Interview with Anouk Llaurens by Julien Bruneau
Julien Bruneau: I'm going to ask you the same questions you ask all the people you interview. Would you mind starting by situating yourself?
Anouk Llaurens: I feel multiple, imperfect, full of contradictions and above all very sensitive. I like to ask questions, to play, to re-inspire movement where there is none left, breath. I am a dancer. I try to sustain the dialogue between contradictory aspects: rigour and wildness, stability and movement, the individual and the collective. I have the desire not to choose sides, but to keep myself at the heart of paradoxes. Right now, I'm fifty-six and going through menopause. It's the end of a cycle in a woman's life and, as I've heard the French writer Christine Singer say, a moment of transition from the fertility of the body to the fertility of the heart.
As for my family background, my maternal ancestors were miners. My grandfather was a Resistance fighter during the Second World War, hiding weapons in his garden. My paternal grandfather was Catalan and an operetta singer. I never met him. The grandmothers were housewives, bringing up their children. They were knitting the most amazing shawls and clothes. My father was a computer engineer, a keen caver and ran a social centre. He died of an aneurysm while distributing leaflets on his bike one Saturday morning when I was nine. That taught me that life could end at any moment. I grew up in a sad and morbid atmosphere. I was brought up by my mother, a mentally fragile woman who was deeply affected by the Second World War (she was four years old in 1939) and devastated by the death of her husband. I was never close to my older sister, who was very jealous of me. I didn't feel much love or supportive guidance in life when I was a child. I had to rebuild everything. Dancing and certain therapies helped me to do that.
I've been dancing since I was five or six. I've been exposed to a whole range of techniques and aesthetics. From classical dance and jazz dance to contemporary dance, tap dance, African dance, cabaret dance, contact improvisation, water dance, flying trapeze, somatic practices... The dances I did at the beginning weren't very lively. For a long time, I was taught dance from the outside, from a mirror, from the monolithic feedback of an all-powerful teacher whose instructions I didn't always understand.
After my baccalaureate in biology and finishing my studies at the dance conservatory, I went to a musical comedy school in Nice, the Off Jazz Dance Centre, which led me to dance in the Nice Casino nightclub, then in a cabaret in Switzerland for a year. Those were my first experiences as a professional dancer. Even though I earned a very good living in Switzerland, I quickly got tired of being a smiling sex object and moved to Paris. I knew nothing about contemporary dance when I auditioned for the CNDC in Angers and they took me on. That's where I met Fernand Schirren, a Belgian rhythm teacher who had a huge influence on me.
I didn't go to university. I wasn't intellectually active for a long time. As a child I didn't read much, I was physical: I grew up in the south of France, I was outside. I was introduced to Chinese Taoism at the age of 18 by a friend of mine when I was living in Nice. It's a traditional book, a sort of Chinese bible that educated me, taught me how to live and that I still consult regularly. What I find very beautiful in Taoism are the principles of cycles, of the return of the “same” and of transformation. There is also the fact that there is yin in yang and yang in yin, and that we are always more or less yin or yang depending on who or what we are in relation to. The masculine and feminine principles are always relative.
I also encountered the thinking of artists like Merce Cunningham and John Cage when I was studying in Angers, who were also very influenced by Eastern thought, Zen, Taoism and “chance operation”. Then I met Fernand Schirren at the CNDC who, through the practice of rhythm and through his words, opened me up, without my knowing it, to the philosophy of Nietzsche and Spinoza. He was also a Taoist and used to tell us that what was important in a vase was its emptiness. Then I met Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton, who are also thinkers. So, philosophy has always been passed on to me through physical practice and experience, anchored in the practice of dance, rhythm and music.
I practised Freudian psychoanalysis and have been undergoing Jungian analysis for several years. I write and listen to my dreams. I trained in Shiatsu with a Japanese master, Master Kawada (Yoseido Shiatsu) but I don't really practise any more, apart from for my son when he has trouble sleeping. I'm interested in astrology, in a self-taught way. It puts me back in touch with something beyond me: natural forces, immensely long cycles, other speeds. I'm interested in certain forms of wisdom, spirituality and also the poetic dimension. For me, there's an obvious link between the spiritual, the poetic and the living.
I've noticed that over time, my dancing has become more and more alive, more and more inhabited. When I met Lisa, she suggested that I listen to my sensations and that changed everything, a real revolution in the literal sense of the word–a reversal of attention. It's listening to the senses that makes up dance. Internalising the “guide”, orienting yourself based on your sensations, intuition and habits. It's not even really a question of a relationship between an exterior and an interior. It is participation, taking part.
Julien Bruneau: When did you meet Lisa and the Tuning Scores?
Anouk Llaurens: I met her at the On the Edge festival in Paris in 1998, which is when I also met Steve Paxton and Simone Forti. I was twenty-nine, just after the return of Saturn in astrology, the beginning of a new thirty-year cycle. I'd had a professional life; I'd worked in a contemporary dance company and left that world because I was deeply bored. Once again, I was earning a very good living, but I was struggling with anorexia and depression. I stopped dancing and started psychoanalysis, I studied classical singing and I had taken up the flute again, the instrument of my childhood. It helped me breathe. I kept in touch with the dance world by translating Fernand Schirren's rhythm classes from French into English at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Three years after leaving the world of contemporary dance in Brussels, I came across improvisation in a workshop with Julyen Hamilton and then with Mark Tompkins. That's what brought me back to dance.
