KHORÓS-Metaformance workshop by Jaime del Val

As part of the Khorós/c-h-o-r-o-s projects Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau (ThomasDumke and Katharina Gross) has invited Jaime del Val to give an introduction to the Khorós concept and practices.

Deeply transformative experiences

The 2021 workshop in Dresden has deepened the experiential and choral aspect of previous metaformance workshops by creating a deeper conviviality process. All of the points proposed in the workshop description below ended up actually being explored and activated in an open, ongoing, unbounded process of improvisation during the entire week, and taken on by participants in the trips after the workshops and beyond.

The workshop was preceded by the participation of myself and another workshop participant in a 48 hours experience in the Hole of Fame organised in the frame of the “Eine Andere Welt ist möglich” project: https://www.bindles.net/o/48hr-experience-and-michael-schumacher. This was a great starting point whose energies were taken further during the foollowing one week workshop at Villa Wigman.

In the 48 hours experience we explored numerous ways of disaligned non-verbal togetherness in exploring, inhabiting and co-creating a space over two days. The non-verbal, disaligned exploration of the space done in the very first evening (surrounded by the uncertainties of potential cancellations due to the pandemic, which added improvisational momentum) set up an extraordinarily deep and open bond between the participants and the space. It was a superslow exploration of the room, feeling it proprioceptively, becoming attuned with the others and the space, creating a new space  in the pace, indeterminate, emergent, a spacing, in silence, for almost two hours…. and magically at some point someone looking from outside the window, started moving with us from the street, and another body joined hir and they moved together touching hands, and I approached them from inside and we moved together from with the glass between us, connected….  During these two days we also made a small adventure of disalignments in the nearby shopping centre that ended up with the group being harassed by a security person, as well as went out together in the last open evenings of the city given new pandemic-related restrictions. We cooked, shared moments of non-verbal togetherness, some participants slept in the space, we had diverse dynamics and discussions; and we did little engravings that I we stamped on our skins. I took mine, a symbol for becoming that I keep using now.

At Villa Wigman we had, besides the scheduled workshop modules (see below) flexible and ongoing improvisations where all elements proposed for the metaformance week (see below) actually ended up being tested, including sleeping one night together in the space, going out into the street in choral disaligned manner, particularly in the open space by the river, and especially cooking wonderful vegan food every day, along with endless discussions and non-verbal improvisations. We did a sort of final performance for ourselves and a couple friends (no more was possible due to pandemic restrictions) where it all exploded in choral madness, with all the elements of the extremely dynamic space being composed, with unique intensities in the unpogrammed improvisation.

And the echo of this energy went on, we even continued working in the space the day after where the most intense improvisations with voice and body contact actually happened. I even continued doing tests of new ideas till the very last evening profiting from the dance floor and the immersive projection afforded by the space and of the time flexibility.

On my way back I had an unexpected 9 hours wait in the Frankfurt airport which I took for disaligned walks in the airport and the city, taking on and on the energies of the workshop, and other participants also sent messages of their continuing their way home (to France, Prague, Stuttgart or elsewhere) in disaligned manner.  The learning of new styles of cooking with the others has also enriched my daily (strictly vegan) cooking afterwards, The resonances keep going, towards even deeper future convivial experiences.

Jaime del Val

Pictures from the workshop at Willa Wigman:

Pictures from the 48hours experience prior to the workshop https://www.bindles.net/o/48hr-experience-and-michael-schumacher – https://www.bindles.net/app/collectives/5btqgdazFJnm8QvHwa3B:

Dresden 22nd-26th November 2021

  1. (Day 1) Introduction to the Khoros concept by Jaime del Val. Why we need choral arts in the age of algorithms. What is the age of algorithms. Regaining proprioception in the age of atrophy. The culture of immobility and the Planetary Holocaust. Towards a metahuman, metasexual r/evolution. What is metaformance.
  2. Introduction to the Metabody techniques:
    1. (Day 1) Disalignments techniques for regaining proprioception and developing BI (Body Intelligence). This fundamental module will be repeated every day with variations.
    2. (Day 2 and 3) Flexinamics and Amorphogenesis – how to design of emergent VR environments with non-reductive approaches to embodiment, with focus on proprioception and counteracting control aesthetics
    3. (Day 4) Microsexes as ontohacking (plus the previous techniques building up).
    4. (Day 5) putting it all together in a unique Metatopia environment as choral metaformance (immersive and hybrid installation-performance).

