Interview 1/2021

"A gentle experiment between the everyday and the event"

Alix Eynaudi im Gespräch über Performance und Experimentierräume im Museum
It is late 2020 and Vienna is in its second Corona-lockdown. The museum is closed, there are hardly any people in the halls and rooms. How come you are here?
I use the museum spaces to work on the performance project Noa & Snow. Collaboration with the museum started in 2017. We got in contact via a project with the Textile Collection. We worked with leather and created a dress to use as vitrine, as an exhibition space for different types of textile manipulations. The main pattern of the dress was inspired by a dress by Emilie Flöge in the museum's collections. Together with curator Kathrin Pallestrang we organised a public event in collaboration with Tanzquartier, which functioned as a pre-performance for the piece Edelweiss that premiered at the Volkskundemuseum Wien. This was the premise of working together. In 2019 I was granted a PEEK funding (Programm zur Entwicklung und Erschließung der Künste des Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, ein Spezialprogramm zur Förderung künstlerischer Forschung) for my project Noa & Snow which led to a close collaboration between Herbert Justnik and me, as the project has its residency at the museum. I like the word residency because it speaks of the intimacy of the house, an extension of the domestic space. And Noa & Snow wants to test the borders between what is an event and what is the everyday, the ordinary.
 
What exactly happens at Noa & Snow?
The project is a free series of events, of performances. Its center piece is the writing studio. We propose a choreographic event: we are testing the elasticity of what one thinks of when pronouncing choreography, and we create a place where people are invited to write. We included the public in the work itself by crafting notebooks for the audience, designing them with collages. We prepared these objects which are all different, and the audience is invited to take one of them, sit down and write. They can take the notebooks home. So whatever they write or draw, whatever happens in the room is brought back home and continued to be used.
 
There is a rupture between the event and the ordinary, between art and everyday life. And the border is crossed by the tools the audience uses. They receive notebooks as a piece of poetry or a poetic object where they can write down their shopping lists, poems or whatever they may think of. The juncture is that by taking one of the notebooks they are already becoming part of that ambivalence you focus on in your project.
Exactly. This lies in the act of choosing the notebook they want. So there is already a preference, a thought process that is put in place. It creates a specific engagement towards what is going to happen. There is an aesthetic choice to be made. In the tools we are using or in the way we are crafting whatever we are doing, be it the dance, the costumes or the music, emphasis is given to the fact that the aesthetic is a political thing. All these choices are sophisticated in the sense that they have been thought about and juxtaposed, adjacent. This is also the moment where I can join the general idea of what this museum is: the fact, that there is a mixture of social awareness and aesthetic choice happening all the time.
 
What is the relation between the museum and your performance? How does the museum enter into your work?
The sculpting of an atmosphere is very much what is at stake. I like the idea of atmospheres in which things can happen. There is a physical dimension to working in a place for a long time; the atmosphere sips in and you really get tuned to it. For example, this can be in our personal conversations, in speaking to Herbert. It works like a prolongation of the relationship I entertain with the building. And it is also in the dancing or the more pedagogical part of the work, the teaching. I try to be aware of the material of the infrastructure in which I'm working: There is this room, there is the parquet on which we are stepping, then there is air between the parquet and the floor which then leads to a ground that transforms into the ceiling when seen from the other side, and then there is air and another room and you start again - physically going through the building. Who were the persons who worked here before? It is like an invented history class, of course nourished by some real information, but also speculated. A museum is something that belongs to everyone: in the sense that we all have an imagination of what it is. As you are practicing here, you have all these thoughts constantly going through you.
 
How do the body and the museum engage with each other?
We have exercises where we really try to imprint the building into our body, moving literally through it, fusing with it. It is actually not as esoteric as it sounds, it's very concrete. For example, one lies on the floor and another one puts the hand on this person, and we are talking and going through all the layers of our body and the building. We think and talk about the people who brought the material, constructed the palace, the people who are using it, cleaning it, taking care of its wombs, arteries and nerves, every day. I am a dancer by education, I approach things through sensation. Sensation, touch is political. In times like these the touch has become something absent, lacking, or imagined. It complicates working, in an interesting way. As dancers, you are always practicing with touch. To have this forbidden means that there is more work to do in order to think about it, because you only can think about it and not do it.
 
