Sunrise/Sunset Score
“To listen is tender l’oreille—literally, to stretch the ear…it is an intensification and concern, a curiosity or an anxiety” (Nancy 2007: 5).
Quality of Movement: stretching, differences within repetition, concern
To do:
At sunrise and sunset each day, make yourself comfortable standing or lying down.
Close your eyes, listen, and breathe freely.
Stretch your body in ways that you feel compelled and needed for healing.
Experiment with performing and/or imagining cyclical motion—in the breath, in the joints, in the whole body, in your pathways through space, in the earth and sky.
Plastic Score
“On this broad but synthetic continent of plastics, the countries march right out of the natural world…. It’s a world boxed only by the cardinal points of the chemical compass […] The Alkyd country, a great swamp of bright, impervious plastic paints, varnishes, and lacquers, creeps out like an implacable Sargasso. Great chemical river systems, like the Acetylen, feed many countries. And boundaries are as unsteady as the map of Europe.” (Synthetica: A New Continent of Plastics, Fortune Magazine 1940: 93).
Recently, glaciologists have found plastics embedded in 10’ deep arctic ice cores.
Quality of Movement: weed-like, elongated, converging
To do:
Make your way to the front desk in the lobby taking a circuitous route.
Collect partners as you go along, asking people to join you and the group as it grows.
Move only as one close-knit assemblage.
Try not to arrive at the front desk with less than 20 persons.
Waste Score
“Dark ecology challenges the foundation of “sustainable capitalism” as managing and regulating waste flows through transforming (devalued) labor and bodies into (valued) products and configuring Nature as the “stockpile of stockpiles” from which we (Drink Pepsi and) Get Stuff” (Morton 2013: 111 – 113).
The U.S. produces 254 million tons of trash each year. How much trash does one theatre conference produce?
Quality of movement: fluid, controlled
To do:
Locate one or more trash bins and select 3 – 5 different items from the bin/s.
Create a trash assemblage with the items and create a movement phrase inspired by the trash.
Perform your movement phrase with your assemblage for an audience of your selection in a part of the hotel of your selection.
Junk Score
Rem Koolhaas theorizes that Junkspace is a “space of collision” dedicated to “instant gratification” and describes it as “a transient coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed, a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation” that offers its consumers an experience “significantly more exhausting than any previous spatial sensation” (2002: 178 – 179).
Approximately 475 miles of main sewer pipe circulate in Arlington, Virginia. Waste water treatment includes screening, scraping, disinfecting, incinerating, landfilling, and discharging into waterways. Many working class employees of the house cleaning and kitchen staff at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel care for us.
Quality of movement: collision, accumulation, exhausted, transient coupling
To do:
In one or more rooms that you enter today, choose one object to be with (to keep close with you) while you inhabit the room.
Upon leaving the room, embrace the object holding it intimately. Then, leave it behind.
Agriculture Score
Livestock confinement is not just a “peculiar spatial institution scientifically planned for the purposes of control” but also an institution of biotechnologically enabled capitalization that enables market sovereignty “to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (Membe on necropolitics 2003: 25 – 27). A general process of unitization—which hinges on efficiency, quantification, technologized “care” practices, and automation—comes to characterize the aesthetic regime of modern agriculture and authorizes strategies of invisibilization.
A single 10,000-head hog finishing operation averaging a 2% mortality rate produces approximately 14 tons of animal carcasses per year. Chickens are the largest agricultural product in Virginia. Mortality rates for broilers peak at 3 to 4 days in the growth cycle when cull birds often stand by themselves, chirp and refuse to move as the grower approaches. Cull birds should be immediately removed and humanely destroyed by an approved method (Watkins, 2003), in order to improve flock uniformity (in bird size), making management of feeder and drinker height easier. An aggressive culling program early in each flock that removes substandard birds can improve overall flock uniformity and performance.
Quality of Movement: efficient, unitized, technologized, automated
To do:
Using maps in the conference program and online, plan an exact route through the hotel. Be precise.
Travel this route alone, uniformly without disruption in your performance, without interruption or error.
Repeat until the route is committed to embodied memory, becoming automatized and controlled.
Notice what becomes visible and invisible.
Extinction Score
For Judith Butler, “the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as livable life and grievable death?” (2004: xiv – xv).
