Vrêk

Performance at the Edge of Humanity as Art

Logging the Venture

It is seldom that I write about a project sensing that I am not 'progressing' to a final product, and really might stay somewhere in the belly of it for ever. However, having been artist-in-residence at Environmental Learning and Research Centre, Department of Education, Rhodes University has been an opportunity to explore eco-artistic work in my field. For this I wish to thank Dr Dylan McGarry for his support and inspiration to submit a project embedded in the field of performance art as ecological research. This submission forms part of my Archive

Hopefully this archive would support work of this kind in schools, institutions in the fields of the Arts and Environmental Studies. I surmise that the sense of the 'unfinished' relates to the subject matter: exposure to ecology with certain depths of embodiment may have its effects on the artists, leaving them, rightfully so, in the vast 'unfinished' of the edge of humanity as art.

Introducting Vrêk

Vrêk was a 10 weeklong performance undertaking as five artists spanning movement, sound and lighting in a space for real-time, post-dramatic theatre, Theatre Arts, Observatory, Cape Town. The era was still pandemic, but reaching towards post-Covid, the northern hemisphere experienced a war, South Africa was reeling from climate effects, escalating power outages affected everything that is productive and threatened performances, and a generic apocalyptic undergird of the psyche prevailed in the morphic field.

Five artists were involved. Two movers, two musicians and a lighting technician. The main collaborative activity entailed intellectual exchange and performance practice on the floor with fellow performer, Nico Athene. We shared a particular interest and concern, turned into various practices, of the human being in an ecological setting undergoing a vast evolution. We were drawn to the vastness, particularly more than what humanity would be able to manage ecologically, socially and psychologically. A characteristic of this collaboration also entailed a definite choice not to engage on the floor and rather operate as independent explorers between performances. Our decision as to the themes of each of the five performances was taken between a week or less before each performance.

The original nature of our association was that of mentorship. However, the degree of conceptual contributions from both as well as the nature of our explorations on the floor pulverised the expected roles of the mentor and mentee. In a way, this freed, and complicated the collaboration. As such, much of what transpired ventured into what we termed 'difference' and the particular quality of our work together embraced difference as a vital contribution to the richness of the project. There were differences in age, South African cultures, exposure to experiences, discursive slants, aesthetic choices and experiences of performances, to name a few. A particular trajectory was that the processing of our performances was undertaken individually which landed with each of us making sense of our work together, again, as difference. Therefore, this writing could be coined an expression of my own experiences of a 10-week undertaking in close collaboration with Nico Athene, who in their own unique manner would reflect upon Vrêk differently.

The eco-ethics of this work was aimed at inclusion. This may mean that I learned through and developed capabilities, as inclusive device, to manage everything that occurred in the space, our collaboration and beyond the performance space, for that matter. The work had shamanic, ecological and artistic implications and affected our lives directly, and, yet to come.

Archiving

A term in the post-humanist feminist philosophy theory is 're-turn.' This is a practice of revisiting what was done with the emergence of new perspectives and knowledge as a result, each time it is being considered. Contemplating the conceptual experience of Vrêk is therefore an undertaking I regularly did and do via the five videos taken of the performances. However, I also I aimed to veer off from seeing the visuals, movement, initiatory moments, the affective labour in each gesture, gaze and contact (with Nico's bodymind). My critique of choices of these were to invite new insights into the collaboration and the value of each performance as ecological statement or contribution to the world of art.

I appreciate and celebrate the newness of our work for both of us individually and as duo over this length of time. As much as it was a strained and uncertain endeavour allowing for influences to enter the realm of performance both ecologically and relationally, the dedication to ourselves and the work sustained a rather animated and dense operational character over the period of 10 weeks.

The theatre drew audiences, which we considered rather as witnesses for us to access material in ourselves as performers that grew over the 10-week period. As this work is unusual as a theatre practice, with no promise of a traditional outcome or aesthetic value compared to any other form of theatre, the immediacy of this form was in itself one that required a heightened state of being for the length of the run. After the 10 weeks I literally felt as if I had undergone a major experiment in sustaining a new practice with a high degree of responsibility and it took a while for me to regain a sense of equilibrium again, and thus write up this archive. However, straddling my personal unfolding with the collaboration and aestheticism is still part of an auric existence as I write this up 6 weeks following the closing performance. I had a strong sense of responsibility for the whole space occupied over 5 performances, over 10 weeks. It stems from my experience as performer of more than 41 years. Energetically, I shift into action regarding my physical preparation, academic research, psychological hygiene, the theatre's condition, my relationships with staff of the theatre, procuring objects we would perform with, costumes, communique with the crew, publicity and production.

