idanca.net

Cristiane Bouger attendend Performa 09 – Visual Art Performance Biennial and wrote about three works. The first text published at idança was about Meg Stuart and Trajal Harrell’s Auf den Tisch!. Here, she writes about Conversation with Boxing Gloves Between Chamecki and Lerner. The third text will be published soon.

::

100 years since futurism

Performa 09 – The Third New Visual Art Performance Biennial, directed by the art historian and critic RoseLee Goldberg, took place from November 1-22, in New York. In its third edition it celebrated the centenary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909.

Marinetti’s manifesto was published in Paris on the first page of the daily newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. The influential text would introduce one of the most provocative and radical artistic movements of the last century, leading the Futurist practices in the decades to follow. The Futurism was seminal in the development of performance works and avant-garde practices that were later originated. Nevertheless, manifesto and artistic movement were polemic not only because of their extravagant ideas, but also because of Marinetti’s sexist and fascist perspective through which he exalted “the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers” and praised war as “the world’s only hygiene” (MARINETTI, 1909).

The revolutionary artistic ideas originated by the Futurists manifestos in Italy – a couple years before the World War I was launched – are controversial even nowadays. On the other hand, through the will to “destroy” the past and scorn all established structures like museums and academies, the Futurists envisioned new directions to the art in the last century. As stated by Goldberg, “Futurist Manifestos left no part of modern life untouched, probing and provoking, inventing and challenging, and proposing and projecting new ways to eat, sleep, fly and dream .”[1]

‘Vita Futurista’

Integrating the celebratory Futurist program of the biennial, the project Futurist Life Redux took place, curated by Lana Wilson with Andrew Lampert. Inspired by Vita Futurista (1916), originally filmed by Arnaldo Ginna, [2] the project included eleven filmmakers and video artists. Each of them received the task of (re)creating one of the short films, which were ramdonly chosen based on the eleven different segments of the 40-minute feature,[5] from which there are no remaining copies.

Vita Futurista was the only Futurist film ever made and it presented many of the ideas proposed in 1916 by The Futurist Cinema manifesto, co-written by F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla and Remo Chiti.

As stated in the program notes of Futurist Life Redux, the original film was thought to be comprised “of at least eleven independent segments conceived and written by different Futurist artists.” Brief synopses of the segments and a few stills were the base for the contemporary artists to recreate their own re-imagined version of the Futurist film.

Among the artists invited to be part of the project[3] were the choreographers and filmmakers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner who brought in Phil Harder to collaborate in their work.

Chamecki and Lerner initiated the transition from dance to filmmaking in 2007. In the following year they were the recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed the duo to work on two new short film productions to premiere in 2010. For the Performa 09[4] commission , their short Conversation with Boxing Gloves Between Chamecki and Lerner re-imagined the Vita Futurista segment Discussion with Boxing Gloves Between Marinetti and Ungari.

Given a small budget, the title with an original still of their segment and a 6-week schedule to accomplish their assignment, Chamecki and Lerner – who had created a short film inspired in boxing fight in 2007[5] – needed to rethink their relation with the same signage. They asked themselves many questions concerning how to create a significant piece inspired in an artistic movement from which they had critical disagreements, since the sexist and pro-war ideas presented in the Futurist manifestos were not endorsed by the duo.

According to Lerner [6], one of their fundamental concerns was related to how they could look back at Futurism, if looking at the past meant a betrayal to the movement itself, which intended to look only at the future. However, imagining how to be a Futurist in the very present, instead of revisiting the Futurism’s past was a thought-provoking and exciting proposal.

From this perspective, Lerner and Chamecki decided to use artistic attributes valued by Marinetti and the Futurists, like speed, abscense of drama, simultaneity, dynamism and violence. They appropriated those characteristics subtly – and indeed efficiently – subverting fighting to recreate meaning.

A Kinesthetic Film – Not a Video Dance Work

Naming their work Conversation with Boxing Gloves instead of adopting the title of the segment Discussion with Boxing Gloves implied an altered approach of the violence suggested by the original film.

Reinterpreting violence transgressing its own force is a strong statement. This quality was accomplished in the video through two main aspects: the overlapped position of the performers facing the camera and the reversed temporality of the video.
The 4-minute video was filmed by Harder with a black background, showing Chamecki and Lerner centered on the frame. Four takes of four minutes with no cuts were filmed of each dancer, summing up eight takes. From that point, the artists overlapped the different combinations of footage they had at hand until selecting one take of each of them for the final editing.

The film starts with a boxing fight that develops into a dance. We see two women in fight position, facing the camera and for extension, in direct relation to the spectator. The images of Chamecki and Lerner are merged, simultaneously creating unity and diffusion of their identities. The action of fighting is developed till the point the fight positions turn into dance movements.

The crucial aspect of the work was the inverted movement of the film: the video was filmed with Lerner and Chamecki initially dancing, further developing the dance into a boxing fight. However, the film was edited showing the footage played backwards and what we see is an opposite sequence of a fight transformed into dance. Caused by this temporal manipulation, the violent movement of the punch is reversed, pulled towards to the direction of the fighter who threw it instead of to her opponent (or spectator). When the attack is pulled back to the aggressor and subtly transformed into dance, the violence is subverted using its own dynamics and speed.

