Well, I’ll start with this video of Lacewings communicating with one another. Biotremologists have captured vibrations they’re pumping through the leaf. It is believed approximately 90% of insects communicate via substrate-borne vibrational signals. These aren’t sounds that are produced and heard but haptic vibrations (felt), homologous to our own recognition of our mother’s heartbeat or the various buzzes of our phone’s notifications. This vibrational spread can cover an approximate 30 centimetre radius in a grassy field (if memory serves me right). It is believed this kind of communication precedes human speech. Before we developed vocal abilities to send vibrations through the air we sent them through a solid substrate.

Did the mechanism of our ears adapt from ancient haptic perception? Did dance develop from ancient haptic perception? e.g. the vestigial trait/memory/mechanism of limbs pumping vibrations into the ground? Did we develop the ability to play instruments and use tools out of this plesiomorphy (shared, ancestral trait)? Like, did our relationship to the solid substrates we evolved with become more complex?

I’m interested in the terms analogy and homology.

Before Electric Bodies began we had a humorous introduction, where Jana’s apologetic cardinal directional disorientation and resulting restraint of gesture was its own performative spin on housekeeping. She held arms close but her radiating physicality just found other areas in the body to diffuse from such as her head. Wriggling.

The invitation from Sara (PAWA Director) was to write an experimental take on the first night of Electric Bodies in Ōtautahi. In the process of resisting review/overview and taking inspiration from the theme (body as sound, sound as body) I point obtusely to the performances,

‘Soft Mouths | the language of fffflowers’, ‘Cataclysmic Catalyst’, and ‘Violin Mantis’.

…analogous to Jana’s directions on where to convene in the case of an emergency. I’ve plucked comments from Youtube videos that correlate to the impressions that these performances left on me. This also creates a supplementary playlist of Youtube (YT) videos that are similarly informed by my experience. I've blocked out some words from some comments that might detract from recontextualisation. My intention was that you, the reader, would convene with bodies and sounds by surfing YT. That was before I came up against the platform’s technological limitations and its comment filtering. My intention is that you infer my experience of this triple bill through this subsidiary extension. Another intention is to transmit more electric bodies. In writing this I experimented with ways to bring sound to the silent form of reading.

“How to continue reading:

 

“Read the comments below. The link at the bottom is the source video for these comments. This will take you to the source video with a highlighted, first comment. This comment is a continuation of the text. The navigation follows this structure. The videos are considered part of the navigation and how you engage with them is up to you (i.e. watch, partly-watch, ignore).”

I wondered about the authorial voice of this text. I reflected on how Antonia transformed herself into an instrument, Alan into shapes held through use of dance, costume, and light, and Sarah and Anita into insects by way of projection and movement. Their performing bodies dissolved into their mediums punctuated between moments of something human that would bring them back: a certain word, behaviour, look, movement, transition, mistake.

Alan mentioned how he wanted to include age and failure as additions to the Electric Bodies provocation. Failure is difficult to detect in abstract performance. I’m not sure it was apparent to me. Maybe it didn’t need to be. I do find it interesting that Alan chose to mention that before performing. He mentioned it’s not something he’d typically do; preface his work. Was this a disclaimer? It made the performance (which was compositionally clean)  feel more personal.

I failed a few various attempts in how this navigation would work. My initial intention was to thread all the comments together. You would be directed to the comment source with a reply under each one which would direct you to the next. It was more seamless in my head. This is a failure of sorts. This is my disclaimer. I felt I needed to tell you this so that you may forgive the clunkiness of this approach and find the grace to entertain this experiment.

EDIT: the latest attempt at navigation failed so we’ve settled on screen shots of the comments and embedded videos. I leave it to you to imagine jumping through links to follow the thread of comments and this text.

Finally, some experimental craft in this damn city.

I can’t tell you how excited I was to experience live/performance art on my birthday and to have it happen in Ōtautahi. Thank you Sara, Jana, Cloister’s team, Antonia, Alan, Sarah, Anita, and other members & volunteers of Tiny & PAWA.

Analogies…

[I love spending time in the comment sections, if you couldn’t already tell. I love reading fragmented thoughts. It’s a beautiful kind of brevity. I love reading the earnestness in the need for expression. Like people watching, these could be words from people with bodies. Uptick in bots and dead internet theory on the horizon has hampered my experience recently.

Some of these comments below read a little like ‘Soft Mouths | the language of fffflowers’. Without context, I'm more aware of the composition of sentences and words. In the case of the show, words were reduced to their constituent sounds. Also, the ambient sounds of the mouth (e.g. lips smacking, saliva sloshing against tongue, roof of mouth, and teeth), vocal fry, stammers, and filler noises. Homonyms made me ‘jump’, as though thought was spacial—is it? The sound score, littered with percussion, melody, and ASMR, edged us with near cohesive lines of thought.

This isn't directed at one artist. I could be projecting but these are just some things I felt that night…

Sound precedes body, body precedes sound.

Violin Mantis, I felt, explicitly worked with behaviour. I like thinking of performance as behaviour. It makes me feel human, animal. I watched the behaviour of these insects wiping(?) their heads and Sarah’s mimicry. Pretty hard not to anthropomorphise after that. Are they wiping their face or is this movement a behaviour unique to arthropods?

I wondered about the behaviour of Sarah and Anita. They performed in unison at one point—what a treat in abstract dance 😆—but their bodies held different movement languages, histories, and tone. Was their behaviour the same? There were slight differences in attention, intention, and performance. Transcription was happening across bodies, species, and instruments, as well as sound, object, and image.

Another thought: Among other things, performance might be the expression of the elasticity of human behaviour.

The performance sat mostly between the micro and macro ecology of insects (projected) and humans (the shared interactive space of the performance). The projection then moved to a retro-futuristic cosmic expanse and finally to an abstracted, sacred geometric end. More than enhance or augment the performance, the projection played with far reaching degrees of perceptual scale.