My producer's and artistic responsibility also included the musicians and lighting designer. Although most of the dynamics present were between Nico and myself, the division between us and musicians were worrisome. As we wanted to share much of our processes with them, inviting their artistic desires to be aired, very little communication ensued. At one point one musician chose not to participate in the final and fifth performance. As it was crucial for me and my understanding of this kind of collaboration that the group does not fracture at that time, I made numerous attempts to communicate how vital is was for the entire crew to be present until the end. Fortunately the musician returned and completed the agreement for five performances. My major learning here was that even though I considered conversation extremely important for the fullness of the artist and ontological experience for us all, my notion that their lack of this desire should be left as their artistic right to be private with their experiences, was in fact misplaced. Thought and regular conversation amongst artists is a matter that should be invited at all costs even when the privacy of process is legitimate.

The nature of this work was to enter the unknown, the un-normative, obeying the unconscious, and to in-dwell the emergence of one's own subjective life to become visible on the lens of a film. The stills extracted from the videos had specific relevance to this writing. It was chosen to illustrate what I considered important moments in the performances. These are moments where self-reflection and aesthetics in performance coalesce as re-turn in the service of knowledge. We unfold because we perform our life, and in these performances, life beyond the anthropocentric realm. Visual evidence of the unseen subtleties gave legitimacy for reflection upon aestheticism as evolution on the edge of society.

For instance, the inevitability of environmental mass extinction, which includes the people of this world, opens a territory for the task of art, and here particularly performance art. Vrêk regularly performed death outside of its classical dramatic gestures. What would be the interest in dance and music performance of death? Who would be willing to suspend hope and faith for life to rise, or not, for a moment to face the phenomenon that faces us: death?

Vrêk, the title

Vrêk is a colloquial term in Afrikaans in South Africa. It is a term that would normally be used to describe death of an animal, with a sense of the creature's meaninglessness and insignificance. It is also a term used to intensify an adjective. A person could be 'Vrêk slim, lelik, mooi, klein' (very clever, ugly, pretty, small). In this performative context Vrêk was appropriated to indicate a practicable and convenient quality of demise, termination of life, ending, ruin or even compost. It aimed to express an Anthropocenic reality through body movement and indigenous music by a group of South African performers.

What was more, this genre of performance would be called improvisation. We talk about real-time performance. What was created was in the moment, a result of listening to fellow artists, sensing what was offered in terms of movement or music and making the art happen on the spot. Generally, this would turn into a fairly easy unfolding of the performance. However, what made Vrêk different was what surrounded the aim of this group, what they stood for as permeated by the field they wished to acknowledge, namely that human existence on this planet would no longer be able to be taken for granted.

Vrêk, the thinking liminal behind, during, after and before, each performance

Gathering as performers our mutual interest and ways of being overlapped at what could be called liminal theatre. This theatre form resisted representation or any form of theatricality with a linearly, dramatic outcome. Liminality is a term that marked the sense of a threshold or boundary of being. It was the end of a phase, yet no coherence existed of what was to follow. Its somatic and sentient embodiment was a death. Liminality was in these performers' blood and came with a quality of interest in the self as transformative, anarchic, shamanic and artistic. These qualities also resisted the known, the predictable, the good and right appearance and the good feeling that underlies our comfort with what was.

As such, an awareness of environmental changes in the mind of the human race, the effects of increasing capitalism and neo-colonialism, and manifestations of new postures of patriarchal rule formed the undergird of our philosophical base. The normative was being challenged as the norm observes dominant forms of gender, race, class, age and demarcations of privilege. And, the norm of being human as environmentally centred, was yet naïve of the condition of our environmental life. But the norm also personifies ontological distinctions of human expressivity. Much of the human race's cultural forms were embedded in what would work for our group, produced a collective ethos and secured the mores that would bind the group's ethos. Even though this binding had valuable functions, it might also stultify expression that would mark individuality or new forms of cultural evolution. As a collective such as Vrêk we positioned ourselves at this edge, namely the revelation of form that was different, unexpected, unknown, undesirable, uncomfortable, and therefore liminal. Liminality marked limits of one existence and not yet fully situated in an-other existence. Liminality restrained from binary modes of thinking. These also included non-sensical and disorienting binaries that entertained divides between body and mind, heaven and earth, the inner and outer ideologies of experiences and so forth. These divides underlay our postmodern psychological and philosophical make-up and were perpetuated in structures that fed phenomena such as slavery, capitalism, educational models depriving embodiment of knowledge, the underestimation of affect, the feeling aspect of being a body as a source of knowledge, and much more.

Our project was therefore to embody a close-knit integration of an awareness that by default acknowledged that we were part of the human race whose influence has had devastating effects on this planet, and at once, as per improvisation, this awareness had to examine those instincts and offer alternative ontologies, as art.

Psychological dimensions of eco-human existence

The possibility of change, of becoming other than how one had known the self, in itself is a rigorous psychological, physical and spiritual challenge. To change under duress disrupted our way of being and this disruption's unsettling collided with our identity. While the nature of our world with natural disasters, the effects of climate change, economic instability, social upheaval, pandemics, food insecurity and youth unemployment impacted on us daily, the competency to deal with such vast disruptions left most people without the skills to know how to manage their world nowadays. 'Going into one's head' is often coined as an unproductive schedule for time-space management in the Anthropocene. Staying in the bodymind is what Vrêk offered as proposition.