You work with people of different interdisciplinary backgrounds and you work with non-human actors and things. How is that interwoven?
One of the fields of research that opened up for us along the project is crediting. How do you credit the things you do, where do you stop crediting? We are all crossed by so many people - or parts of them: parts of their brains, their laughs, their energy, their word-writings, their geographies, their meteorologies and places. Long forgotten places whose memories still make us float, meteorologies again, smells of disinfectants, smells of astrological charts, lingering voices, the feeling of sliding into one of the many movements present around us.
 
The institutional setting of Noa & Snow is quite specific, with various institutions involved. How is that reflected in your work?
The institutional construction of the project is very interesting as it informs different audiences into what we are doing. There is money coming from PEEK, but there is also the fact that we work here at the Volkskundemuseum. Information about the project is running through the museum apparatus, but not only: brut Wien is also involved, which means that again there is a completely different perspective on the project grounded in the traditions and cultural references of theater and dance, as well as from Wien Modern in the case of this November edition. I find it very interesting to blur the lines and the filters with which things can be seen, to create one's own context and frame within which a work can be attended. Because of the different agendas of the people involved in the project and where the different audiences are coming from, there are very different entry points to what is possible. I like this in-between, and that it is not quite clear what you are attending when joining the performance. It is vague and precise at the same time.
 
You are also reflecting the conditions of working. You and your colleagues widen the approach and create working situations: space to work, to research. Volkskundemuseums "Zwischenjahr" 2020 concentrates on "ordinary" processes yet for which time often lacks in the museum's everyday. We reduced some things in order to concentrate on others. How is having time and space to work connected for you?
How you take care of an event, a performance or work is not only about arriving in an empty space to make things. It is also about imagination or atmosphere. Noa & Snow highlights contexts - also relating to how subventions are granted. Prior to receiving the PEEK grant, I was in a tight structure of applying for project subventions. A time schedule is imposed on your work, influencing what the work will look like in the end. This tight frame is not necessarily in accordance with the project itself; it is a structure imposed from the outside. Having time to spend means that there is no defined end to a production.
 
Noa & Snow is also titled "a gentle experiment". The "Zwischenjahr", too, aimed at opening spaces for experiments to happen and to fail. Having enough time allows for idiosyncratic moments of development: To work in circles, proceed backwards, build up and destroy and analyse the pieces. Normally, you have to set a goal and have less space for exploring paths.
Yes. In a way, you start participating differently in the world and are less part of a capitalist snowball that doesn't stop. It took me some time to get used not being part of this dynamic anymore, I am still working on it ...
 
Originally, the performance in November 2020 was planned as a public space. How did you transform your performance in light of Corona? What does the absence of audience do?
We decided to experiment with video making and are working with filmmaker Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh and sound designer Paul Kotal. In Noa & Snow there is performance, but the performance actually allows for something else to happen. We were curious how to do that via film where the gaze is much more directed. It is really tricky: What I didn't want to do is to develop a performance and then film it; the sadness of the missing audience; this is a kind of melancholia which is not necessary. We are working on how to show the work: It is about performing, performing with many variations of distance between what we are doing and the material we are dancing / interpreting, in fact working on expressing something that is not self-expression.
 
What are your next plans?
A publication is emanating from Noa & Snow - not about Noa & Snow, that's a difference I insist on: publishing in the frame of the project is a partial form of the project, never representing it in its entirety. For the book launch I would like to organise an event, where we project videos and recordings - we recorded a lot of the museum soundscape, the sound of the empty rooms, waiting to be re-played in their "home" - and there would be a library and cocktails too, and of course some dancing!
 

Das Interview führten Herbert Justnik und Julia Schulte-Werning.
 
Alix Eynaudi ist Choreographin und Tänzerin. Sie wurde an der Pariser Opera als Balletttänzerin ausgebildet und arbeitete in verschiedenen Ballettkompanien. Seit 2005 hat sie allein und in Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Künstler*innen zahlreiche Stücke geschaffen, unter anderem Exit, Monique, Edelweiss und Chesterfield. Derzeit arbeitet sie an Noa & Snow, einem künstlerischen Forschungsprojekt, das durch den FWF (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) über PEEK (Programm zur Entwicklung und Erschließung der Künste) finanziert wird. Noa & Snow zielt darauf ab, die Fähigkeiten der Poesie zu erforschen, Imagination über verschiedene Schreibweisen und Genres hinweg zu entfachen, um die möglichen Artikulationen zwischen Performance-Praktiken und Schreibpraktiken zu beleuchten.

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