[-empyre-] at times

[Fabrizio Manco]

Dear and resonant forum, 
 
This is also my scribble.
 
As I join you with a bit of a delay – in my not having been part of the choreolab and in this response – I’d like to ponder, or dwell for a short moment on few of the very engaging contributions that have an echoed within me so far, in the stimulating closeness of this meeting, and in what I follow from your bodied recollected experiences. Then, I ponder trying to still my bodymind, and yet keeping constantly in tune with my surrounding movements, in a sort of butoh-becoming realization in movementstillness. So, I dwell with you, then pacing, and realizing a paradox of moving, if and when, we realize the (old story of the) intrinsic relation between stillness as movement and movement as stillness. Of course, the same relationship stays with silence and sound, when we realize (physically) that silence is sound, the many and infinitesimal sounds of the many and infinitesimal silences (as also my old chronic tinnitus teaches me). As indeed are so
 varied the different variations of deceleration/acceleration and celerity – as Elisita Smailus reminds – I am giving myself the arduous task of reflecting afterwards on  my somatically discovering of those infinitesimal and very diverse moments of speeds of bodymind movements. Then, comes the one of that moment of suspension which takes place between input – for instance, a sonic input – and movement. In my auditory-based moving,  the response to imput/s is not always immediate. The cognitive process never stops, of course, but, as in a trance state (Samadhi-like, as I believe is one of the few in butoh) is a constant embodied unfolding through decelerated rhythmicity, as I believe rhythm or rhythms are always there, never escapable, even in the smoothest peak-less of passages of movement, in order for an experiential dance to emerge.  
 
In tarantism, for instance, an entranced state is achieved by a speeding up process of acceleration of rhythmic and oscillatory movement or dance, which I believe is another form of meditational ‘thinking about not thinking’ but in a fast emotional folly, which, although appears as a different experience from deceleration and calm (sane) flow, is nonetheless a tangible experience of the apparent duality of the paradox. Then, as I reflect on immediacy and delay in response to input/s, tarantism as well as butoh, offered me the place where input continues to vibrate in stillness. In the case of tarantism, I believe that the actual moment of the sudden stopping of the rhythm of the accompanying percussive music, was the actual dance (and therapy). 
 
In my work as an ‘aural choreographer’ in performance, with drawings, or workshop facilitation, I think carefully how specifically  one can stimulate and inform active and reflexive engagement with different image guided or acoustic and sensory inputs following acoustic cues of speed, direction, intensity, rhythms, origins and qualities of sounds together with time processes: the walking body, meditational process, speeds and trajectories of movement, slowness and stillness, concentration and explorations of duration, dwelling and endurance. So, I feel that a sonic input can affect the body (what I call the ‘ear-body’) in different cognitively filtered ways. In a decelerated pace and response, a sonic input never decays, it keeps its specific quality and intensity, yet takes time, if it is a fast moving sound, it moves me/us at my/our own time. What is my time? Now, it’s a geological time, or an aeon, where a sound is already and always bodied
 and has already reached my ear (and the ears of the body) but, its vibration continues, it takes its time. It has moved me and I move with it, I feel its alterity and sameness at the same slowfast time. In a butoh slow movement I experience, I become being-time. A time emerging slowly in a not-self-conscious, but awakened slow pace creating and created by the space where one is immersed, space which is not made, but which instead makes the dance/performance. Yet, also when butoh is fast and furious, it keeps at the same time that slowness of consciousness, where time is multiple. So, is it matter of ‘dropping’ in that awakened reception. So, I’ll ask the reception. 
 
I just found a book on my shelf, one I read in my youth and brought with me from Italy, where Milan Kundera was more popular, and I open by chance and read (and translate): “there is a secret link between slowness and memory, between velocity and oblivion”. So, finally futurism (and with its blind faith in progress) can only be a buried past. 
 
To be continued.
 
Best wishes,
Fabrizio Manco
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