Psychological dimensions of eco-human existence

Performing with these artists is a privileged journey to discover an ontological clarity, momentarily of handing myself over to younger people. The exquisite acts of surrender into anguish, derangement, sorrow, defeat in the presence of the next generation concluded in the manifestation to raise up. What better exploration and research could an elder expect in a shamanic and artistic milieu where the unknown is revealed in nothing but a surrender in the presence of artistic and psychological competency. It could not have been choreographed or composed. It could be revered for its innate wisdom of the old truth: the natural cycle will return, new strengths will reveal themselves when given the opportunity and courage will come from mysterious depths.

The acknowledgement of our planetary heritage as a performance collective aspiring to embody the liminality of human existence was also a position of change for ourselves. We brought about change when we become the change. Whichever way we were impacted by the multiplicitous realisations as to how the human race was changing, these ideas, like clouds did not last long unless they become matter. Mattering / performing helped the human being to see themselves as changing, or changed. Becoming a bodymind that was different, and could be lived with, and lived with more-than-humans provided a human ontology that would assist in bringing about a changed world.

Quite pointedly, Manning considers the embodiment of the psychological self.

Philosophical underpinning siting Erin Manning

While artistic expression was close to a calibration between the world and the self and often provided a sense of balance in a person, albeit momentarily, further elements in our research into liminal performance provided us with substantial psycho-philosophical support. The field or study that opened the thinking about the world today and its trans-disciplinarity with ecology, queer theory, feminism, blackness studies and performance studies was also the philosophical territory of the post-human studies.

Post-human psycho-spirito-philosophy acknowledges the existence of the non-volitional, the knowledge that is embedded in bodymind and not aware of, knowledge of intuition, the non-rational, the embrace of the ineffable, knowledge that cannot be hierarchised or systematised, knowledge that is constituted by relations, experience outside the linguistic limits of intelligibility and 'how these relations open themselves toward systems of subjectification.' Manning p30. In her uncanny colluding of concepts Manning calls this 'radical empiricism.' It begins in spaces before binary emergence, before bifurcational knowledge tendencies. Manning calls it 'pure experience.'

The in-act of artistic making and doing lies at the heart of experience, acknowledging the shifting relations between knower and known. No experience exist without some relationality for human beings. Since we studied the ecological embodiment of emerging selves, Vr&circe;k offered us opportunities to transform who and how we were philo-aesthetically.

The performance of Vrêk as such could be seen as artistic speculative pragmatism. Experimentation was present at all times. The performer awaited, invited, welcomed anarchy to nurture new modes of experience. It withheld order and dwelled in a sense of excess. Manning claims this as a 'The rigor [that] must emerge from within the occasion of experience, from the event's own stakes in its coming-to-be.' p38.

The Performers

Nico Athene - performance art practitioner, Garth Erasmus — First Peoples musician, Sumalgy Nuro — African musician, Frans Mandilakhe — Lighting technician and theatre manager, Tossie van Tonder | Nobonke — movement artist.

A major part of our constant internal shift was to acknowledge the difference in embodied practices between us all and the effect this might have on our embodiment of the various performances.

Videographers

We are grateful to Clifford Bestall, Alex Hendricks and Richard Pakleppa for video graphing the five performances from which we were able to study and research our performances with multiple reviews into our engagement with eco-human themes.

Legitimacies of depths

A major factor of my particular role in this production was being embedded in the world of thought surrounding my understanding of others. I am a practicing clinical psychologist and ontological coach for 42 years. My manner of listening to people has a particular interest in understanding the person for who they are. In performance art work such as Vrêk the heightened receptivity towards the other performer is enhanced through contact improvisation, touching the other body, holding the frame of bone, breath and muscle, in fact, affect in its entirety. And a listening beyond the obvious touch, or tone of music, or choice of lighting. A deepened understanding of this phenomenology beyond the performative moment densified the nature of the relationship and the artistic experience. Understanding was not a mere thought. It was a particular nestling of a person's ontology in one's bodymind and being. If this understanding also entailed a process of unfolding, and a rather intense one at that, even this material of the unseen became part of the understanding. It should also not be underestimated that a relationship of guidance-while-participating-in-one's-own-process is a taxing affair of complexity and inherent ambivalence towards the various subjects of gravity that was part of one's awareness. At times this became an intense charge to sustain a working relationship while dynamics of complexity played out. It was a strong resolve of mine that the nature of the performance lend itself to giving releasement and a home, an in-dwelling so to speak to these complexities. Indeed, out of intense relational dynamics, the performances managed to contain, release and build a field for a hygienic ground for the next performance. In other words, the performances themselves added to the complex healing of the relationships in new ways each time. As we scheduled 5 performances over 10 weeks, this rhythm of intensity and release, creating ground for the next fulfilled itself in a performed separation and deepening of biographical content at the event of the fifth and last performance. Flowing with the subject matter, itself charged with eco-significance, was enmeshed with a relational eco-ethic with a trajectory to articulate its unfolding after the performance run into an 'unfinished' archive. We stepped back from a venture of difference with a remarkable crescendo of deeply charged work claimed as ourselves individually, two biographies that mattered most as the last two solo dances: the ecologies of our cultural histories as embodied and enlivened catharses, embodiments that veered off from environments to cultural embeddedness at the last moment of the run of Vrêk.

