Iris Colomb and Xavier Velastin introduce their new SLANT event, Forms In Flux, coming up on the 13th and 14th of December.
If a text for performance isn’t just a sequence of words to be read from start to finish, what else can it be? How can we expand, shift, and disrupt the relationship between a text/poem and its performance? What new systems can we create and use?
SLANT is an investigative platform exploring the diverse range of transdisciplinary poetic performance practices within and beyond the UK. Each SLANT event takes on a new focus with a new co-curator. SLANT’s last event, ‘Voiceworks’, co-curated with Serena Braida, focussed on experimental uses of voice in poetic performance. Our next event, ‘Forms In Flux’, co-curated with sound artist and performer Xavier Velastin, will be livestreamed on the 13th and 14th of December 2020.
‘Forms in Flux’ aims to explore the performative potential of systematic and procedural modes of composition through pieces that engage with the performativity of compositional materials, that employ systems to dynamically disrupt a text’s structure and content, or become independent systems for holding and realising texts. Although plans for this event were drawn up before the Covid-19 pandemic, as both curators and performers we cannot avoid addressing our current context. The disruption the pandemic has caused requires us to reinvent our ways of developing, presenting, and experiencing live work. We have come to see the impossibility of physically sharing a space as an opportunity to question our relationship to live performance. Seizing this opportunity means moving beyond attempts at simulating liveness and instead directly engaging with the technological medium we now employ. Forms In Flux is grounded in this awareness: what used to be a matter of creative curiosity is now one of actual urgency. The seven artists featured in our event will respond to these concerns with a mixture of physical and virtual means.
Photo of Xavier Velastin by Suzi Corker
Process-led performance encompasses a wide range of potential genres, approaches and mediums that can incorporate both cutting-edge technology and embodied scores, a breadth of possibilities we were eager to reflect in our curatorial choices. Forms In Flux’s two headliners, Jörg Piringer and Nathan Walker’s respectively digital and somatic uses of performative systems present complementary approaches. Jörg Piringer is a Vienna based language artist and performer. His multifaceted practice spans multiple fields including sound and visual electronic poetry, computer games, electronic music and video art. He uses generative systems to develop striking and playful interactive and collaborative poetic performance pieces. Nathan Walker is a writer and artist whose trans-disciplinary practice is rooted in a poetics of action; they see the vocal-body as the material and initial site of performance. Their scores for vocal performances use collage, writing constraints and descriptions of previous performances to generate new approaches to reading, vocalisation and performance.
In curating Forms In Flux, we endeavoured to both programme individually innovative contributions and to compile a diverse set of performances in order to thoroughly investigate the potential of systematic composition when applied to poetic performance. In addition to our two headliners, our event will feature contributions from performance maker Ana Coltatu, sound and media artist Christina Karpodini, poet and artist Alison Grace Koehler, and experimental composer Alaa Yussry (cerpintxt). Their performances will respond to current constraints with an exciting range of situational, choreographic, visual, and sound-based approaches.
Ana Coltatu’s performance will play with notions of intimacy and formality to subvert the surreal nature of her experience of lockdown. She will use a compelling performative ritual to artfully transform and repurpose found text. Christina Karpodini’s piece will explore loneliness using a wearable musical instrument that triggers, controls and fractures the delivery of text through haptics and gesture. Her performance will also involve two human collaborators, poet Jana Erbes and performer Dimitra Bakalgianni. Alison Grace Koehler’s performance will feature a choreographic dialogue between textual fragments and shards of stained glass. She will handle these poetic materials with a mixture of designed and improvised procedures to engage with the paradoxical nature of vulnerability. Alaa Yussry’s performance will orchestrate a phonic disintegration of textual materials. Her piece will be a layered sequence of self-destructive textual rituals blending discourses, techniques and languages to scatter, unfold and gradually dismantle sense.
Finally, Co-Curator Xavier Velastín will use the event itself as compositional material to produce his performance. Fusing a technological process of encoding interactivity with the somatic liveness of adaptive utterance, he will generate and modulate both text and the parameters for its production in real-time through the sonic, spatial, temporal, geographical and psychic components of the other performances.
Forms In Flux occurs at a bizarre and pivotal moment for live performance. What began as a desire to platform artists that interrogate the form of poetic performance has grown into an occasion to interrogate the form of the live event itself. Beyond a celebration of experimentation, this is a call for momentum in defiance of the adversity that our artistic communities face. We believe that through multifaceted systematic approaches, new modes of expression can be explored that will allow us not just to navigate the constraints we currently face, but to build structures through which we can connect and thrive. The impact of the pandemic demands a transdisciplinary, structural response; Forms In Flux is ours. We hope to see you all (online) on the 13th and 14th of December, 8pm, at IKLECTIK off-site.