The performers facing the camera allow the spectator to be involved in the action, in the sense s/he is facing the fighters and the blurred movements of their dissolved images. Sometimes it suggests that it was me – as the seer – who was hit by the punch and saw the opponent to dissolve into another woman’s body.

This impression does not happen by chance. According to Lerner, they wanted to attain not only a perceptual weirdness of the movement expressed on the video, but also to incite a certain physicality in the seer, granting the spectator the perspective of the fighter’s adversary, in a way one cannot watch the action passively.

The action and the structure of the video are incredibly simple. Still, it reverberates a conceptual and physical response to the artists’ initial question about how to look back at the Futurism: the speed so valued by the Futurists – a new mechanical quality in that context – is used to reverse the past into present and in this regard, chameckilerner makes both a tribute to the Futurists and a statement about the impossibility of their radical wish to destroy the past, which they also now belong to.

The merging of the artists blurs the identity of each of them, unifying Chamecki and Lerner and creating for their physical similarity, a meaningful duality of discussion and unity: a reflection of their artistic process. The blurred duality/unity can also present expanded meanings for those who know the history of chameckilerner. The dance company directed by both choreographers presented the suicidal spectacle EXIT at The Kitchen, in New York in 2007, stating the end of their dance partnership [7]. More than an end, EXIT marked their transition from dance creation to filmmaking. In this context, observing their boxing fight – in which every punch movement returns to the fighter who threw it – can also suggest that for both artists to fight each other is equivalent to fight themselves.

Considering they did not created the choreography for the camera, but rather a film based on a real action, Lerner situates the creation of Conversation with Boxing Gloves closer to a live art concept and not to a video dance approach. In an interview conceded for this article, Lerner stated:

“Working with film has been an extention of what we were doing [in dance], but we are questioning ourselves about which direction we will head to. We know there is a kinesthetic quality that is inevitable for us because this is the way we see the world. So far, body and movement are the focus of our films. (…) A lot of people ask us if we are now making video dance works. We do not have any interest in making video dance. We are making films.” (LERNER, 2009)[8]

She clarifies that her work with Rosane Chamecki always evolved from an action and not from a choreography or narrative. Even in chameckilerner’s earlier trajectory, their choreographies were created from a specific action that imposed the development of the dance score.

Considering that one of the crucial factors in performance and live art works is centered in a differentiated state of presence embodied by the performer, Chamecki[9] expands the approach pointing out that in their dance works, chameckilerner always attempted to recapture in front of the audience the momentum when, in their rehearsals, liveness and presence where unquestionable. However, this re-embodiment is not something easily achieved, and sometimes it hardly reoccurs in the works that are re-presented. From this perspective, she understands that creating for film allows them to capture these moments, which otherwise would vanish unseen. In that sense, she ponders if a performance for video can, in some cases, comprise more “liveness” than a live performance.

With Conversation with Boxing Gloves chameckilerner created a concise and effective reinterpretation. Interchangeably blurring and defining their practice, the artists subverted and recreated meaning to explicit both the fragility and strength of Futurist concepts in a time in which violence, speed, dynamics and simultaneity achieved completely new dimensions and influence in contemporary life.

::

Futurist Life Redux was seen on November 16, 2009 at Anthology Film Archives, as part of Performa 09.

Cristiane Bouger is a theater director, dramaturge, performer and video artist. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

[2] According to the program notes of Futurist Life Redux, “The 40-minute Vita Futurista premiered at the Niccolini Theatre in Florence in 1917.” Performa 09 Commission Program, November 16, 2009.

[3] Futurist Life Redux was comprised of works by Aida Ruilova, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Michael Smith with Bill Haddad, Shannon Plumb, George Kuchar, Shana Moulton, chameckilerner, (with Phil Harder), Ben Coonley, Trisha Baga, Matthew Silver and Shoval Zohar (The Future) and Martha Colburn.

[4] A Performa Commission with SFMOMA and Portland Green Cultural Projects.

[5] The short film integrated the dance work EXIT, presented at The Kitchen, in 2007.

[6] Interview conducted with Andrea Lerner for this article in December 2009.

[7] Even though chameckilerner presented the dance work Borbulho (Brazil, 2009) as a special project, their plans are not to choreograph anymore.

[8] Interview conducted by Bouger with Andrea Lerner for this article in December 2009. In the original conversation in Portuguese, she says: “Trabalhar com filme está sendo uma extensão do que estávamos fazendo [na dança], mas estamos nos questionando sobre qual direção tomar. Nós sabemos que há uma relação cinestésica que é inevitável para nós porque é assim que vemos o mundo. Corpo e movimento são o foco dos nossos filmes até aqui. (…) Muitas pessoas nos questionam se estamos fazendo vídeodança. Nós não temos o mínimo interesse em fazer vídeodança. Estamos fazendo filmes.”

[9] Conversation by phone with Rosane Chamecki for this article on April 17th, 2010.