Reportage: Vrêk 1 to Vrêk 5

Vrêk 1

As the entry into this performance, the unknown of our relationships as artists emerged as an organic manifestation of our relationality. Of particular significance was my collaboration with performance artist Nico Athene. I became aware of the mutuality in interests, discordances, the differences in interpretation, and how both of us attempted to manage this as real-time expressions of a plurality of physico-affective perceptions, charged with the immediacy of the performative moment.

The intense striving for a working relationship of performance, became the performance as such. Movement was combat and submission. In Vrêk 1 there were very little other authentic themes present. We adhered to technical devices of real-time contact improvisation, listening to the nature of touch, bearing weight, becoming real in the affective content of the movement, and we were willing to face the consequences of our performance.

To me, two moments were relevant in the outflow of this performance. At one swift act, so swift that no conscious regulation of movement could have been designed, Nico's hand landed on my throat in a strong thrust of determined engagement. Soon, they shifted their hand downwards toward my collar bone, as perhaps an expression of their concern for what they had created. I swiftly shifted their hand back to where it was, on the "jugular" for strangling to occur as intended. I was empowered by this act. As the nature of this work in real-time is also intrinsically real-event, I welcomed the occurrence of Nico's body undertaking what they may not have intended consciously. There was also an 'erotic' inclination in my gesture to shift their hand to the "jugular." Experiencing their accuracy of gesture directly from their body, like an impulse, rather than pondered through, was in itself a testament of will that speaks truth. This was how the body worked, truthfully, and it did so in this genre if it was entrusted to unequivocally and soulfully say what needed to be said. Often this phenomenon served both parties, as an understanding of the genre was well grounded.

Following, I turned to stand in front of them. From this position they found "ledges" onto which they climbed onto my body: my calf, hips, shoulders. I sustained their weight and accommodated the act of their mounting, even assisting in holding their limbs while their body was heaved up and wrapped around mine. In slow time this act released and their body slid down to the floor. The creation of time to listen and live into this phenomenon, allowing another body to embark on mine had great significance. I was willing for this undertaking of containing their weight, yet I was aware of my ability to release this act in equal measures. As gradual as they ascended, they descended to the floor. My learning was that whether this was an act that I should be offering at all. Whether other modes of engagement were equally effective and possibly more productive, came as after-reflection. The main trajectory for me was that I was capable, but would I be willing? This opened up a vast spectrum of self-reflection, the possibility of unexplored avenues of relating, and of engagement that would invite relational lightness.

Vrêk 2

In Vrêk 2 we gravitated to ecological concerns. Two items of performativity was chosen, namely earthworms and plastic. Background to this is that I am an ardent earth worm farmer for almost a decade. I collect kitchen waste from neighbours and feed earthworms to recycle the vermiculture into soil for planting vegetables. The other item, a large sheet of plastic was chosen as contrast to the earthworms, itself representing an item that suffocated life environmentally. Nico occupied the performance with this sheet of plastic with very little else as costume than one piece of underwear. How we would deal with these two items was not clear to us, however, we were drawn to the obvious and stark contrast between the items.

What I wanted the witnesses to experience was the earthworm in the palm of their hand and a ball of colloidal humus, a clay-like form the size of an egg created from the vermiculture. I conducted this as a ritual for every person who entered the theatre. My costume was a laced dress which, underneath, revealed my body flesh in total.

I had so much to say about earthworms, how they lived, what they did for us and contributed to life on earth, that I decided to speak into these realities while I performed, and as these thoughts emerged for me. This form of performance vacillated between a rational, linguistic meaning of what earthworms do in an escalating emotive tone, and being engulfed by Nico's performance in and as the large sheet of plastic. At first we were separate from each other. Gradually through her encroaching motions towards me, and with my emotive verbal renditions of significance of the worms on the planet, Nico entangled us through their movements in utter slow motion into the plastic to the degree where I could no longer utter my renditions of life, but succumb to a death by plastic. The last utterance was: "The default dance, is life!"

The magical moment came at the end, after my succumbing to a death by plastic, lights already fading, when Nico raised above my body as a living entity beyond my death. The eerie image of this occurrence highlighted the possibility that non-life forms may survive in ways unexpected and not succumbing to particularities we would likely consider as beings of vitality beyond our empirical modernistic notions of that which is alive.

This end was one of those magic unfoldings that happened in improvisational theatre: the unexpected, unthinkable emerged, offering an entirely unexpected result, with a new materialism, life and humanity replaced by pollution.

