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NORDIC LIGHT & COLOUR
53
Exercising pre-expressivity
The extra-daily capacity of pre-expressivity is developed and
refined in exercises. The exercises situate the performer in a
working relation to him/herself, organised within formal struc-
tures, which enables a focus on the art of the performer as an
independent field of practice. The exercises are formal training
devises, and the exercise “forms are empty […] they are filled
with […] concentration” (Barba 1995:101), enabling a focused
situation for the development of pre-expressive capacities.
Barba (1995:100) suggests the exercise event to produce ‘a
paradigm of dramaturgy’, that is, a situation where a specific
mode of presence is enhanced by way of the exercise. This
extra-daily presence develops through an emergence of “a
second nervous system, [or a] memory, which acts through the
entire body” (1995:100). The exercise is a versatile environment
for investigation and development of a variety of extra-daily
behaviours, as Barba (1995:100) explains: “In each case it is
a question of a well-contrived web of actions. […] Exercises
are pure form, dynamic developments without a plot, a story.
Exercises are small labyrinths that the actors’ body-minds can
trace and retrace in order to incorporate a paradoxical way of
thinking, thereby distancing themselves from their own daily
behaviour and entering the domain of the stage’s extra-daily
behaviour.”
The improvisation exercises are driven by tasks, as scored ac-
tivities, which develop into exercise machines. Figure 03 shows
students engaging in an improvisation guided by such instruc-
tions, and, in a paradoxical way of thinking – as an embodied
mode of thought, experience themselves acting and sensing,
reflecting on their own experiential situation.
These “senses not only mediate information for the judgement
of the intellect; they are also a means of igniting the imagina-
tion and of articulating sensory thoughts. Each form of art
elaborates metaphysical and existential thought through its
characteristic medium and sensory engagement” (Pallasmaa
2005:45). The task utilized in the exercises, driving the devel-
opment of experiential capacities towards light phenomena,
are particular to the architectural context, but fundamentally
awakening very similar spatial sensibilities as those of the
performer. The strategic method can be slightly adjusted to the
particular task, adapting to the medium and qualities under
investigation; for instance the phenomena of light-zones.
The strategic method to some extent evolves a new sense-
capacity, a new ability of critical relation to light phenomena,
which to some extent will remain and develop as a personal
capacity. This is an ‘extra-daily’ capacity that can be mobilised
through these methods, these systems of activities, engage-
ment and staging strategies. There is potentially opened for a
field of experiential practice of thinking through performative
engagement, which could be transferred to other enquiries by
adapting the particular approaches to the phenomena of inter-
est.
Experiential engagement
Spatialization and temporalization
The change from observing from the outside, towards expe-
riential observations from within generating the experience,
is an investigatory style that actively challenges the concep-
tions of space and time. There is opened for an analysis where
everything is in constant change, where the basic phenomenal
status of space and time is altered towards modes of ‘spatial-
ization’ and ‘temporalization’. That means that the sense of
space unfolds as notions of place and direction, nearness and
distance. Likewise the sense of time is formed by the duration
and hesitation in the actions.
In everyday life, space is normally understood as a stable con-
text wherein temporal events occur. Pallasmaa suggest, “Ar-
chitecture is our primary instrument in relating us with space
and time, and giving these dimensions a human measure. It
domesticates limitless space and endless time to be toler-
ated, inhabited and understood by humankind. As consequence
of this interdependence of space and time, the dialectics of
external and internal space, physical and spiritual, material
and mental, unconscious and conscious priorities concerning
the senses as well as their relative roles and interactions, have
an essential impact on the nature of the arts and architecture”
(Pallasmaa 2005:17).
A consequence of the method with performative engagement is
that the notion of space as stable is substituted for an expe-
riential account, where spatialization is a consequence of the
human activities; the walking, the direction of attention, or the
hesitation when considering the possible future actions and
movements to be performed. The sense of space is a construct
generated by the way we think space. In the method of per-
formative engagement the experience of space unfolds and
actualises. As the architectural philosopher Elisabeth Grosz
discusses, ”space in itself […] is not static, fixed […] though per-
haps we must think it in these terms in order to continue our
everyday lives. […] Space, like time, is emergence and eruption,
oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the
event, to movement or action” (Grosz 2001:116).
The perception of spatialization and temporalization is an expe-
rience of continuous unfolding, an emergence in the present, of