and David Roesner's new book, Composed
Theatre. Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, must
be considered a valuable investigation of compositional
principles drawn from music and applied to theatrical
performance, as organizational methods of theatrical
thinking and collaborative, transmedial creation move to
the foreground of performance-making that owes much of
its inspiration to John Cage and the Fluxus/Happening
movement of the (politically) vibrant 1960s. The main
feature of the book is its emphasis on processes of
practitioners, collecting a range of voices and
viewpoints providing often quite fascinating insights
into issues of improvisation (George Rodosthenous), the
hearing of voices (Nicholas Till), un-structured
composition for speech, sound and objects (Michael
Hirsch), the creation of hearing/the hearable (Petra
Maria Meyer) which stretch from Artaud's poetics of the
stage to some of the works mentioned here: Heiner
Goebbels's Die Wiederholung/The Repetition,
Pina Bausch's Bluebeard, Johanna Dombois's 3D
virtual reality visualizaton of music, or Demetris
Zavros's decompositons of myth and music in his
'rhizomatic performance' of choral multiplicities in Metaxi
ALogon.
The book tends to privilege
experimental praxis in Germany (ten out of the fourteen
contributors are German) and Britain. Perhaps some of
the objects of its study, Schoenberg, Cage and
Stockhausen apart, may not be overly familiar names to
many readers even though Rebstock's opening chapter on
"Composed Theatre: Mapping the Field" extensively
reviews familiar 20th century sonic and postdramatic
developments, especially noting Hans-Thies Lehmann's
observations on the 'musicalization of theatre' (p.
45). This musicalization, parallel to the
'theatricalization of music,' is a key concept for the acoustic
turn that the editors, and contributor Petra
Maria Meyer, see in the world of dance, music theatre
and theatre. Even if the focus is Eurocentric, one can
think of reading Composed Theatre as an
exercise in listening to broader critical issues,
challenging us to re-think a tradition of experimental
music and performance art through a careful parsing of
ideas that, arguably, are still not fully understood nor
embraced, if we remember Cage's insistence on
indeterminacy and the absence of intentionality:
Where, on the other hand,
attention moves towards the observation and
audition of many things at once, including those
that are environmental – becomes, that is,
inclusive rather than exclusive – no question of
making, in the sense of forming understandable
structures, can arise (one is a tourist), and
here the word 'experimental' is apt, providing
it is understood not as descriptive of an act to
be later judged in terms of success or failure,
but simply as of an act the outcome of which is
unknown. (Cage, cited by Rebstock, p.
34)
Rebstock's introduction, and longer
discussion of Cage's research on the phenomenal
qualities of artistic, artificial or environmental
materials, attempts a 'mapping' of contemporary
compositional thinking that derives its strength from
the developing/creation process and the combination of
different, non-hierarchical elements in the works that
are presented. The vast majority of the book's sixteen
chapters are written by practitioners, which is unusual
for a publication that seldom shies away from complex
discursive analysis and self-conscious reflections on
art and poststructuralist theory (composer Demetris
Zavros, in particular, is evoking a Deleuzian language
of 'becoming' for his explanations of rhizomatic,
de-territorialized hearing and the concept of the
'dividual' for choric refrains).
To those working in contemporary hybrid
and software-supported performance, much of terminology
introduced here will not come as a surprise. The
definitions offered for compositional processes and
material organization draw on the principle of the
simultaneity and non-hierarchy of the theatrical
elements or, as Meyer suggests, a "multimedia structural
principle"(p. 89) of the
temporal sequencing of acoustic events revealing a
heightened awareness of phrasing, rhythm, intonation and
dynamic articulation, exemplified in similar ways by the
forms that contribute to this discourse on composing.
They range from "audible theatre" (Hirsch), 'visible
music' (Schnebel), or Hans-Joachim Hespos's 'integral
theatre' and Einar Schleef's 'choral theatre' to
Mauricio Kagel's method of composing with non- musical
materials ("You can use sound materials. You can compose
with actors, with cups, tables, busses, and oboes, and
finally compose films", quoted on
p. 37), Heiner Goebbels's "polyphony of the
media and their contrapuntal functions" (p.
114), Valère Novarina's 'théâtre des
oreilles' as well as the style of directors such a
Robert Wilson, Christoph Marthaler, and Romeo
Castellucci who "compose with the means of the stage" (p.
30) and have an ear for the particular
significance of 'aural semiotics' (p.
78). Applying to theatre the 'semiotics of
sound,' Roland Quitt argues in an important chapter on
contemporary art's ironic and distanced relationship to
traditional and modern aesthetic codes, should imply
that the performing arts, at this late stage, know full
well that since Schönberg and Kandinsky "there has no
longer been a fundamental aesthetic difference in terms
of the artistic approach between music and other arts" (p.
78).
