>The experimental< is a research project about the experience of experimentality. The work is made up of a series of speculations, manifesting into performance and text. Each constituent practice  concerns an exploration into the consistency of experimental time(ing). Experimental temporality is a certain gauge with in experience, leading to unexpected outcomes and disruptive relations. It is at once a period of time, a method, a way of being and a descriptive attribute. I am concerned with an experimentality that destabilises,  a form of mentality that induces collision, friction and conflict toward the established. As a focus, I have been working with dance and the archive, using the fertile past to experiment with performative time. I began working on a series of reenactments, that place the body into multiple contextual histories. Displacing the present through intervening into the past, I engage with an embodiment practice that falsifies past physicality, re-articulating specific components of works, manifesting them partially into new futures. This mode of working attempts to unfix a singularised notion of an original work, locked or held in the past. The ‘original’ rather contains a reservoir of possible futures. I work creatively with this supply of dance history, to transit works across time.

 ‘without history, experimentation would remain undetermined, unconditioned […] yet history cannot but be seen as a set of negative conditions which enable experimentation as a product of something new’

So experimental time is dependant upon historical time, or the time just before, the changing feeling of a time lived. The ground slips away from the feet slightly, a time in which to spend ambivalently, and to witness an end that doesn’t end but rather reserves possibilities for other ends to come. Reenactment work is a type of experimental time, it holds on, prolonging resolution, holding the end in suspension. This might also be understood as resonance, what is left hanging in the air, the vibrations of gesture or performativity. 

Nothing Gained

Nothing Gained ventures aimlessly into the death drive, a faculty upon which past, future and present entwine. What seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance, from the past, from the back. This work is a proposition to engage the death drive into the confines of a dance work. This impossible desire, to stay with the death drive, stems from a critique of common hope or a common trope, the wish to do away with Thanatos, as that which must be surpassed or transgressed in order to build a better life for all. Any futurity imagined depends upon a structuring body, a system, or choreography, that already contains within it the propensity for its own wreckage. Order as such may be inseparable from what disturbs it, that the law of order always contains, in both senses of the word, the spectre of its own undoing which is conjured to help it survive.

The zero like a stutter, or a broken record, makes what it keeps repeating worthless and meaningless, offering nothing to please anyone. Anxiety and enjoyment together makes ‘enjiety’ a combination of utter bliss and the anxiety which comes with such a blissful impossibility. Following such a design, the phrase has been built to remain unclear in its direction or object of choice. An algebraic situation envelops, with no credible formulae to figure it possible. Its not that it is without an object per-se, but rather driven by a resistance to realise an outcome, a finality or possibility of repair. What forms of optimistic attachment does dance propose to its onlooker? Here it is given no future, this work has no future, no means to go on, only deja-vu. ‘Have I been here before? where did it start? why or how did he end up here or there? ‘Nothing Gained’ is a dance for forgetting and remembering of not knowing what will come next and being taken in by the enjiety such sequencing upends.