More details here: http://t-m-a.de/projekte/c-h-o-r-o-s/metaformance/?lang=en

http://t-m-a.de/projekte/c-h-o-r-o-s/ – http://t-m-a.de/projekte/c-h-o-r-o-s/?lang=en

 

c h o r o s – How to create a social technology of belonging

Titel: 

open Call for 

Ontohacking/Metaformance – Choral technologies for Planetary Health

workshop by Jaime del Val

Ort: Villa Wigman für TANZ, Dresden

(add pictures from https://metabody.eu/khoros/)

The workshops presents the Metabody techniques and theories developed by Jaime del Val over the past 20 years as means to reinvent the body-as-movement, in times of a sedentary algorithmic culture that is creating a planetary crisis. The techniques explore the body’s sense of internal movement, proprioception, and its expansion in physical dynamic structures and in digital and electronic systems, in non-reductive approaches to interaction design that allow the body to unfold its capacity to vary its internal motion and perception, as choral practices for a gradual disalignment from the unsustainable systems of global sedentary culture, towards a planetary health.

Ontohacking is about challenging what we think reality is by moving-sensing in new ways. Metaformance is the art of sensorimotor plasticity that affords more open worlds. —- Ontos is the ancient word for being, ontology is the theory of what things are. This workshop hacks millennia of belief in being and proposes that there is only movement. This is also described asOntological Therapy.

hashtags:
#metaformance #metabody #khoros #colectivecreation #socialbelonging #ontohacking

target groups: anywhat I have to bring as a attendee? your body (but please don’t bring your “mind”)

which preparations I have to do before participation? none

contact person for questions: Thomas Dumke, dumke@t-m-a.de

there wont be a participation fee

 

——–The workshop-experience proposes at least three levels of involvement: like in the ancient Dionyisian chorus Jaime acts as mediator or catalyser, the satyre. Then there is the group accompanying the satyre (and challenging its dominance) and finally the “audience” that we will seek to involve and immerse in an immanent experience from within that challenges their role as spectators.

  1. Ongoing during the week: Jaime del Val will do a 5 days long durational metaformance consisting of symbiotic practices indoors and outdoors around the Villa Wigman, inviting to explore disaligned ways of sensing the world. Participants are invited to join Jaime in this symbiotic process any time. Movement practices will de done more or less continually, with specific dedicated times.The process will eventually involve:
    1. doing long movement improvisations and long immersions in the Metabody systems
    2. communicating nonverbally and through proprioception, co-sensing
    3. improvising non-verbally with the voice as part of the movement
    4. coupling to things and feeling them propriocetively,
    5. moving at 1cm per second inside the Villa, in the garden and moving through the city in the streets of Dresden, etc. — eventually interacting with homeless or sleeping/staying long periods in the streets.
    6. cooking, and buying/getting, vegan food.
    7. eventually sleeping in the space, (this will be decided on site day by day)
    8. reflecting on our alignments with the Planetary Holocaust
    9. reflecting on a “Dacalogue for Planetary health” that involves rethinking our ways of dwelling and building, of clothing (or nudity), of food and energy, of kinship and non-binary trans-species families, etc… towards a culture of naked gatherers developing unprecedented architectures of life and of BI (Body Intelligence)
    10. doing critical documentation/reflection on/of the process, with a critical use of writing and images or other recording modes, with focus on kinesthetic memories
    11.       interacting and exchanging with other local artists, particularly in the c h o r o s constellation.
  2. The workshop modules (SEE BELOW FOR DETAILS) traversing the 4 Metabody techniques coming together into a 5th element as choral Metatopia metaformance are presented as 5 becomings/bodies that imply also major disalignments:
    1. becoming trans-species/metahuman,
    2. becoming microsexual/postqueer,
    3. becoming autistic/neurodiverse,
    4. becoming mestiza,
    5. becoming molecular swarm, by activating proprioception as entangled mode of sensing, reversing the dominance of the fixed point of vision, developing BI (Body Intelligence).
  3. The public presentation: The creation of an emergent metabody/chorus/space/experience that will be shared with a larger audience at the end of the final day, avoiding to place the audience as spectators followed by a metareflection and introductions to the Theory by Jaime del Val (and a presentation of the upcoming book ONTOHACKERS).