What makes this book insightful for a
reflection of new theatre in the 21st century is its
historical contextualization of composed theatre as
continuous with earlier performance experiments (after
Cage and Fluxus, but also reaching back to the Bauhaus,
Futurism, and Artaud) and its insistence on process,
collaboration, and a redefinition of roles (composer,
director, designer, performer, technician, etc) which
demands a critique of the apparatus of conventional
production and thus the political/economic determinants
in the industry but also the entire educational spectrum
(universities) still widely based on disciplinary
strands. Underpinned by the working methods it examines,
Parts II and III of the book are all about "Processes
and Practices," reflecting the manner in which the
individual practitioners find and organize their
performance material, portray the devising process,
working conditions and interaction with performers who
are often crucial for the development (e.g. how the
'composing' evolves collaboratively through
improvisation and iterative design), and invent
directing strategies or generative assemblage modes that
differ significantly in regard to whether scores,
'proto-scores,' 'transcripts' or subscores (in Cathie
Boyd's Optical Identity and Nicholas Till's Hearing
Voices), or no scores are used for the shaping of
performative, sonic, visual and technical aspects. Till
refers to his group's rehearsal process as a 'critical
practice' (p. 186) that not
only questions conventional operatic forms (and the
subjectivity at work in operatic singing) but
specifically investigates new interactive audio-visual
technologies through its provocative 'multiplication' of
performer and voice via the uncanny effects of voice
technologies. The latter of course allow the "recording,
transmission and imitation of disembodied voices" (p.
187), and Till, much like Goebbels in The
Repetition and Eraritjaritjaka, disrupts
common attitudes of listening by shifting attention to
the sounding (of language), silence and movement of
acoustic material, as well as the montage of playback
effects, repetitions, projections. Goebbels's 'theatre
machinery,' Meyer suggests, "runs in no one particular
direction but rather in various directions
simultaneously" (p. 98). The
circularity and polyphonic dimensions of such work that
interlaces various events, as well as using a range of
permutable elements – Jörg Laue, in his chapter "...To
Gather Together What Exists in a Dispersed State..."
calls his devising technique a form of 'leaping' within
a fundamentally constant transformation process (p.
142) – constitute a language of compositional
thinking that in all of the book's chapters highlights
common features of 'intermodality' (p.
325). Part III offers additional 'Portraits' of
artists such as Georges Aperghis, Ruedi Häusermann,
Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris, followed by Part IV
("Discussion and Debate: On Terminology, Planning and
Intuition, Concepts and Processes, Self-Reflexivity and
Communication"), and indeed lively debate characterizes
the book's effort, not to label new genres of
performance, as Roesner points out at the end, but to
clarify "How we do it."
Noting that not all practitioners agree
on intermodality and the integration of mutually
dependent relationships of sound, movement, video and
lighting – Goebbels for example favors the
"compositional separation of elements" (p.
325) while Hirsch prefers the term 'Konvolut' (p.128)
and Tsangaris devises music-theatrical 'molecules' for
his site-specific and processional works – Roesner
offers the book's findings as an incentive for further
research into tendencies of compositional thinking. The
questions he summarizes ("How do we understand what we
do?"/ "Who do we work with and how?"/ "How is the
working process different from other forms of theatre
and music practice?" / "What are the consequences of the
above?" p. 324) resonate
more forcefully when they are taken out of the tedious
British context of 'research-led practice' evoked by
Till and conceded by Roesner who completed the book
after workshops held at Universities of Exeter and
Hildesheim in 2009. The consequences of undermining the
conventional notion of a composed score or music
composition are of course obvious: the work can only be
produced outside of the commoditized market and
privately funded or state-subsidized institutions that
commission product. Throughout the book, even though
some of the practitioners assembled here have become
known and had their work performed, the ethos of process
and experimental collaboration points back to the
question of immaterial labor in the age of austerity,
and within a western culture of the 'post-medium object'
that Vujanović posits. Social and cultural codes still
affect the reception of aesthetic objects; open
source/digital culture has not yet managed to overcome
the medium-specific tradition, even though Vujanović
adheres to Bourriaud's paradigm of 'postproduction,'
arguing that today's dominant protagonists are
programmers and DJs whose coding, sampling and remixing
procedures are common processes of art production which
they share with everyone (the users). I am not sure
whether radically unconventional audio-visual
installations such as Goebbels's
Stifters Dingecan be shared, travel and
perform again to a wider range of audience. When I saw
it in London last year, I was struck by the overwhelming
complexity of its material construction and engineering,
and anticipate it may end up as a collector's item in a
museum. It is not clear how Roesner wants to argue that
composed theatre, aware of the "dual thinking of
acoustic and visual elements or aural and optical
stages," actively seeks to "render this distinction
obsolete, to 'ravish the senses' (Cryptic) into
synaesthetic receptivity, hearing with the eyes and
seeing with the ears" (p. 325).
