Brussels 15th of July 2014

“Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relationship between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or the scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of places. She composes her own poem with the element of the poem before her. She participate in the performance by refashioning it in her own way – by drawing back, for example, from the vital energy that it is supposed to transmit in order to make it a pure image and associate this image with a story which she has read or dreamt, experienced or invented. They are thus both distant spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them.This is a crucial point: Spectators see, feel and understand something in as much as they compose their own poem, as, in their way, do actors or playwrights, directors, dancers or performers.”

 Jacques Rancière. The emancipated spectator - p 13, Ed Verso.

“Visions is interested in the transmission of choreographic tools and their integration into new artistic paths. How to integrate and combine some of Lisa Nelson tools into new processes and references? How to create a poetic and polyphonic documentation that will contribute to the evolution of a choreographic culture?  Visions is also interested to reflect upon documentation in itself: what is poetic dance documentation? What effects does it have upon its subject? How can documentation allow the appropriation of a received teaching?"

I have been deeply inspired by Lisa Nelson Tuning Scores since I have met them in 1998. I have used them as a base for the unfolding of my dance, teaching and choreographic paths. The question of documentation allows me to pursue my appropriation process. The research is first a mean for revisiting this heritage, to specify my interest and to communicate my opinion. It allows me to questions the process of transmission, to build up personal references and to highlight what appears to me essential in Lisa’s work: the active and subjective construction of experience. I see this research as an emancipation process that can only happen within a collective frame.  I invite others to play games, to sharpen our taste and materialize it through our documents. I invite “us” to teach ourselves, to teach each other and to emancipate from “the one who knows. I see Visions not only as poetic proposal but also a political one that want to create and inspire diversified and yet unified choreographic ecosystem."

About Visions, Anouk Llaurens, May 2014.

Pictures of an installation at Bain Connective Brussels, 2013. The extract of "The emancipate spectator" by J. Rancière is written in french, with a blue window marker  on the two windows that are side by side. On one window  the text is written inside and on the other window it is written outside, so you can see the inside and the outside of the same ' event' at the same time. On the other side the text is completely unrecognisable.

Photography and instalation: Anouk Llaurens