After meeting Mark, I auditioned for On The Edge, I knew nothing about this world. There were all the crème de la crème of French contemporary dance and a few “outsiders” like me. It was intimidating. I remember being struck by Steve's intelligence, which reminded me of Fernand Schirren. In fact, they were born on the same day, January 21. I couldn't understand a word Lisa was saying and doing. However, I still remember the start of her performance one evening in the large studio of La Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. I can still see her bursting through the back door. It was like a detonation, as if someone had thrown her into the studio. It was explosive, unexpected. She played with pre-recorded calls on a tape player, to which she responded. She worked with objects, cushions, I think. I found it really strange and above all very funny. Then during the PA RT performance, I think it was with Steve, I remember seeing something like a mirage around her body, a kind of warm halo that blurred her outline. It was energetic, hyper-vibrant. I wondered if I wasn't hallucinating. I think it was really vibrating.
Julien Bruneau: When these three weeks at On the Edge came to an end, how did you feel about this meeting, this work?
Anouk Llaurens: I run a lot on intuition in life. A lot of my decisions are not analysed; I understand them after the fact. I think I was impressed, in the emotional sense of the word, but also in the impressionist sense, i.e. atmospheric. I was living in Brussels, and I took part in Lisa’s workshops organised by Contredanse in 2001 and 2002. Then I did others in London when I moved there, and I stayed in touch. I never missed an opportunity to see Lisa when I could. Following a performance in Montreal with the trio QO2, I went to spend a month at Mad Brook Farm where she lives in Vermont. I spent a good part of my days gathering grass cuttings to make straw bales and taking them to the compost heap. Lisa used to tell me that for her it was like “combing the earth”. While I was there, I met people from the original community, old hippies of the sort you only meet in the United States and that had survived that era, drugs and so on. It was also very informative about their way of life and the culture in which their work is rooted. It was a real change of scenery.
Julien Bruneau: Do you apply aspects of Tuning Scores to your work?
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, a lot, in my teaching practice and my artistic research. I started by transmitting, and the artistic research came later.
Julien Bruneau: When did you start ‘teaching’ Tuning Scores?
Anouk Llaurens: I don't teach Tuning Scores. I think the only person who can do that is Lisa. I share my perspective on what has touched me and helps me to live. I try to open pockets of poetry. Recently, I've been calling my work Tuning to the Poetic Space as a way of both inscribing myself in the Tuning heritage and differentiating myself from it.
I've been teaching dance, in one form or another, since I was eighteen. First to earn a living, and then because it came easily to me. As early as 2001, I started to teach using the Tuning Scores tools in a rather wild way, because I found that it worked, that it was engaging for lots of different people. I relied heavily on pre-techniques, warm-ups, eyes closed, all kinds of explorations of the body systems and the environment, and the interaction between the two.
Julien Bruneau: And do you remember what led you to use them?
Anouk Llaurens: The Tuning Scores literally educated me. They allowed me to revisit the fundamental experiences I hadn't had access to as a child. It was also the only practice I knew where you moved between the position of dancer, “mover”, and the position of observer, “watcher”. It gave dancers a lot of agency to see and to show what they saw. It emancipated them from the all-powerful gaze of the choreographer. And it rehabilitated the dialogue with the environment as a support for dance. It brought back the basics that I felt were essential for every dancer, choreographer and, ultimately, every human being.
I've shared some of the Tuning Score tools in lots of different contexts, dance companies, dance schools, festivals, art schools, to contribute to artistic research, in self-produced contexts with adult amateurs. I worked a lot with the Candoco dance company when I lived in London. It's a mixed-abilities company that brings together dancers with and without motor disabilities; for example, those who are visually impaired, hearing impaired, in wheelchairs, suffering from neurological illnesses...
For the last six years, I've been teaching for one month a year at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. An improvisation course in the first year of the bachelor's degree and choreography in the second year. I also give a course called the “Labo” for a mixed abilities group which brings together young students aged between eighteen and twenty-five who want to be professional dancers, and amateurs of different generations who live with more or less severe physical and sometimes mental limitations. I love working with these groups. The Tuning Score tools are universal enough to work with everyone. However, I have to adapt them to the context.
The Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp trains contemporary dancers to work in spectacle oriented dance companies. Most of these young dancers want to join the big Belgian dance companies such as Rosas, Ballets C de la B, Peeping Tom and Ultima Vez, which for me are big machines with which I don't have much affinity. They've recently opened a master’s programme, which will probably influence the intentions of the bachelor’s. The classes last two hours, so you have to make do with this limitation. It's not a research environment, and bringing in Tuning Scores can be a challenge.