The Rubble Coil snail or Helicodiscus lirellus is an endangered species of Virginia. "As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away.” (King James Bible, Psalm 58:8)
Quality of Movement: sustained, mourning
To do:
Find a place outside the conference hotel to lie down in the grass.
Relax your body into the ground, releasing tension with each breath.
As you breathe slowly and deeply with your eyes open to the expanse above you, imagine your body’s disintegration and decomposition into the earth.
Feel your organs rupture, your blood pool, the disappearance of your skin.
Feel your bones sink into the dirt.
Listen and breathe.
Media Score
On disciplinary and biopolitical regimes of power, Michel Foucault theorizes sécurité as a regime of power less concerned with spatial partitioning and more with pathways of circulation in between spaces. Power operates through the technology of security that controls, inhibits, and allows circulation specifically for the shaping of a population (as a human species) within the space of the city (1994: 201 – 22 and 1997: 218).
Quality of Movement: surveillance
To do:
Choose three moments in the day to place yourself on the perimeters of a group.
Overhear and oversee.
Make yourself invisible.
Record your observations on the card.
Light and Air (Atmospheric) Score
“Atmospheres are a kind of indeterminate affective ‘excess’ through which intensive space–times can be created” (Anderson 2009: 80).
Quality of Movement: intensities of dwelling, the promise or concealment of pathways, charged, strange, restful, open
To do:
Follow what draws your attunement.
Select two or three places that compel you.
Dwell there.
Feel the intensities of scale, textures, proximities, rhythms, porosities.
Find a way to perform them, to take them up.
Ice Score
Concerning explicit and implicit death worlds, Achille Mbembe argues that “new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy,” represented by the massacre with a “patchwork of interests” and actors that render destruction, injury, and suffering opaque (2003: 31 – 34).
“Iceberg water is a very unique product, in a superior category all by itself. It is an all natural, truly pure water […]. This water’s journey started over 15,000 years ago in the ancient glaciers of western Greenland. It has been safely stored in the ice cap, protected by the ocean and the hazardous conditions of the arctic weather. Isolation has made its source totally inaccessible to man. It is not until massive pieces of ice break off into the ocean in the form of icebergs that they can be harvested. Icebergs are melted and bottled under strict quality conditions in order to preserve the water’s natural qualities. Production can be limited due to extended winters and the harsh conditions of the North Atlantic. Harvesting icebergs is a dangerous task. They are very unstable, shift frequently and can roll over in seconds, which make the possibility of drinking iceberg water an accomplishment in itself….” (Amazon.com where one 12-pack of Berg water sells for about $180.00). The Okjokull Glacier in Iceland was memorialized in August of 2019.
Quality of Movement: noticing invisible interests and injury, isolation
To do:
Take note of invisible interests and injuries throughout the day.
Isolate yourself for 5 minutes.
Consolidate that isolation in one part of your body.
Hold the isolation there for one hour of your selection; performing it and/or keeping it hidden.
Deep Timespace Score
“There is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour, visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of the ice, the tactile qualities of both)” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 421). “These haecceities are not what we perceive, since in the world of fluid space there are no objects of perception. They are rather what we perceive with. In short, to perceive the environment is not to look back on the things to be found in it, or to discern their congealed shapes and layouts, but to join with them in the material flows and movements contributing to their – and our – ongoing formation” (Ingold 2011: 88).
The geology of the Piedmont bedrock in Virginia is complex.
Quality of Movement: Undulating and tactile
To do:
Go outside and follow the path of the wind as it blows against the leaves in the trees or those on the ground, against any tall grass or plants.
When you feel it blow, notice on which side of your face you feel it.
Notice how it swirls and changes direction. Notice where garbage lies and is blown.
Stop when the wind seems to blow in all directions and try to notice the overriding direction.
Walk that way.
Turn and face the wind.
Change direction. Notice how it feels.
Notice when there is a void. Walk towards the void, the place where the wind dies down.
Allow things to touch you: dirt, wind, wallpaper, concrete, carpet, water, plastic, steel…
Deep Timespace 2.0: Ancestral Summons Score
Quality of Movement: undulating, tactile, sensing, revelatory
To do:
Touch things (e.g. dirt, wind, wallpaper, carpet) with various parts of your body, not just but including the hands
Find a space to stand, sit or lie down and close your eyes. Send your consciousness to a particular part or your body and let it wander throughout the limbs and through your core, allowing movement and sound gestures to emerge in response. Imagine those who came before you - mineral, animal, human, for example, those you know about and those you don’t know about, dead and alive, and sense their presences.
