About "Vilje" is about the need to be seen, accepted and included - and about the life enhancing will behind it.
In every human lies a need to be respected as an individual and to feel included in a social group. In order to be included one needs to be accepted into the group and feel appreciated as part of the group. "I felt included", we say when we have experienced to be invited into a group with a common understanding of content and purpose. However, to be included into an existing social environment with its established norms, values and behavior patterns, the individual must wish to be included. This is done by making itself visible, able to be seen and heard, and considering it to be natural to belong to the group.
"Vilje" show how the lack of inclusion or fear of inclusion, can manifest itself in loneliness, anxiety and insecurity as if constantly standing at an emotional cross road in life. These feelings manifests themselves in the body which leads us to how we experience our being in the world. Through dance and vocal sound scape the performance further explores how the will (Vilje) to live and survive, physically and socially, drives us to live our lives within our capacities where anxiety, insecurity and loneliness plays a role. Vilje (Will), a concept I borrow from Schopenhauer, drives us to go on living also where rational thinking take no part. This Vilje is a humans bodily experience. We know ourselves and our reality through our own body. The human Vilje is similar to all animals and all life in our world the way we know it. Humans are born with Vilje making the infant, if given time and opportunity, without help, moving itself up to the mothers breast to feed. In "Alene meets Crux and Vilje" we explore how Vilje moves us within the cognitive space we find ourselves to be in.
In order to exist humans need air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink, time to sleep and space to move. In order to live humans need to be seen, accepted and included. And to be seen, accepted and included, the human must want to be seen, be honest in its expression, and acknowledge itself in relation to the group. A human seeking safety in lonelyhood will resist meeting the group, because the result of the meeting is unknown, and by meeting the group the human puts itself in a potentially difficult emotional state, leading to anxiety and strengthned feeling of loneliness and insecurity. Choosing to meet the group can be experienced as standing at a cross road where the sensation of insecurity is hightned by not knowing the outcome of the situation.
There is an individual in "Vilje" that seeks to be seen, accepted by daring to show itself honestly through the arts. If the individual can be seen it can also dare, wish and experience to be included. More universally "Vilje" relates to an interpretation of the concept of "including" as a dialectic relation between those who include and those who are included.
Artistic Goal "Vilje" is a triptych in scenic format exploring the relationship between what exists a priori as a potential of movement and voice in the body, the bodys' meeting with the immediate bodily experience, and what can be said to be known a posteriori in the body. The concert performance is a symbiotic mixture of body movements and vocal expression, with technology as scenographical tools and improvisation as fundamental means of expression.
With the concert performance "Vilje" I have two main artistic goals. One goal is to create music from movement. I work inter disciplinary with dance and music, and my artistic interest concerns the interplay between movement and vocal sound in relationship to the psychological and physiological processes in the body.
The other goal and artistic focus is build on the philosopher Schopenhauer and his theory on human experience and knowledge relating to what can be considered a posteriori knowledge (Alene), immediate knowledge (Crux) and a priori knowledge (Vilje). I wish to explore how I can develop my artistic material into something symbolizing and expressed as being either a posteriori, immediate and/or a priori in the body, and how these can relate to each other in the dance concert performance. How can these three different epistemological concepts affect my working method and artistic expression?
Method I started Vilje produksjoner in 2014 with the aim to produce dance concert performances using the MAB method. The same year I staged the performance Concert for one body - alone (Alene), shown at Rådstua Teaterhus, 18.10.2014, in Tromsø, Norway. In 2015 I produced Crux and staged the two performances as one during RadVent in Tromsø, also at Rådstua Teaterhus, 29.11.2015. Alene is about lonelyhood and Crux is about standing at a crossroad in life. Although these are two individual performances, they are linked in what is my working method and my point of departure concerning what happens in the body and how this is expressed via movement to vocal sound.
For "Vilje" i wish to create tools for expressing movement with sound working with the material at hand from the two performances "Alene" and "Crux" on a meta level. For this I will use Schopenhauers philosophical theory on (1) Will, (2) the immediate object, and (3) a posteriori experience in the body. (The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer - først utgitt på tysk i 1818.) How can the artistic material from the performances relate to each other in light of these three epistemological concepts? How can these three various working methods be seen as related to human experience and knowledge - as something a priori, immediate and a posteriori? How does this affect the movement and sound material? How can I create a scenic performance with these three diverging approaches with MAB?
