Gravel Maraboutage

Conducted as a series of small ongoing outdoor performance experiments during the COVID-19 lockdown period, this film/dance-essay is a composition with dialectical exchanges evolving between Zhi Xu (locked down in London) and Johannes Birringer (locked down in the Saarland). The film’s title evokes an eco-philosophical imaginary that seeks to combine body weather techniques (derived from Japanese butoh dance), enacted in various organic nature and industrial locations, with digital processing and editing. The site-specific performances are creative responses as well as social choreographies in an era of climate crisis and virological pandemics.

This crisis comes with challenges but also offers opportunities. Experiential and time-based, performance is an art form for the 21st century, capable of capturing the pulse of anxiety but re-connecting human and not-human lives or organisms: Reflecting on what is important in our environments, nurturing mind-body connection and somatic experience in a commons. As we may be restricted in our mobility and experience of intimacy, we can afford attention to access the wisdom from our inherited knowledge systems just as much we access the skills, techniques, knowledge and technology-supported information from contemporary practices across the globe. Contributing to the examination of practices of living and working under corona conditions, and seeking to explore what public performance can look like, this film points to perceptions of embodiment and de-distancing as important vehicles for the exploration of performative knowledge (and our somatic toolkit) both from the inside and in our entangled relationship to ecological, political and digital data/logistical environments.

Publication

Johannes Birringer, “Gravel Maraboutage,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 18:1 (2021), 191-94.