Gently allow your eyes to flutter open and see/imagine who came before and what it took to get here.
Expand your attention and vision a bit further and explore the space, moving through it using three options 1) slow walk 2) run 3) circling at any speed. If you are executing the summons with others, at this point you have the option of moving together.
Bring the movement to a still in a sitting or lying down situation and practice listening, trying first to hear all sounds at the same intensity and then trying to train your hearing to amplify some sounds and annex others to the background. Feel free to vocalize any sounds or sound attempts that form and want to emerge, in an experimentational manner.
Use sounds to propel your body gently into motion towards standing, but without creating any linear pathways. Be experimental but forgiving. What if every line or linear trajectory dissolves into a circle or cyclical form? Listen to the spirits that your performance has activated or engaged and feel their resonances.
Free write for five minutes.
Dust Score
“Without it [gentleness], no space laced with shadows and light, no drawing near, no letting go, no play, no inventions, no mirages […] ‘if a gesture would be a caress seizing upon nothing…toward a future never future enough…a movement unto the invisible’” (Dufourmantelle 2018: 57).
Quality of Movement: caress, floating
To do:
Let all of your touch have the quality of a caress.
Bacteria Score
“I want to suggest that as a nexus of life and growth within a meshwork of relations, the organism is not limited by the skin. It, too, leaks” (Ingold 2011: 86).
34 million pounds of non-therapeutic antibiotics are used in U.S. agriculture each year.
Quality of Movement: creeping, spreading, viral
To do:
Imagine the germs, bacteria, and potential viruses that live on/in/with your body.
Let them move you.
Select a hotel room number that occurs on each level (e.g. 218, 318, 718, etc.).
Let some of your movement leak into the hallway close to each of these rooms.
Elevator Score
“Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249).
Quality of Movement: symbiotic, liminal, admixture and distillation, coagulation and dispersal, evaporation and precipitation, continuous generation and transformation
To do:
Visibly transform yourself as you pass through any and all thresholds and doorways. The physicalized transformation might be the same or different each time.
Anthropo-Score
“Those who believed they were at the centre desperately mess up what they, and many other earthly critters, depend upon. Now those of us who were told stories since birth that there is something really special in being ‘human’ are at a bifurcation point: either we furiously keep to that narrative, or we accept that if there is a post-Anthropocene worth living in, those who will live in it will need different stories, with no entity at the centre of the stage” (Stengers 2013: 178).
Quality of Movement: unknown
To do:
Shed your skin.
Whisper who you become to whom you might become.
Attune to/with the nonhuman in all theatres.
Appearance/Disappearance Score
“An ethics of encounter is not a universal ethics, a totality or a frozen set of moral principles that steers our behavior, but a passion for reality, a fidelity to the encounter as a situation, as a site, as an event. The ethical demand raised is precisely to stick to the encounter, to care about the meeting. To endure” (Arlandis, “sharing, displacing, caring”: 282).
Quality of Movement: walking
To do:
On Saturday November 9th, Philip and Malin are walking a continuous path through the conference venue and the city. Beginning at sunrise, we will walk through the hotel and conference grounds until approximately 1:30pm, when our path will take us along the Potomac and the National Mall to the United States Botanic Garden for a 3:45 tour developed by fellow members of the Ecology in/and/of Performance Working Group. This simple score encourages our bodies to deeply inhabit one sustained and sustaining movement in a durational effort to resist economic models of exchange and the commodity form as the structuring principle of contemporary capital-driven social relations.
All are welcome to join and leave the walk at any time, to come and go as they desire.
Spider and Mouse (Vermin) Score
“On the Eating of Mice” by Russell Edson
A woman was roasting a mouse for her husband's dinner then
to serve it with a blueberry in its mouth.
At the table she uses a dentist's pick and a surgeon's scalpel,
bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler's loupe
Twenty years of this: curried mouse
garlic and butter mouse
mouse sautéed in its own fur
Salisbury mouse
mouse-in-the-trap, baked in the very trap that killed it
mouse tartar
mouse poached in menstrual blood at the full of the moon
Twenty years of this,
eating their way through the mice
And yet, not to forget,
each night one less vermin in the world.