It is true, much of contemporary sonic art doesn't need
the theatre, it's already online and will be
downloadable. On the other hand, the notion of the
'experimental process,' in the studio or on site, as it
is celebrated and affirmed here, may require a closer
scrutiny, since the book relies of course on artists'
statements on their own work. Rodosthenous, for example,
sums up his improvisation process by stating that
Improvising material for
devised work is a unique and very rewarding
process because it extracts material from the
performers (who are actually performing the
piece) and gives then joint ownership of the
final creation. My improvisational process leads
to a kind of collective in situ compositional
process. Its musicality (the sense of musical
structure and – to a degree – notation, of
musical underscoring, of conducting, of
musically approaching language) is what sets it
apart from other techniques of improvisation in
devised theatre (which may have little or
nothing to do with musical composition). As with
any piece of devised performance though, a
crucial question remains unanswered: 'who is
ultimately the copyright owner of the work': the
director, the dramaturge or the ensemble of
performers itself? (p. 181)
The question remains unanswered indeed.
Rodosthenous, who is introduced as a composer and
artistic director of the theatre company Altitude North,
speaks of "conducting the body" (p.
175); he then describes his process as
developing "our material" dealing with live human
bodies, but never mentions who these live human bodies
are. Similarly, the 'Portraits' of practitioners in Part
III focus on the key role of the performer as a creative
contributor, emphasizing the presence of the personal
within composed theatre, from the biographical origins
of Ruedi Häusermann's inspiration to compose or his
close collaboration with a string quartet on Gewähltes
Profil: Lautlos, to Daniel Ott's deliberate
working with the personalities and memories of his
instrumentalists during the creation of ojota
(mixing sound and movement of walking in different shoes
on different paths). Ott's collaborators are introduced
by name, and percussionist Christian Dierstein's walk in
different shoes on changing surfaces underfoot is
carefully explained, while Ott's more recent work seems
preoccupied with theatrical qualities and sound
ecologies of a particular landscape/location (harbour
basin, ski- lift, railway viaduct, woods, etc). Moving
outside of the stage of composed theatre, Ott follows
Cage's footsteps into the weather, into research and
rehearsal "on location," first listening to how the
landscape itself sounds without using any additional
sounds, then probing possible linkages of instrumental
improvisation to the (chance) events in nature. For Hafenbecken
I & II. Umschlagplatz klang (2006),
Ott investigated the Basel Rhine Harbour's acoustic
environment for three years, developing ideas jointly
with orchestra musicians involved in the project, and
eventually 'installed' live sounds or moving sound
sources in seventeen stations around the harbour,
inviting audiences to wander around between the
different locations of with the 'moving orchestra' (p.
270). His installation here corresponds a
little to the 'Geopoetics' project I mentioned in the
beginning.
Ott's situational approach seems to
hover between openness (landscape as 'installation' –
'made up' sounds from nature) and structured
instrumental performance (musicians respond with their
own scenic ideas and sound improvisation). It remains in
situ, he avoids capture of a sound into
electro-acoustic or digital composition to be displaced
into other spaces. It is not mentioned how the witnesses
reacted to the environment-performance. The book strains
to include this practice under the rubric of "composed
theatre," but is correct in assuming that such a
dramaturgy of co-composition uses filters and
arrangements for the experience of sonic images,
gestures and occurrences in the landscape: a "staged,
perceptual offer was created" (p.
275). Here we also note the connection between
Ott's practice and the questions raised by Tsangaris's
resistance to writing scores and the conventions of
(prescriptive) notation. In fact, Roesner argues,
Tsangaris refers to John Cage when proposing that we
should be inventing "new social models rather than
reiterating established power structures. Many of the
scoring and notation techniques described in the context
of Composed Theatre display an active and critical
engagement with the implicit politics of the score" (p.
335).
Having claimed such differentiated
working processes, and noticing an affinity of
practitioners for venturing into new territories in
areas of science and technology, Rebstock and Roesner
still stop short of examining technological
composability, failing to address why Till might "cheat"
certain technical effects of real-time interactivity or
whether real-time systems present a problem for
composition (cf. Jörg Lensing's comments on Suite
Intermediale, pp. 163-67),
for example when sounds are triggered that were not
anticipated. Thus, they also cannot enter into a
dialogue with cultural theories of knowledge production
or virtuosity under the regime of neoliberal capitalist
economy. In conclusion, it would be interesting, in my
mind, to take a particular aspect of the book's theses
on creating hearing and the hearable, and ask whether
and how performances, with any or some of the
modalities and techniques in play – and with the notion
of the "instrument" in particular – are equivalent or
distinct, whether and why it makes a difference to work
with trained dancers, actors, musicians and audio-visual
programmers? In Lensing's Suite Intermediale, the
diagram for the technical setup describes the dance
floor as an 'electronic instrument,' with cameras
and microphones able to generate data to control
lighting, sound and video projections, but it is the
ensemble (Lensing speaks of a mixture of dancers, actors
and musicians) that creates the input for the sensors
and this ensemble must rehearse the actions. To go back
to my example of Stone River at the
beginning, regardless of the action parameter (whether
it is extensively rehearsed or
spontaneously/continuously improvised), especially if
musical, acoustic or electronic instruments and objects
are used as well, the performative quality, the
form and content of the event, will depend on the
performer techniques.
