A work-sharing with artists Jaleh Negari and Alice Martucci.
Immediately as I entered the room at The Development Platform for Performing Arts where Jaleh Negari and Alice Martucci had been in residency for the past two weeks, I had a strong sense of calmness and soft openness.
I took in the different objects which greeted me – a table with polaroids that seemed to be snapshots of moments of the past two weeks, a long roll of paper on the floor, covered with books and objects as well as drawings as a sort of ongoing palimpsest happening as the days had unfolded and a table with a mixing table and an Iranian drum.
Jaleh Negari and Alice Martucci welcomed us all and we placed ourselves around the room, wherever we each felt comfortable.
Negari and Martucci, who had worked together before, began the work-sharing by emphasizing how they had welcomed being in process and that they were at a stage where they didn’t see it as if they had created a new work but rather that they wanted to show us their research as well as be in dialogue with us about what they were about to show.
Negari began to read, translating directly from Danish to English the thoughts that had come up during their research. It was as if every word was a small world, something which swayed and swirled around in her mouth, before it was let out and met us. A strong sense of presence was perversive in the thinking and there was a clear economization happening; energy was both protected and preserved.
Negari explained how this was a whole new process of testing out material – old as well as new – in this collaboration. Bits and pieces of the first tryouts in transforming thoughts and ideas. Now they were digesting ideas and wanted to get feedback.
She went on and elaborated how this residency had been a common process in which they were informed by each other, in equal measure by dance and sound. The questions of regeneration came from a space from their personal life but also in the separate individual work.
A focus for the exploration had been in searching within memory and connecting through different time dimensions. A question which had been prominent was how to create space for the past in the present and manifest once again in a different way as well as how to reconciliate the past and the future into a sustainable present.
These questions had been with both Negari and Martucci through dealing with displacement in their own heritage and being separate from their cultural heritage. Instead of falling into despair, a healing force was a focus – a need to create other possibilities in terms of being split between cultures.
Their research, both physical as well as theoretical, had drawn them towards working with regeneration in relation to the aspect of time. This meant to work with time as non-linear and creating cyclical and fragmentary shapes and forms. I thought about Lisa Baraitser, who has written about time in relation to motherhood and how time is altered in several ways when your body is split into two by becoming a parent. The constant flux of shapeshifting, transforming, from who you were to yet again becoming you – altered and also the same. Negari mentioned her own role as mother and how she wanted to build bridges for her daughter as to both contain the here and there.
Martucci continued with reading from a stream of consciousness of thoughts which had come about through the residency, here in excerpt:
(…)
So nice when you do two things at the same time
Reading in the dentist’s waiting room – you are granted extra time
(…)
Stop running from it or after it
(…)
Everything is language
—
But what do I want to say?
…
Regenerate the work we have done and will do
After the introduction Negari placed herself behind a mixing table and Martucci at the other end of the room. Martucci stopped and paused before beginning her movement, it was as if carefulness was embedded in everything both of them did.
In a slow movement Martucci began to move as if she was sensing the room with her hands, as if she was blinded, as if she was stroking the air. At the same time Negari started to play drum sounds, which sounded like they came from inside a large can, the sound was muffled yet reached us all.
As in a spiral, Martucci moved through the space. It was as if she was taking in the space through her body, learning how to move from a space within.
I started tracing the sounds and the movements on paper as an umbilical cord twisting and unfolding in front of my eyes:
making space
rises in speed balancing act
what is leading her? music intensifies
an outer or inner force her arms as magnetic force
heavy deep sounds resonate throughout the space
hitting the edge of the drum rising and fall
as if somethings gotta let go curves
trying to capture grand gestures
pushing back invisible walls
insecurity dance
body being played by the drum gestures of soft caresses
down fall uprising
healing