Quality of Movement: consuming, digesting
To do:
While eating, reading, and/or walking, vary your speed.
Try hyper-speed, brisk, plodding, stillness, and others.
Form a web or nest of speeds.
Notice how they live indoors and outdoors.
Rainforest Score
“‘That is how you stand: facing me, softly [dans la douceur], in constant provocation, innocent, unfathomable,’ says the narrator of ‘The Atlantic Man,’ by Duras. The words are not linked together at random; softness [douceur] is face to face with provocation, and it has the enigma and impenetrability of what we call innocence” (Dufourmantelle 2018: 42).
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has reached historic levels in 2019 following a period of decline. In Brazil, fires have increased nearly 80% from 2018 and are occurring along transportation routes, which exposes the interests of cattle and soybean farmers (as well as politicians and others) in clearing land for economic growth. 1 in 10 of all known species live in the Amazon and 305 indigenous groups depend on it for food and shelter.
Quality of Movement: simple, humble
To do:
Observe the quality of light that falls on things surrounding you throughout the day and evening.
As lightness and darkness shift, allow your body/voice to hum in response.
Re-perform the hum throughout the conference as it moves you.
Rainforest Score 2.0
Quality of Movement: simple, humble, whimsical
To do:
Breathe and let your attention drift to focus on your breath. What does the air taste like, feel like, smell like? Where does it enter and leave your body and how? Give the air a colour, if you wish, to help make its presence and actions more palpable.
Play with allowing your breathing to become audible and experimenting with adding sound to your breathing by shaping your mouth. Notice how vocalizing the act of breathing changes the relationship between your diaphragm, pelvic floor and throat.
Let the sounds dissolve. Notice if any fears have arisen and surrender these into the earth by letting them fall down into your feet and become part of the texture of the floor. Go on.
Deregulation Score
“I think the modern age of the history of truth begins when knowledge itself and knowledge alone gives access to the truth. That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as subject” (Foucault 2005:17). Power therefore is not just a matter of domination or oppression but is also a matter of producing discourses of truth. The stakes shift from explicit concerns with equality and rights to the economic, political, and institutional regime of the production of truth and the ethical formation of the self.
Changes in U.S. environmental policies since 2017 include (but are not limited to):
the revoking of flood standards that account for sea-level rise
approval of seismic air-gun blasts for oil and gas drilling
rescinding methane-flaring rules and requirements for oil and gas facilities to find and repair leaks of methane
narrowing the definition of what is considered a federally protected river or wetland
re-opening tens of thousands of acres of federal lands to new coal leases
relaxing and economizing endangered and threatened species protections
the rejection of the petition to ban the agricultural use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which negatively impacts dozens of threatened and endangered species
halting compliance deadlines that set limits on toxic water pollution from coal-fired power plants
repealing the Stream Protection Rule, which restricted the dumping of mining waste into streams and waters
Quality of Movement: truthful, knowing, uncertain
To do:
Visualize how you arrived here in this place, based on a timescale of your choosing (since this morning, a week ago, a month, a year, episodic, dream-shape, etc.).
Doodle or draw a map of that journey in whatever form that best captures the nature of the path.
Transform the map into a movement phrase.
Transform your movement phrase into an “intensity of total experience” that attunes to/with what unfolds above and below perception.
Perform this for/with a friend and/or a stranger.
Amazon HQ Score
On colonial occupation, Achille Mbembe asserts: “[s]pace was therefore the raw material of sovereignty and the violence it carried with it. Sovereignty meant occupation, and occupation meant relegating the colonized into a third zone between subjecthood and objecthood” (2003: 26). Membe further writes, “new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy,” represented by the massacre with a “patchwork of interests” and actors that render destruction, injury, and suffering opaque (31 – 34).
The new Amazon HQ in Arlington is slated to be built in the previous location of a plantation owned by George and Martha Washington.
Quality of Movement: physical labor, work
To do:
Research the historical and current labor of a colonized population.
Notice the movement demands placed on/in the bodies who are tasked with performing that labor.
Commit your body to performing the gesture of that movement in repetition for 15 minutes, a half hour, or an hour in the privacy of your room and/or a public space.
Tree-Human Interconnectivities Score
If the Amazon is the lungs of the earth, the (Canadian) boreal is its circulation system. (Canada Huffington post).
“The lovely puzzles, the enchanting beauty, and the excruciating complexity and intractability of actual organisms in real places (Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 2002, 1338).”