With MAB I aim to make music from movements. I musicalize vocal sound and gestalt feelings into dance. I work inter diciplinary with dance and music, and what fascinates me is the intervention between the bodys' movement and vocal sound. I experience them as symbiotic in my own body. Working on the performance Alene, MAB was my tool towards finding movements and sound material. I explored the immediate relationship between movement and vocal sound; i.e. movement can lead sound, start sound, stop sound, contain sound etc. I then reworked the material, abstracted parts of it and put it together in an abstract form. For Crux, however, I borrowed John Cages' concept of indeterminacy and used only inner motivation and exterior factors on stage as predecided on. The movement and sound was improvised during the performance. The content of this performance, Crux, was expressed through immediacy. These two different approaches influenced excessively how both movements and sound was presented in the art work, and represent two opposite ways of developing and expressing artistic material, form and content, in my work. Where improvisation on stage creates the immediate, MAB is a tool enabling me to create new materiale from which I can abstract specific qualities, make choices amongst these, select, compress and choreograph during the creative process.
Scenario - choreographic idée "Vilje" is a dance concert performance in three "parts" each thematizing their respective concepts with MAB. Below I describe how the three parts relate to one another and explain closer how I wish to explore this.
A posteriori; experience - change; from one point to another in time and space Change, writes Schopenhauer, points to the law of causality and what follows with necessity at a specific time in a specific place. He describes changes as punctual in time and space. The law of causality follows human experience. I find it natural to tie this concept to the work "Alene". During the exploring of MAB for Alene I worked systematically creating and collecting movements and sounds, both from my focusing on emotional aspects of lonelyhood. This systematic work gave me a "bank" of movements and vocal sounds from which I could select for the piece. I based the performance methodically on a selection of movements and sounds, and put these together both structurally and as a starting point for improvisation. Now I will look at this material in a meta perspective for "Alene meets Crux and Vilje". I consider it as a posteriori in my body following the fact that this is known material existing because of experience I have gone through creating it. From experience follows change. From a humans movements between two points in time and space it has made experiences and therefor change and only then visible to us. I relate my working method for Alene to Schopenhauers theory on how human experience and change relates to the law of causality and punctuality in time and space, and I aim to use this as a methodical tool.
Immediacy - here and now The body can be understood as what Schopenhauer calls "the immediate object". As an immediate object we have immediate perception and experience of the world in our own body. This is, however, not known to us in our consciousness. The concert performance Crux was about human experience of standing at a cross road in life. Movement and voice was improvised during the performance and I expressed the intuitive and immediate. This was represented physically on stage as the body of the performer moved four different directions in the room symbolizing four various choices of life changes. None easy to make and all hard working matter. Methodically I developed MAB for Crux in an opposition to how I worked on Alene. For Crux I was inspired by Cages' concept of indeterminacy. I made choices in advance concerning staging and focus of attention, as well as choosing style of vocal technique and the sound on external technical devices. I relate my working method for Crux to Schopenhauers theory on "the immediate object" and I aim to use this as a methodical tool to explore the bodys' perception and reaction to matter outside the body.
A priori - Will moves the body Schopenhauer postulates on how the Will exists a priori in the body as we cannot know anything for certain about anything without experiencing the world through our body; to a certain extent we can say that the Will is the bodys' knowledge a priori, and the body is the wills' knowledge a posteriori. What exists a priori in the body can be said to be what is the point of departure for movements of the body. In my choreographic work I wish to investigate how Vilje (the Will, represented by two performing bodies) is what drives experience, movements and changes in Alene and Crux throughout the performance. The Will exists as a moving force in the body. However, how this can be understood, perceived and expressed is what I am curious to investigate.
«...Finally, the knowledge that I get from my Will is immediate, and for this reason it cannot be differed from the one that I have from my body. I do not know my will in its entity, (...) only from its specific afts in time; (...)» (Schopenhauer, 2007) (my translation from Norwegian)
Shopenhauer concider the will and the body to be unceparable. He also believed that humans are unable to know their own will in its entirety, only as it is perceived in the human body within time restricted events, actions and experiences. With this as a focus point I will seek too understand how Vilje relates to and affects Alene and Crux on stage and during the performance from start to end. During the artistic process with "Alene meets Crux and Vilje" I will explore each of the three different approaches as presented above, and from there on to explore how these meet and are formed in relation to each other in the scenic room.
Instruments Dance/body movements in symbiotic relationship with vocal sound production are the key elements in my work and the dance concert performance "Alene meets Crux and Vilje". Technical equipment like loop boxes and effect pedals, microphones etc. are important aspects of the piece both for sound production as well as scenographic element.