Metabody Techniques & Toolkit

Bodynet-Khorós Project

(Mass Liberation Tools for a Planetary Dance Pandemic- or the Neverending Dance – or the Planetary Chorus)

KHORÓS: Disalignments/Metakhorós – Nomadic Choral Improvisations + Workshops/Labs

The return of the Dionysian chorus – Or the Neverending Dance (0)

(Mass liberation machine – Planetary chorus)

Bodynet-Khorós EU Project – Forum 5 & Lab 9 — Metabody Toulouse 2023

Choral nomadic improvisation in the streets of Toulouse, by the river Garonne, 19th October

With Lydie Gavard, Perrine Mehat, Mathilde Poligne, Laure Lapeyre, Jean-Marc-Matos, and Jaym*del Val – Hosted by K. Danse

Disalignments concept and practice, and project coordination by Jaym* del Val – Reverso

During a week-long lab we explore the disalignments movement techniques by Jaym* del Val along with other proposals by Jean-Marc Matos, sometimes indoors, mostly outdoors. Diverse ways of careful listening into proprioception and non-control are explored along with flocking techniques that avoid copying movements and mobilise instead a differential propagation of rhythmic energies, along with multisensory integration, peripheral vision, an experimental use of the voice as coming with the movement, and disaligned relations to oneself, others and the environment.

These culminate in outdoors nomadic improvisations across the city or out in nature as modern revival of the ancient Dionyisian chorus: a group of dancing-singing bodies moving nomadically across spaces, each one differently but connected, entering a metahuman mode of experience and existence, and potentially infecting the whole of life, as a neverending dance.

In the process a symbiotic untrainment unfolds and can be cultivated: instead of entrainment as synchronic mode of relationality based on movement homogenisation, the anchoring on proprioception allows the deep connection oneself, others and environment as based on difference and ongoing variation. A research on symbiotic untrainment is being done in parallel with researchers Alicia Peñalba (University of Valladolid) and Rubén Lopez Cano (ESMUC, Barcelona).

Ultimately these practices point to a deep transformation of life practices towards becoming nomadic flocks of gatherers, self-rewilding, for a planetary regeneration away from sedentary and exploitative modes of dominant human living: a metahuman mutation for a planetary regeneration.

KHORÓS: Flexinamic sonic playground – Open-air sonic-architectural improvisations

 Or the Neverending Dance (3)

(Mass liberation machine – Planetary chorus)

Bodynet-Khorós EU Project – Lab 7 — Metabody Toulouse 2023

in the Reynerie park of Toulouse, August 2023

Part of “Un été au bord du Lac” – Hosted by City of Toulouse – Coorganised by K. Danse

With Laure Lapeyre, Jean-Marc-Matos, and Jaym*del Val

Flexinamic structures, sound instrument, disalignments concept and practice, and project coordination by Jaym* del Val – Reverso

The Flexinamic structures and the interactive sonic instrument by Reverso / Jaym* del Val together with disalignments movement techniques (also by Reverso/ Del Val), and metachoreographic strategies from Jean-Marc Matos (K. Danse) become a playful and portable instrument for outdoors choral experiences, that was first put in practice in this only-sound configuration (in daylight and without projectons)  in August 2023 in the park of La Reynerie, Toulouse, as part of the “Summer by the lake” initiative of the city of Toulouse, in days of extreme heat.

In the process many combinations appear: some people playing with the flexinamic physical structures, others wearing the sensors creating the sound, or just moving together, improvising as a group and passing the from one to the other, entering and exiting the playground. Endless choral dynamics can be playfully explored. With a portable sound  system with batteries the whole could shift and move during the session dialoguing with different spaces.

The software created for the project further allows to use people’s phones as sensors.

Interactive video projections of the Amorphogenesis project can also be added through portable systems at night, with or without the flexinamic structures, eventually  projecting on buildings. As well as play with the physical structures alone.

Along with other movement practices as well as living together, discussing theory, doing vegan cooking, multisensory walks and explorations for inhabiting the environment in non-disruptive ways, disperse gathering of plants and (self)rewilding, collaborations with animal sanctuaries and local environmental organisations, queer and refugee communities, etc.

The complete implementation of all aspects over a period in a place eventually conform Metatopias: site-specific and community relates events and processes.

Video and pictures from the Metahuman Lab in Lesbos 2022 and 2023, organised by Reverso, Hosted by Ohana collective and the University of the Aegean:

Combinations:

  • Flexinamic structures only – (outdoors daytime – plus in the night with on body lights)
  • Flexinamic structures + interactive sound (outdoors daytime  – plus in the night with on body lights)
  • Flexinamic structures + interactive sound + interactive visuals (outdoors night time)
  • Interactive sound only (outdoors day time)
  • Interactive sound + interactive visuals (outdoors night time)
  • Interactive visuals only (outdoors night time)

BODYNET: Disaligned Video Chorus

Or the Neverending Dance (1)

(Mass liberation machine – Planetary chorus)

Toulouse October 2023 – Bodynet-Khorós EU Project – Forum 5 & Lab 9 — Metabody Toulouse 2023

Choral online telematic improvisations across 4 countries and 7 cities: Toulouse, Istanbul, Torino, Athens, Thesaloniki, Mytilene, Santorini

Disalignments and microdances concept and practice by Jaime del Val

Video mixing concept by Jean Marc-Matos

Software by Arnaud Courcelle.