Forests from Virginia to the Arctic Circle and down to the Amazon in South America are interconnected. Tree systems and human circulatory and bone systems have parallel structures; organized around a multitude of roots or bones at the extremities (think feet, hands) and a long stable truck connecting these and sending resources between them. Our circulatory system follows a similar fractal pattern, as arteries branch out from the lungs, which pump blood to the entire body.
Quality of movement: exploratory, not upright, shifting relations to gravity
To do:
Let your feet become roots that extend into the earth or whatever material they come into contact with, without becoming stuck or fixed to one spot.
Notice tension in your jaw and occipital point (joint between the skull and top vertebrae of the spine) and let your head become lighter
Let your arms and fingers become branches.
Notice other tree spirit-bodies in the room, without losing track of your root systems.
Switch the roles of the limbs.
Airplane Score
“Aviation is a site where technology, scientific research, defence and security interests, and computation converge in a nexus of transparency/opacity and visibility/invisibility.”
(Bridle 2018: 35)
Boeing is the leading manufacturer of both commercial jetliners and military aircraft, and the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world. Their Regional Headquarters is approximately 1.5 miles from the hotel. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is just across the parkway; many of us arrived here by airplane. The United Nations forecasts that airplane emissions of carbon dioxide will triple by 2050. One study suggests that this amount would equal one-quarter or more of the world’s carbon budget—the amount of emissions permitted to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees.
Quality of Movement: surveillance, precarity, carelessness
To do:
Find a space where you can look down on an action happening below you. (This could be a great height, or as small as the difference between standing and sitting.)
Observe. Whether or not you allow yourself to be seen observing is up to you.
After a time, put yourself ever so slightly off balance. Continue observing, off balance.
To conclude, find a movement or gesture that temporarily takes up more space than strictly necessary. (It can be expressive or pedestrian.) Let this movement restore you to balance, and release you from your observation.
Verticality Score
“Why not a geography of lifts as well as urban highways and subways, and of airspaces, drones and satellites as well as the terrestrial surface? Or a sociology of skyscrapers, sewers, bunkers, elite housing towers, domes of polluted and lethal air, raised walkways and personal helicopter commutes as well as ‘flat’ treatments of ground-level public space and its inhabitants? … Is it possible for us to shift our perspectives sufficiently to see boundaries and relations between layers and levels within volumes of geographic space to be as important as those that horizontally demarcate traditional ‘flat’ notions of territory?” (Graham 2016, 13)
Quality of Movement: expansive, interruptive
To do:
Lie on your back, anywhere that is comfortable. Close your eyes. Breathe.
With your eyes still closed, extend your awareness simultaneously above and below you. Begin slowly, then allow your focus to encompass more and more distance in each direction.
What beings, objects, systems are in motion above and beneath you?
Pick the movement you’d most like to borrow for the day. Try it out for a while.
Carry it with you for the rest of the day. Return to it whenever something in your own horizontal plane brings it to your attention.
Project Bibliography
Anderson, Ben. “Affective atmospheres,” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77-81.
Arlandis, Alberto Altés. “sharing, displacing, caring: towards an ecology of contribution,” Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures, eds. Oren Lieberman and Alberto Altés Arlandis. London: AADR Anagram Books, 2013.
Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso, 2018.
Butler, Judith. Precarious life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and London: Continuum, 2004.
Dufourmantelle, Anne. The Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
European Standard, “Iceberg Water.” https://www.amazon.com/Iceberg-Water-750ML-glass-bottles/dp/B07FZPJNQB/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=iceberg+water&qid=1572104267&sr=8-4
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality,” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 vol. III Power. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
———. Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1976. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997.
———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject Lectures at the Collège de France 1981 – 1982, ed. Frédéric Gros and trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2005.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2002.
Graham, Stephen. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London: Verso, 2016.
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace,” October 100 (Obsolescence 2002): 175-190.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15, 1 trans. Libby Meintjes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Winter 2003.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007/2002.
Ortho Plastic Novelties, Inc. “Plastics in 1940,” Fortune 22 (1940): 88-95.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2007.
Stengers, Isabelle. “Matters of Cosmopolitics: On the Provocations of Gaia. Isabelle Stengers In Conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin.” Architecture in the Anthropocene. Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, ed. Etienne Turpin. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013.