Rigged Dialogues

These research traces available here are organized into five sections. The ‘dialogue scores’ refer to the actual improvisations we did. ‘Queer rigging’ names one theoretical framework which emerged in response to these improvisations, both helping us both decode our experiences and guide the evolution of the practice. ‘Somatic warm-ups’ and ‘tarot’ were two practical tools which helped us prepare for and shape the unfolding dialogue scores. Finally, ‘letter writing’ became an important way of digesting what we were experiencing or had experienced during the dialogues.

This organization of traces was performed post-facto by artist and dramaturge Sebastian Kann, who did not himself participate in the rigged dialogues. Digging into a voluminous google drive, as well as interviewing the participants, set in motion a composting process whose results are available here, ready for new seeding.

It’s important to note that the reality of the practices in evidence here is more multiple and contradictory than a single organization scheme could allow. Emerging between many bodies, objects, and things, what we are calling ‘rigged dialogues’ is best characterized as an event which can’t be accurately described from any singular perspective. What is nevertheless given over to a certain amount of interpretative specificity here should be parsed with that caveat in mind.

Camille: Feel your back, your body, where you have been and where you are now. Let’s continue (since we have all ready started).

Tank: I feel lonely …

Fran: Don’t feel lonely! We are connected. I know I’m looking at Saar, but everything I do is linked to you.

Saar: I feel the loss, the letting go, the fading memories [indecipherable] away. Holding on, letting go, being entangled. Surrounded and supported by ropes. 

Chair: [Sitting] I am Camille’s seat who is not physically in this space. 

Camille: I also sit, watching, writing, participating. 

Saar: Sitting, on a rope chair, on Fran, under Fran, on the floor. 

Fran: Sit or stand. Vertical … Horizontal … Diagonal. 

Camille: The diagonals are shifting.

Rope: Shifting where? I like shifting, and moving, changing shapes. Creating lines and pulling, pulling the focus. To shift, to shift perspective.

Chair: Sitting sideways shifts perspective.

***

What is queer rigging?

A multiple time-space for belonging, not built by normativity but by pleasurable pain, shared memories of absence, passive revolt, fragile destruction, (inter)dependency, soft heaviness …

‘Queer studies’ is an interdisciplinary academic field which thinks about unusual, minoritarian, deviant, or non-normative (that is, not-‘normal’) sexual and gender practices. One theme that runs throughout queer studies is power. It is uncontroversial to state the power relies on a certain measure of agreement and uniformity, grounded by hierarchy and convention—think, for example, of the army. From the perspective of a queer kid in an unfriendly school, for example, or a queer citizen of an oppressive regime, it is clear that sex and gender are part of the larger complex of norms that ensure the reproduction of power structures, because the repression that they face for stepping outside of those bounds is powerful.

One queer strategy for pushing back against repression has been to claim that the hierarchies and norms that structure gender and sex are not ‘natural’ but are in fact instituted by a kind of decree, backed up not by nature but by power. And one legacy of this strategy is the notion of ‘queering’. Queering something can mean thinking through the ways that thing is streamlined by norms which are complicit in upholding greater power structures; for example, the way the freedom of the individual body in circus reiterates the individual freedoms of liberalism. It also means pushing back on those norms and speculating about alternatives.

In this project, ‘queer rigging’ emerged as one important theoretical framework, one which both emerged from practice and contributed to structuring it.

What do we rig for? Who do we rig for? What outcomes do we eliminate at the outset, in the preparation for circus, in the process of rigging? How can we make space for the weird, the abject, the boring, the uncomfortable, the unexpected?

These were questions which we kept asking and deepening over the course of the project.

Here are some of the aspects of rigging we considered under the rubric of ‘queer rigging’:

1. Active / passive : rigging for rest
2. Spectator / performer : what if the spectator is allowed to be active?
3. Time : instead of rigging for the future, what if we rigged for the past? How can we ascribe values to the choreographies of memory?
4. Time scale : can we think of rigging in the context of cosmic time, rather than banal quotidian time?
5. Presence / absence : can we rig for the absent or excluded?
6. Heavy / light : can rigging make bodies heavier, rather than always more ethereal?
7. Human / object : how to emphasise the activity of so-called ‘inert’ matter—the rigging itself?
8. Spectacularity
9. Productivity
10. Strong / weak : can we use small, thin, fragile ropes? How does that change what we can do with them?
11. Verticality / horizontality
12. Attachment : can rigging figure attachment as something other than a burden?
13. Pleasure / pain
14. Risk : to what do we remain deaf when we hear ‘rigging’ expertise only as expertise in ‘risk management?’
15. Real / fictional : can rigging take place in mediums other than that of ‘real life?’