Video by Reverso, including some shots by Marion Sciuto. Hosted by K. Danse

Local Group in France (Toulouse): Lydie Gavard, Perrine Mehat, Mathilde Poligné, Laure Lapeyre (performers), Arnaud Courcelle (software), Jean-Marc-Matos (choreographic approach) and Jaym*del Val (concept and metabody techniques).

Remote participants in Greece (Athens, Mytilene, Santorini, Thessaloniki): Vivi Zangoyianni, Ioanna Stamati, Maria Asimakopoulou; Turkey (Istanbul): Ipek Kuran; and Italy (Torino): Michela Bloisi.

During a week-long lab a group of participants connect at a distance from 4 different countries and improvise together watching their images merge in real time, in a mesmerizing, ecstatic, liberatory journey that opens our alignments with cameras up to indeterminacy.

A group of people connect at a distance from different countries and improvise together watching their images melt in real time, in a mesmerizing, ecstatic, liberatory journey that opens our alignments with cameras up to indeterminacy.

4 countries and 7 cities experiment throughout a week with jam sessions of online improvisation: Toulouse, Torino, Istanbul, Athens, Mytilene, Thessaloniki, Santorini.

Two to five locations join at a time, one of them the local group of performers and participants at a Theatre in Toulouse, with a wall projection and creating a local choral in-person interaction, which further creates a larger chorus with the distant performers. The others are project members connecting from their homes, or even open air spaces like beaches, located in Greece, Turkey and Italy.

We use software specifically made and/or adapted for the project by Arnaud Courcelle, based on previous ones by Jean-marc Matos, and on concepts of Disalignments and Microdances from Jaym* del Val. The current stage of this project, is the result of three years of experimentation between Reverso and K.Danse (Jean-Marc Matos) in the frame of Metabody Toulouse and now the Bodynet-Khorós project, since 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023 year we bring in a stronger choral focus and a greater improvisatory freedom, and consolidate the software toolkit.

Throughout the process we work on embodying the relation to the camera, so as not to have to look at it all the time, using peripheral vision, and with a focus on proprioception, which we explore every day outdoors, confronting the liberatory outdoors improvisations with the prison-like experience of moving for the camera, till we find a way to hack the latter and make it into a disaligned liberatory experience too.

Bordering life abstract film and video dance, but also jam sessions of improvisation, focusing on the tension between internal focus on proprioception and the tyranny of the camera, we hack the fixed point of vision that dominates contemporary global hypercolonial culture, and does so since invention in 1436 in Florence.

Throughout a week of residency we explore spatial, temporal relations to each other and the camera, and diverse improvisational parameters. The local groups works on movement excercises, often outdoors, some of which we share with the telematic participants through warm-ups, along with theoretical debates on global crises and the importance of regaining the lost body as reply.

All along we explore disaligned flocking dynamics and rhythmic contagion, unspeakable phantom limbs and chimeras, of oneself becoming other, embodying the between and the opening, in superposition and interconnection across spacetimes-bodies.

It is a new choral improvisational technique, a metaformance technique, not for creating shows but immersive transformative experience, a jam-session technique for a neverending and planetary dance: a Bodynet.

A Dionysian journey beyond the infinite. A dream-like spatiotemporal distorsion of vague connections, openings and indeterminacy. A symbiotic coexistence that, by disaligning fro and with the camera, makes of telematics a deeply embodied experience, like coinhabiting a same room and body, a symbiotic organism ones inhabit others, with planes of reality merging and emerging in permanent amorphogenesis. A hypnotic journey where one loses the sense of time. A choral technique for renewing our embodied sense of symbiosis, for metahuman futures to come.

It is one of the Metabody techniques proposed in the Bodynet-khoros project.

 

BODYNET: Abstract Choral Avatars

Or the Neverending Dance (2) – (Mass liberation machine – Planetary chorus)

Amorphogenesis 9.1 – Metabody Techniques

—> software (more info soon)

Bodynet-Khorós EU Project – Forum 5 & Lab 9 —- Metabody Toulouse 2023

Choral online telematic improvisations across 4 distant locations in 2 countries and 3 cities: Toulouse, Athens, Mytilene.

Video shot by Marion Sciuto, edited by Reverso – Hosted by K. Danse

Concept, visuals, sound and software concept by Jaym* de Val – based on the Amorphogenesis project.

Software by: Gregorio Gracia Karman (audio, 2003), Dieter Vandoren (visuals, 2014), Arnaud Courcelle (telematic version, 2023).

