Performer's lab- improvisation and performativity based on scores and parameters.

This laboratory framework was developed as a consequence of the coaching project I led within "Meet the next generation" at Explore Dance Festival in 2013 in Bucharest. The framework sought to discover multiple levers of and approaches to per-forming the body, acquiring performative / improvisational abilities, identifying and exploring a method of working with these abilities and drafting a notation and graphic representation system for this method (the system of performative parameters and the generated scores) in the attempt to render it conveyable and usable in other pedagogical and artistic contexts, as well. My reference point and source of inspiration in elaborating this practice have been the systemic model and the organisational principles of experiential anatomy presented in Andrea Olsen's book "Body Stories". This volume stresses bodily awareness in a continuous and integrative dialogue between the interior (the anatomy and its complex interdependent working systems: see the somatic and the autonomic nervous systems, the relationship between voice and emotions, bone structure and the function of the organs they protect, etc.) and the environment.

The Lab focuses on the exploring the itinerary from extracting sensations, impulses, emotions, intentions, thoughts and gestures from the unconscious and the latent over to the process of drawing them onto the performative and representational plain. We would practice as follows, by using the parameters described in detail in the Table of Performative Parameters: either in a choreographic phrase or as applied on choreographic scores, with group compositions as a third variant. The method and the notation system are open to an ongoing process of improvement and contamination with new approaches from the participants. Graphic design for the TPP(Table of Performative Parameters) and the scores: Andreea David and Melania Macesaru, participants in the initial coaching project.

While not claiming to be exhaustive and all-encompassing, the system attempts to subdivide mostly interdependent and complementary parameters out of a desire for increased scholastic clarity of the multiple ways of expressing, understanding and producing presence, gesture and movement. Despite the intrinsic qualities of movement, the fact that we can become aware of, follow and control a logic of these parameters reveals a more technical and practical aspect of performativity in improvisation, which can also be accessed programatically, beyond temporary inspiration. By drawing an analogy with the human body and its anatomical organisation, knowing and incorporating its complex and organic workings brings us closer to a deeper and more sophisticated experience of inhabiting one's own body. „Per-form: to make the formless visible through form.

Presence from the Latin praesension: to perceive beforehand. Perceive, from the Latin per-cipere: to receive, to be flooded or inondated. Embody: to incarnate, to make flesh. Experience is described by action-word, by what actually happens. Human experience is revealed to the audience through the form and voice of the actor whose flesh is already (beforehand) surrendered to the perceptions of that which is spoken.To be present is to suspend the desire to be elsewhere. For the actor to be incarnate in the presence of another (the audience) is to suspend the desire to be elsewhere than in the presence of that other. To embody is to consciously and willingly surrender one’s whole being to the experience of the moment and to be consciously and willingly seen in one's most intimate experience.” (Making Sense, Getting throught the word’s body by Judith Koltai)