Vrêk 3

The work of Erin Manning has had a major influence on movement researchers. In (Thought in the Act) — The Minor Gesture (2016) Manning took on the phenomenal task of writing into text the human experience that is largely un-wordable. It is a movement existence that invites the what else of an ontology in motion. In addition the not yet is present as a movement pattern that appears to be "searching." However, Manning assures us of the "legitimacy" of a movement pattern that is not typical of our linear, cause-effect, purposeful and directed movement. Her bifurcation of this exercise into neuro-typical and neuro-diverse movement became part of our score for Vrêk 3.

This performance followed a specific and increasingly popular exploration of Otherness in our social realm. Erin Manning's work on the significant space inhabited by the minor gesture underpinned our exploration here. Her articulation of the fragility of a knowledge at the limit of human ontology, the minor gesture, revealed the "as-yet-unformed" force in our bodyminds, or the edges of existence, and potentially a source of being human in the Anthropocene.

I often speak into the minor gesture as follows: imagine a group of soldiers marching along. What one is drawn to is the LRLR of those heels striking the ground, rhythmically exact and predictable. Imagine everything in between the moments of LRL, and then one begins to veer towards the multiplicity of everything that we never considered part of the grand gesture, the march. This is the invisible world of being and also of movement.

We were on the floor to be inventive of new forms of existence bringing a boldness into that which is dissonant, disorientating, not yet fully in existence, process bound, dependent, questioned worthy, mentally 'uncertain,' inviting robust difference, addiction, psychosis, Blackness, transgender, 'uneducated,' exceeding the known, complex forms of interdependence, disability, intuition, affect, non-individual, political, avant-garde, marginal, dynamic, ecological, life at the limit, a force of freedom. The generic term for this state of being is neurodiversity.

Its inverse is termed neurotypicality. It is affirmative, emphatic, sure, perfection of societal norms, self-directed, "I," individualism, system-supported, speaks major languages only, policing, institutional, hierarchizing of knowledge, market, framing for use-value, the set-up, reason, volition, intentionality, agency, goal-oriented, non-temporal, autism, pre-linguistic, creativity, a thinking in the moving.

Vrêk 3 took this difference on board, as modes of movement. We embodied dance as neurotypical. This was when a dancer knew their movement from moment to moment as awareness of being in the dance, feeling the line into its space, the timing into its contact with the floor, with a spatiality of gaze to project the movement out into the realm of witnesses, and wilfully pausing a movement when it is asking for it. Neurodiversity as dance form negated all the above. Tremors, uneasy shifts, coping strategies of movement that did not appear under control of the dancer, the movement that was not-yet a dance, instability, uncontrollability of repetition, an event with some notion of the future, as it was unpredictable. The unthinking nature of this movement rode on the intuition driving impulses extracted from their cultural overlays. Time, was plural.

Our participation in this event vacillated between these two 'gestures.' We independently embodied neurodiversity and neurotypicality following the impulses of our bodies to gear us into the one or the other mode. Manning states that: "There is an important difference between conscious thought and thought that moves with experience in the making." p115. Then we made contact and as real-time improvisational duo we entered the complex amalgamation of the two modes of being. Manning often writes about art as "outdoing" of itself: "Relationally, ecologically, the work participates in a worlding that potentially redefines the limits of existence." p56. It was in this duo of contact work that the imposition of one mode over the other brought about interesting complex and baffling communications, I am sure also for the witnesses.

Here follows a closer analysis of the variations of movement as neuro-diverse and -typical.

• One dancer would make strong contact as neurotypical with the other while another part of the body displayed the score for neurodiverse movement such as repetition.
• Contact would be made and one dancer would spark the neurodiverse repetition in another.
• One dancer would depart from contact with the other transferring into typical movement while the other dancer is still steeped in the repetition of diversity.
• The dancer left in diversity shifts the repetition into affective movement with breath, facial movements and a dramatic presentation of crisis.
• One dancer's strong typicality contains the other dancer's diversity, but while doing so, they developed the same diversity albeit with a very different affect from the first dancer.
• Both dancers could expose diversity after contact followed by separation. This separation in diversity could bring about cataclysmic affect as expression of death (or any other crisis) from separation, a state of being out of which neither dancer can depart from.
• The inter-active meeting of typical and diverse ontologies brought us the knowledge that the one could support or deconstruct or separate or catharsise (as in catharsis, as verb) or expose underlying typicality or diversity in the other dancer.
• What does this mean? That the exploration on different bodies and different ontologies of movement complemented each other remarkably. This list is of course infinite depending on the number of times dancers got onto the floor with this exercise. Closure to a relationship in this case had brought about a rich weaving and diffractive ontology besides and beyond the original score of two ontologies.

Whatever constituted as political in our relationality in this performance was evident in everything that constituted our acts on stage. It was not political in the sense of powers and hierarchies due to difference, but revealing the complex ecologies of the vast spectrum between the neuro-diverse and -typical, as bodyminds in action. The concerns of each movement was concern for its own evolution and the other body played a crucial role in this no matter how each were sparked by the other. And the aesthetic yield was the intrinsic adherence to emboldened field emergence of the dancer's becoming strongly transindividual. It was with this contrasting ontologies that we were hoping not only to embody these differences solo and as duo, but also to emit some pedagogical claim that should we be able to embody this, then we would have allowed a learner in the audience to recognise their own neuro-diversity or -typicality. And, be the richer, ontologically for it.