Local Group in France (Toulouse): Lydie Gavard, Perrine Mehat, Mathilde Poligné, Laure Lapeyre (performers), Arnaud Courcelle (software), Jean-Marc-Matos (K.Danse, choreographic approach and hosting of the event) and Jaym*del Val (Reverso, concept, metabody techniques and coordination).

Remote participants in Greece (Athens, Mytilene): Evi Stamou, Maria Asimakopoulou, Evi Sampanikou, Vageli Kavakli (University of the Aegean), and Italy: Michela Bloisi (Torino).

During a week-long lab a group of participants connect online from 4 different locations and improvise together transferring their movement data through phone sensors onto collectively co-created amorphous digital architectures and soundscapes: Abstract Avatars for composing a collective metabody, in an immersive, transformative field-process, a journey beyond the infinite.

Four intra-actors from four cities and countries connect in a telematic choral movement improvisation sending data of their movement through the accelerometers of their phones, which get transmitted to amorphous digital avatars, 3D architectures in constant amorphogenesis, and electroacoustic soundscapes, which are created by the joint interaction of the four players.

Each colour corresponds to an intra-actor from a different telematic location, in this case four cities and countries (France, Greece, Turkey, Italy), though they could be in the same city or even room.

In other scenes all remote players affect different aspects of the same mesh with the same colour.

In each scene the interaction is different, unpredictable. It is about letting control go and let the body find new movements and sensations.

It’s about developing new choral improvisation techniques with focus on proprioception and indeterminacy, creating a sense of symbiosis and connection by how the abstract avatar embodied unpredictable movements from all participants, informing them in turn.

In one of the spaces there is a local group, a chorus within the chorus, in a theatre with very large, immersive projection, while the remote participants see it in the PCs.

Different flocking dynamics, contagion of rhythms and energies, spread across the local group and telematic group. During the week-long residency we explore different dynamics and possibilities and finally let them come up in long improvisations or jam sessions, always in new ways.

Remote and local participants can enter the pay and leave in a neverending process. A neverending dance.

Participants may see the others through a parallel videoconference used for communicating, but mostly they don’t see their recognisable presence, instead they connect proprioceptively: sensing how their muscular sensation connect to the meshes and how the movement of the meshes is felt by the body in return, playing with weird circuits of mirror neurons, or perhaps one should say differential neurons.

Symbiotically weaving a cosmic tissue, a collective breathing body is created through attentive listening of oneself and others.

Focus on proprioception, sonic feedback and peripheral vision help in not having to alway look at the screen.

You cannot known exactly what you affect. Indeterminacy in movement is promoted as metagaming aesthetics of non-control.

Sometimes each interactor relates to a different avatar, sometimes all affect the same avatar but each on transforms different aspects of it (shape and deformation, rotation or twisting, size and virtual camera, colour, texture and noise, rhythm).

Sometimes only one or two connect at a distance and the other sensors are in the local group. The local ones no wearing sensor let themselves be affected by the digital creatures and the others in an open and disaligned flocking dynamics, becoming part of the symbiotic ecology and architecture that is being created.

The local group has its own flocking dynamics, as participants pass the sensor from one to the other.

There is a feedback with the avatar that transmit its own movement qualities back to the participants, including those not wearing sensors.

There are multiple levels and modes of attention across which participants continually shift, inward to the body and outwards to others, focusing more on sound, or on visuals, or on all layers together.

The avatar acts as common body or metabody both for local participants and distant ones, who become this entangled mesh, this collective body in eternal variation.

There are many different visual-sonic scenes and digital worlds, of digital creatures-architectures and behaviours. Interaction changes from one to the other so that you can never be in control.

The whole ecosystem is shifting with each conversation of movements across intra-actors: the posture of one may be affecting the deformation of the avatar, while the other adds changes in texture, or each new movement of each participants will add a new twist to the overall twisting of the abstract avatar whose non-shape unfolds in perpetual variation, never attaining a form: amorphogenesis.

Each group configuration is a configuration of the avatar but due to the many paramenetrs the changes are irrepeatable: an anti-choreographic techique for improvisation.

The avatars are sometimes creatures and sometimes architectures.

The sound is itself a presence and moves around, spatialised.

The whole can be setup as a surround installation with cylindrical projections and spatialised sound and could be implemented in immersive VR/AR systems. Images from Metabody Forum Madrid 2014:

The software is based on pieces programmed in Max-MSP, developed by Jaym+ del Val with diverse collaborators since 2003, and converted by Arnaud Courcelle in 2023, into an easy-to-install standalone, as well as creating an easy-to-access app for remote sending of sensor-data using phones, which get attached to the body in unusual ways with custom made or recycled hardware pieces.

The current stage of this project, which transposes onto a telematic experience the Amorphogenesis project develped by Reverso (Jaym* del Val) since 2003, is the result of three years of experimentation between Reverso and K.Danse (Jean-Marc Matos) in the frame of Metabody Toulouse and now the Bodynet-Khorós project, since 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is one of the Metabody techniques proposed in the Bodynet-khoros project.