WHAT IS A CHORUS? … A chorus is a nomadic group of dancing-singing bodies improvising together and creating an immanent space-time, without spectators. Following a whole intellectual tradition coming from Nietzsche the chorus was ubiquitous phenomennon in all cultures and the one associated to Dionysian rituals in ancient Greece was the origin of the tragedy and the theatre. At first there was only chorus, no spectator, nor actor, nor preexisting work. In a time of homogeneous consumption of prerecorded products the Khoros project proposes the urgency of recovering the chorus as generative matrix for a creative culture and a sustainable society.

This event happening in and around the Villa Wigman is also an HOMMAGE TO MARY WIGMAN who was a pioneer in proposing improvisatory practices for emergent movement, challenging formalist aesthetics, focusing on sensation, and promoting the idea of space as a projection of movement, not as a container for it.

 

WORKSHOP MODULES – intro to Metaformance – Special one to one or small group sessions can be organised with participants. The programme schedule is subject to final agreements with participants. We kindly ask for participation in the modules the entire week.

Introduction to the Khorós concept by Jaime del Val. Why we need choral arts in the age of algorithms? What is the age of algorithms? Regaining proprioception in the age of atrophy? The culture of immobility and the Planetary Holocaust (the current extinction process and climate crisis that is including killing of hundreds of billions of animals, mainly in farms, linked to an excessive consumption of sedentary bodies and to an excessive human population which in turn is linked to an oppressive heterosexual regime that paradoxally leads us to extinction!). Towards a metahuman, metasexual r/evolution.

  • Introduction to Jaime del Val’s theories of
    • Radical Movement Philosophy
    • Propricoeption and BI (Body Intelligence)
    • The Algoricene (Age of Algorithms) and the planetary Holocaust,
    • Swarming Chaosmology and Planetary Health.
    • Metaformance: a Dionysian aesthetico-politics.
  1. Introduction to the Metabody techniques:
  2.     (Day 1) 22.11., Tuesday

starting time: 2.00pm

ending: 5.00pm

Disalignments techniques for regaining proprioception and developing BI (Body Intelligence). This fundamental module will be repeated every day with variations.

  1.     (Day 2) 23. 11., Wednesday

starting time: 2.00pm

ending: 5.00pm

Flexinamics – physical, flexible and dynamic architectures as body extensions (+ telematic version with robotics)

  1.     (Day 3) 24.11., Thursday

starting time: 2.00pm

ending: 5.00pm

Amorphogenesis – anti-VR system – digital architectures and sound as amorphous proprioceptive avatars – how to design of emergent VR environments with non-reductive approaches to embodiment, with focus on proprioception and counteracting control aesthetics – focus on sound interaction only is part of the process (+ telematic version).

  1.     (Day 4) 25.11., Friday

Microsexes – surveillance cameras on the skin and processed voice for a post-anatomical body (+ telematic version) – (plus the previous techniques building up).

starting time: 2.00pm

ending: 5.00pm

  1.     (Day 5) 26.11., Saturday
    Metatopia – putting it all together in a unique Metatopia environment as choral metaformance (immersive and hybrid installation-performance).

starting time: 2.00pm

ending: 5.00pm

18:00 public presentation: immersive, choral metaformance experience followed by exchange, talk and book presentation.