Vrêk 4

We were over half of our commitment of 5 performances. Nico and my relationship, as much as that of the musicians and lighting technician was directing itself towards the end of this collaboration.

I considered the bracketing of our collaboration for a few reasons. I believed that all collaborations and even relationships thrived on the structuring of a beginning and end within what could easily run into oblivion. Every relationship had its dynamics and an artistic one even more uniquely so. History had shown us evidence of the muse's presence in artistic relationships. As if inspiration and creativity was not enough, artistic relationships required rigorous reflection that might reveal psychodynamics, complex artistic and aesthetic leanings complicating artistic associations. The exigency of aesthetic choices, present at all times originated in profoundly archetypical drives. These demanded attention and representation and did not tolerate their negation and refusal. They were also direct and potent expressions of foregrounded psychodynamics in an individual artist's life and artistic career. I was sure there were many other dynamics present and these would be revealed if there would be a concerned space for this exploration. An ideal opening invitation for this, no doubt very rich confluence of artistic and psychological material, would belong to a relationship with long standing regard for personal and artistic explorations. As much as history revealed the trouble and glories of artistic collaborations, there were equally many that displayed a regard for both these domains lived and traversed over time.

While the rich particulars of the performance relationship with Nico Athene and myself is a topic for wide exploration here, I would simply state that the acknowledgement of archetypal fields of being in each of us was also an acknowledgement and acceptance of our unfolding as artists in this collaboration. The closure over the period of the time left was an interesting observation and participation to engage in.

It was at this point that I appreciated a discretion in how I, and Nico, exposed our material resources for publicity and general archiving. This was confirmed at the writing up of this archive, namely that stills would be used for personal use, omitting videos from public viewing. My concern was that the relationship had a particular tenderness that ought to be taken care of whilst in the process of fervent explorative phases of contact improvisation open to any manifestation of relational, archetypal, artistic and shamanic platforms.

The question that arose regarding a collaborative closure was the following: How did one direct the unknown space of this improvisational genre of artistic performance as part of the closing collaboration, whilst as such it may bring various and largely unknown affective contents into the real time artistic performance methodology, as much as the relationality of this collaboration.

In Vrêk 4 our score was an engagement with another-human-body-as-becoming-environmental-element. This was a challenge to resonate with the other body as container or field of one's own, and a container/field upon/within/beyond which one could explore any ontology one felt legitimate to do as free agent of one's movements. The body of the other therefore became the territory for the expression of the self. Since closure of the relationship was immanent, this was also a factor in the manner in which we engaged as an ontological departure from the collaboration. Each gesture, bearing of weight, handing over to gravity onto the other body, touching through skin upon skin, deep pressure and infinitely light connectivity bore the relationality of departure.

But we had to find non-human environmental matter to entangle this trajectory. It did not take long for Nico to clinched the association: kelp. We gathered fresh kelp flushed out from the ocean as choice of an environmental item while we would continue to apply ourselves to the other's body as ecology. Kelp turned out to be a truly transformative participant in our performance. It was not a spatial element as in Vrêk 3's neuro-typicality, nor an abject object such as in Vrêk 2's plastic. I really felt as if it was working me. For a week before, and four days following the performance, my body was "zinging." It was essential that one measures the effect of an elemental being on one's field of experience and being. My body felt strong yet I could feel the effect of retention in my thighs when I had stairs to climb. This, even when we did not use our standing thighs much during the performance.

Kelp came into my home, got washed from sand in my garden, trucked to the theatre, and then given back to the sea. It was a weighty item to pull-drag over a beach and we developed ways of spanning it over our bodies rather than pulling it by hand. Finally it was laid to cover the stage. While it was fresh it had no distinct or overwhelming smell, for us at least. But the slippery, slimy quality amongst the distinct tubes and leaves, dark with green called for us to be present with the greatest item in the room, and little else: kelp.

Intimacy with another body and with the matter of kelp allowed for a movement vocabulary that required and demanded extremely slow and meditative action. What transpired was the study of how to "rest" as kelp, how to be shifted into different positions due to an imaginary element, water, with that quality of movement, slow, weighty, unfolding, heaving, gliding with a sense of the eternal against the underground insistence of our musical accompaniment, a rapid staccato with unearthing sounds. The lighting was an imagined underworld with much shadows on the floor, dark forms and at one point impulsive flickering of lights across the stage.

Our movement geared towards a removal from an anthropocentric vocabulary such as gripping with hands, lifting heads, raising up to verticality and so forth. The immense pleasure, the response to the desire to become other-than-human, was our element. The value of decentring from being human, whatever that might have meant, gave us a taste of immersion into the foregrounding the well-being of all agents rather than one alone. No favourites, no hierarchies. No rushing of an invitation to seasons, but an impulse to follow something bigger than ourselves. We got close to abandoning human notions of thinking altogether.

