"Which is the nicer present, a number or an image?"
The theatre choir as a staging practicum

2 Proposals

Proposal 1.
I will begin by quoting Rene Pollesch:

"We discover that there are no bodies that are similar, that everything is something else all the time.

So, what is love? There we have the obscene word: body, which we always think of as foreign, as something we need to investigate. But there is no such investigation, there is no search for what we are. That serves only to make bodies foreign, or animal or whatever. Bodies are foreign, always, everywhere. The search for truth always converts the other into something foreign. And those who search for truth will always be the same ones without a body because they are not allowed to be obscene when the truth is obscene".

(In "I'm looking you in the eyes, social context of deception!")

From this perspective, we need to ask: so, is a body without organs more foreign than a body with organs, than a body which, for example, has the same organs as another body but in different areas or as a body that may function according to the body formula = n(# organs)?

I will begin by quoting Rene Pollesch.

"We discover that there are no bodies that are similar, that everything is something else all the time.

So, what is love?

What is foreign here, the question about love that carries a blast of foreignness or the repetition of the quote, which brings what it brings from the text itself and that's all?

Questions are foreign bodies, their organs are their words. A question generates an impulse, like walking into a house with all the windows closed. Questions keep words in, they close off sentences. One reads and suddenly comes to a question mark. Imagine I am reading out loud. Imagine I am not particularly skilful at reading out loud. Imagine that the text is a long paragraph that stretches over a certain period of time or a flat level of ground. And one reads and crosses through the text almost as if one's voice has an engine in it. And then, all'improvviso, a question mark appears and the voice that has grown and been driven by the working engine hardly sees the sign. There is so little time between a sentence and a sign and yet there is so much time to fall in love with the landscape and the routine of speed that the voice doesn't even realise. However, the sign is followed by the question and the question is a different tone, foreign, which grows in a different way, which imposes a certain violence, a question, any question, for example, Lenin's question: 'what to do?'

(Why do we hurry to answer? Questions and answers were never lovers. Questions love silence. Questions love themselves)

Proposal 2.
Now something I wrote last year.

In an interview for the magazine Kunst und Ökonomie, the Professor of the Chair for 'Economics, human resources and production' at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Herr F. says the following in relation to the practice of art: 'they are accustomed to an existence of continuous representation. They are always positioning themselves in the world. An expressionist painter who speaks of the Spanish War, or a giant flower dog. They refer thought to a sculpture of a man thinking... And void to a sculpture of an open cube. They constantly make things, many of which probably end up in a pile somewhere, that is why they find economics so fascinating. However, I am fascinated by their compulsiveness, which is... extremely positive and naive (in the positive sense of the word, please). I wonder how an artist would work with the 'minus' sign. Imagine someone starting with everything done and whose work consists of doing 'less' art. Instead of an exhibition of x works, one of -x works. Would that be possible?'

The sentence General "Stormin" Norman Schzwarkopf used to announce the end of "Desert Storm" in the First Golf War: "they should invent the way of turning art into drinking water".

About the Laboratory

The Laboratory is linked to the production of the play titled "Again, Again(st)", a project by Pablo Marte produced by Consonni for the 15th Festival of Theatre and Contemporary Dance of Bilbao (BAD). The laboratory is therefore conceived not only as a node of that 'production of processes' that makes up CsO, but rather as an integral part of the production process of the play, which is to open on 29 October at Bilborock (Bilbao).

The idea of working the figure of the theatre choir as a staging practicum is to come up with a kind of choir that has an active presence in the staging of the text of the play as far as possible. Active presence means: sharing and discussion of the texts of the choir and the interpretations that enhance the various situations by which it is materialised as a joint or disjointed body.

The aim is also to create conflict between all the material generated by the various laboratories that have been organised previously. Therefore, the bodies of the choir will be not only its members, but also the objects, images and texts worked in the Laboratory.