One can call the live process a
composition for sure, but in Stone River the
audience witnesses a highly trained dancer and a highly
trained musician interacting with an environment,
microphones, and painting (by a painter). Similarly, if
Ortuzar were to move with the invisible, in the coal
mine, the woods, or the harbour, she would move with her
dancer body/instrument and process the environment based
on her subconscious knowledge of moving. Without
interpreting the outcomes now, the live composing or the
live synthesis are an artistic issue, not a political
practice, even if Boyan Manchev believes the performing
body is incalculable and can resist "standardized forms
of subjectivity production" and the "codification and
commodification of the body" (p.
19).
I cannot say what one would see or
experience; perhaps Ortuzar would be an inconsonant
figure in a ruined landscape, standing irreducibly
apart? Perhaps she would listen to inner resonances that
are becoming the substance of her dance which we cannot
hear. In that sense, Manchev might argue, she resists
being predetermined (scored). The four performers just
mentioned, Macarena Ortuzar, Vanessa Michielon, Emi
Watanable and Hayriye Koç Başara, are all free-lance
artists, like most of the named and unnamed performers
in the book. In regard to the political resonances of
their work, Vujanović contradicts Manchev, suggesting
that the "politicality of the performing arts, which
structurally belongs to that system of production as
part of the so-called tertiary sector [service
industry], is not only indirect and weakened, but
remains complicit until it shifts from being appellative
to debating on politics and then to dealing with its own
working conditions, which follow the performing arts as
their 'politically unconscious'" (p.
127). Performance can only deal with these
working conditions, and the available modes of
composition outlined in Composed Theatre, if
it is not indifferent to both old or new protocols and
the economic policy of the art world which
instrumentalizes its collective knowledge to serve the
foundations of the art system, to recycle the social
status of composition. Nowhere, yet, do we hear an
urgent, common reflection on the public good, along the
lines of John Cage's 1975 "Lecture on the Weather," in
which he gave his scathing account of the misdirection
of politics and society, drawn from Thoreau's On
Civil Disobedience.
This essay was originally written in 2013 for the Greek
theatre journal GRAMMA whose editor had asked me to look
at new books in the field. At the time my choreographic
interest was shifting strongly towards 'audible
choreographies' and 'audible scenographies,' and I was
also writing on Heiner Goebbels’s unusual sound
installation Stifters
Dinge. I therefore suggested to attend more
closely to sound-performance practices and processual
art that redefine a common understanding of composition.
The political side of processual labor, and of social
decomposition in precarious times of austerity measures
and economic crises, as experienced so painfully by our
friends in Greece in the summer of 2015, would need to
be expanded on. I am currently working on a five-year
european project (Metabody) seeking to address some of
the issues of the (dis)alignments of the 'zone.'
Unfortunately it appears that GRAMMA no longer has
funding to publish its annual journal.
REFERENCES
Birringer, Johannes, "Choreographic Objects: Stifters
Dinge," Body, Space and Technology 11:02
(2012). Available at: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol1102
Vujanović, Ana. "State against Public Good: Economic
Policy of Cuts and Political Economy of Contemporary Art,"
Frakcija 60/61 (2011-12), 123- 33.
Johannes Birringer is a
choreographer/media artist and director of
DAP-Lab at Brunel University where he is a
Professor of Performance Technologies in the
School of Arts. He has created numerous
dance-theatre works, video installations and
digital projects in collaboration with artists
in Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. His
digital oratorio Corpo, Carne e Espírito,
premiered in Brasil at the FIT Theatre
Festival in 2008; the interactive dancework
Suna no Onna was featured at festivals in
London, and the Lab's mixed-reality
installation UKIYO went on European tour in
2010. DAP-Lab's new production is a dance
opera, for the time being, created as an
homage to the 1913 futurist Russian opera
Victory over the Sun. His current work is a
prototype for an immersive hyper sensorial
installation, titled "metakimosphere
no. 1", developed for the European Metabody
collaboration project; His books include
Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1989), Media
and Performance (1998), Performance on the
Edge (2000), Performance, Technology and
Science (2008), and two edited volumes on
Dance and Cognition (2005), and Dance and
Choreomania (2011).