Archiving this performance was crafting new conceptions of what thinking across species, land, water, air might mean. It brought us close to what it meant to co-exist as a plurality, with a continued status of unravelling and becoming. It meant giving up our cultural identities, not a set of values inherited from history, but one that had sedimented strata in our bodies through our lived experience. Was this indigenous knowledge? Intra-active respect of difference? To know everything and at the same time forget it all. Keeping an eye on the romantics of human centred notions of nature, the performance also opened up nature as a site of struggle. Beyond structures of representation which in itself indicated the tragedy of proximity we experience when one animal hunts another, where we cannot save a young from the talons of an adult, our relationship with the rest of the planet was a troubled, agitated, unsettled and conceptually problematic one.

Vrêk 4 elicited new forms of bigger thinking which will hopefully help us in the possibility of more sustainable futures.

Vrêk 5

Vrêk 5 brought to an end this series of performances over 10 weeks. Again, the question was what the theme would have to be for us to focus on and which would guide our intentions. Healing was a theme suggested and agreed by both of us. I was pleased with this theme as it would bring about a trajectory that would be challenging in the light of much tension of difference. Yet, it evoked more than the relationship. Our personal biographies became apparent for the healing trajectory to be the grounds onto which we would base our performance.

I welcome Nico's contribution to this part of this archive below.

This performance consisted of three aspects. The first was allowing the space for individual dances solo and witnessed by the other. These would be alternating between us until we would see the opportunity for the second aspect namely a duet between us. True to the rest of the Vrêk series, contact improvisation would be our main methodology. As we had agreed that this last performance would aim to bring to a close what we had become through the previous performances with an exploration of it being an aspect of healing for both of us. The third aspect would be an element that we had considered to some extent since the beginning of the overall performance period of ten weeks. But since our main trajectory became an ecological one, this biographical material was placed on the back burner. For Nico it would be a visitation of their history and ancestry, being of largely colonial English existence. This was a theme that they had started to talk of in parts during our ten week period. For me it was a solo improvisational performance that would track the truth of my movement in a relationship of over 30 years.

Back to the first aspect: solo's alternating. The aim was to bring about a healing theme to each of the dances. My first entry was marked by a caring approach to movement which was well supported by the musicians. Succumbing to the softness of motion supported by different levels was an opening to the performance's aim: healing, as I allowed through movement of softness.

My second dance started with a heightened awareness of the energy in my feet. They felt like running water and gradually this became the nature of movement in the rest of my body, starting with my arms. At times it also felt like an entanglement as the dance was immersed in a choreography of movement that did not escape itself. It was like conducting and being conducted at once. In line with the healing intention of Vrêk 5 this dance was "staying with the trouble" of its own creation, which it did not attempt to escape, nor deepened.

My third solo was following an incessant musical rhythm to which I made a large circle. Very soon this circle became a spiral reducing to a centre. The centre of the spiral was the conundrum for the human bodymind. It was infinitely progressing yet could quantum-like flip into itself and return to the wider spiral. What would be the healing component here? Exactly that, that the spiral is the infinite form for the human mind to be subjected to the facticity of no end. Yet it "flips" like magnetic poles reaching a point of saturation, a phenomenon ardently exercised by geo-physicists and astronomers in relation to the poles of our planet. The healing component lies in the disinvestment in the final, the fixed, the certain and the hubris of any such position. These were the thoughts that accompanied the spiral.

The duet with Nico followed their last entry into a solo. This was our last real-time contact improvisation performance under, and as Vrêk. I met them on the floor engaging in proximity closer to them. Soon our bodies touched with gentle closeness. Their body laid on top of mine, rolled off and still much tenderness accompanied our movement. It was as if we were feeling and moving how this moment of separation was to be processed. Clearly we had to be together to separate, giving our weight to the other in flows of exchange. I took a wide lunge towards Nico which began the slow ascent to standing figures, heads close together still in process of engaging to separate. Embracing them with one hand I paid attention to their open gestures with their palm turning upwards. This upward palm gradually curled around my arm. Their left hand firmly gripped around my right arm and slowly began to pull away from me in that way. What remained of their grip was only their fingertips which pulled away through my fingers. At the last release their other arm raised into the air. This led to both of us raising our arms facing each other. The feeling was that of a mutuality following a long act of moving together not only in this dance but over 10 weeks of this project. Much space entered between us and we sustained eye contact until the dance came to its end. It felt difficult for me to take my eyes off Nico's and I felt a whole story coming to an end and that the end was a sacred and committed finality.

What now follows is Nico's write-up of their solo performances during Vrêk 5.

Here follows their rendition of our duet, the contact improvisational movement that would mark the end of our collaboration.

The two ritual dances followed. The tradition of constellation work, of setting up witnesses for entering a biographical rite of passage accompanied this part of the performance. We demarcated the position we wanted the other to witness ourselves from by placing a stool for the witness in that position and then proceeded to the dance ritual.

Here follows Nico's writing on their dance.

At the end of their dance Nico, replaced their blankets off the centre of stage, and de-robed me from being their witness.

A dance ritual may have a plan of execution, but the dance true to shamanic ceremonies may not follow the plan. The reason for this is that the dance is in the body and not in the plan for what would happen. And therefore, the rite would follow its own trajectory. The prospect of this rite was one that I expressed very early in the formation of Vrêk. I wanted to place my relationship with Sandi, our son's father centre to my dance work at this time of my life. And to learn what the dance would reveal.

As background, a relationship of over thirty years was relevant. While we had filled these years with attention to our parenting roles, the true reflection of the meaning of this relationship could only be known through shamanic ritual and embodiment. And one event may not be enough. From the early years of this partnership I had often constructed events for Sandi to witness me while I moved in that open-ended way to reveal what was not apparent to us, or me, for that matter. Big decisions were made at the end of a ritual, such as our decision to attend Chris Hani's funeral in 1993 while I was already pregnant and we had known the turbulent political atmosphere of South Africa at the time. The dance said: Go.

This Vrêk 5 dance was aimed at Sandi's life as freedom fighter in the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the original armed wing of the ANC, and as such serving as vehicle for a dance towards him. A large part of our lives revolved around this identification of his, a role which he also written out in his book titled Abanqolobi — Freedom Fighters. A similar identification was present for me, namely an archetype I have been working with regularly, the warrior. Much of Sandi's character and personhood revolves around this archetype. It has also shaped and filled our relationship. And most definitely, I had given self-made form to intrinsic characteristics of warriorship that I had learnt from his presence in my life.

An integral part of this performance was the presence of a fellow comrade and friend, film maker since our Namibian days, Richard Pakleppa. I discussed the trajectory of this dance with him beforehand and I was pleased to have had a person of our mutual background, mine and Sandi, to witness this work on film.

Sandi's presence at this dance was important to me and therefore I prepared a place for him on the side of the stage as major witness to the dance. This performance ritual was accompanied by a photograph of Sandi, an enlarged identity photo taken at his arrestation to Robben Island of 15 years, in 1973. I have lived with this image which was so direct and filled with many associations and gazes in my life. Its presence marked that of a funeral. I displayed this image in its frame to the camera for Richard to capture. Then I performed a rhythmic dance and voice to the song sung by MK: Hamba Kahle Umkhonto, we Umkhonto, Umkhonto we Sizwe. It served as a mantra to which I constructed my dance to contain and sustain the affective quality of the dance. I could not imagine how this would transpire.

The musicians, Garth Erasmus and Suma Nuro, provided a singular drum beat to which I sang and danced. Nico witnessed from their position on stage.

The dance began with a roll out of a garment I had made in 1991 soon after we had met. It is a red overhanging cloth with animal tracks across the length of it, indicating a path of life. I folded the red cloth out onto the stage in front of me and laid face down towards the position where I assisted Sandi to sit, on the side of the stage. Then I displayed the photograph to the videographer and placed it on a stand centre stage. Garth proceeded with a singular and deep beat, reverbed on his instruments. I found my voice deepened and heightened as the dance proceeded. The power of warriorship through the song prevailed and escalated as the dance unfolded. I found my movements and face stern and resolved to embody that which he had embodied all his life and which I then could do as my own empowerment. The dance converged into strength, earthiness, spear-like focus on Sandi and allowing for any characteristic to be born into this moment to celebrate his life, our lives, the liberation movement when it had its powers, and my body's powers to become this mutual warrior of relating within complexity with forces of political and personal liberation.

At the end of the dance I took Sandi back to his seat within the audience. I undressed from the red robe, laid it onto the floor and rhythmically rolled the photograph into it. Then I replaced all these objects and de-robed Nico from their role as witness. This brought the performance to an end. The more I reviewed this dance, the closer I come to the realisation of a death between us and pre-empting it was a way of realising the facticity of a person, a life lived, reciprocal influences and the truth of a political love performed as funeral.

Closure

The undertaking of 10 weeks of performance was a challenge and an adventure into celebrating new relationships, learning how we interpreted some of the most pressing events of our time while sustaining artistic integrity as relationality. True to the recognition that the experiential proximity between human beings and their immediate and cosmic environs, is shrinking, Vrêk embodied the complex conundrums of the attempts to give form (per-form) to these realities. The reverberation of the performances could not be said to be a clean and clear outflow of five performers and their distinctive efforts. The residue of this work may remain in our beings as a revelation of what complex and troubled worlds implicate and necessitate in the era, and epoch of mass extinction, mass quarantines, climate catastrophes, economic crises, and human ontology as at the edge of meaningful existence. Vrêk brought us closer to feeling, sensing, perceiving this reality. It will remain with us as a brave adventure into a micro excavation of a massive phenomenon that we are becoming as this sentence comes to its end.

Resource

Erin Manning, (Thought in the Act) — The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press (2016)