I work a lot with warm-ups to open up the senses and encourage the exploratory side. I incorporate calls into warm-ups: “pause” first, then “reverse”, etc. I do extremely basic things. I also include the watcher and the watcher's calls in the warm-ups before playing the scores. The Single Image Score makes the students pay attention immediately, it's incredibly active, it always amazes me. They love “replace” and “replay”.
Julien Bruneau: Yes, but you were already passing on the Single Image Score long before that.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, in the context of your research phréatiques, I shared the Blind Unison Trio and Single Image Score directly because the conditions were right: we could take our time, there was a certain level of maturity, an ability to listen, a taste for research and contemplation. It was easy, I felt confident. Bringing Tuning Scores into the context of the bachelor's degree in Antwerp is an adventure. I don't know if Lisa has ever worked with such young dancers, perhaps at the CNDC in Angers. Most of these young people need to get moving and proposing a “pause” is already a huge thing.
Julien Bruneau: And was it difficult for you to “pause” when you started practicing Tuning Scores?
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, of course. I had been so tamed and inhibited as a child that at first it was very difficult to accept inhibition in any form. All calls are inhibitions. And there are inhibitions for life and inhibitions for death, it's a question of measure. Over time these inhibitions have become supports, and the situation has been reversed. Today I almost prefer pausing to moving, maybe because I’m older [laugh!] and also because it gives a lot of space and agency to the watchers, to the witness inside me and to those watching. When you don't move, it's your attention that moves and it's the watchers' eyes that scan the image and make choices. And a dance with pauses is a dance with holes in it that leaves room for others. It opens a conversation with those who are watching. It's about sharing.
And although Lisa's work is aimed at everyone, it's important to remember that Single Image Score and Blind Unison Trio were originally developed by the highly experienced dancers who worked with her: Karen Nelson, Scott Smith, J. K. Holmes and others. The scores are very simple, but this simplicity demands an enormous amount of physical and mental commitment, maturity, patience and, above all, a taste for study and contemplation. Finally, it's reversible, and that's what you learn from practising it.
Julien Bruneau: Yes, it's a laboratory in which we observe, we experiment, where we don't know. It's not about producing a dance or creating a show. You try things out and ask yourself questions.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, it's research. I sometimes wonder whether it makes sense to pass on this kind of tool and “spirit” in a context like that of the conservatory, where the pedagogical choice is to put students in contact with as many different techniques as possible and where there isn't much time to go in depth. Then I remembered that Tuning Scores is all about working with and unfolding the potential of a situation. I'm learning to work within the limits of this educational context and often I live moments of pure poetry in the studio with the students. I hope that leaves its mark.
Sharing is also a way for me to continue studying tuning. Lisa never wanted to “make school”, even though she taught a lot and devoted most of her time to the subject of learning. Sharing my perspective on Tuning Scores is a reconstruction based on my experience and the few scores and warm-ups that are stabilised. It is also based on the responses and effect they have on the people to whom I am talking to. I see it a bit like a “reverse”: you start with a form and go back in time to try and understand how you got there. I often ask myself what the right warm-up is before doing a certain practice or a certain score. It's a kind of embryological study of an origin that doesn't exist. Like “reverse”, it's forward-looking, not regressive, and you make discoveries along the way. Lisa and I are very different, I don't understand her completely. So, teaching my perspective on Tuning Scores means building them at the same time.
Julien Bruneau: What about your work and your artistic research?
Anouk Llaurens: I started developing pieces and performances inspired by Lisa's work very quickly after meeting her in '98. In this interview and in the context of Replays, I'd like to dwell more on the research that I initiated in 2013 and that I'm currently pursuing. It was initially called Visions, Research in Poetic Dance Documentation, and you've been involved in it from the start. It was a turning point in my work because it was no longer about making pieces but about research. And paradoxically, it produced a lot. We were working on documenting the relationship between the eye and the hand, hand-eye coordination, based on several scores that Lisa had passed on in her workshops: following your hand with your eyes, playing at moving your hands in and out of your visual field with your eyes open and closed. I wanted to document these practices from and through the experience of the dancers, their sensibility, their tools, their know-how. We were looking for ways of documenting that were in line, in adequacy with our lived experience.
Julien Bruneau: Yes, at the beginning you guided us in explorations that brought the hand-eye relationship into play and then we were invited to develop artistic proposals.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, the polyphony, the multiple replays were already there. I was interested in offering several perspectives and working with several media: video, drawing and voice. I wanted to highlight a landscape in which the proposals could interact, interfere, vibrate and resonate with each other rather than define, fix or block the subject. The artistic proposals were an appropriate way of documenting artistic proposals, too.
Julien Bruneau: An important characteristic of Tuning Scores is a desire to study, a desire to question. It's not about producing forms for the sake of producing forms. There is a desire to observe the consequences of one's choices. What happens if you put together such and such a parameter, if you play it like this or like that?
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, in Lisa's work, studying is about learning. For me, it's also a way of making things strange and incomprehensible, of opening a poetic space through a great deal of rigour and choice. And the fact of being systematic gets us out of our personal tastes and preconceived ideas.
Julien Bruneau: This notion of study also appears to me in your research, because it's precise. You set a starting point that you always bring people back to, so you don't just freewheel.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, the question is an anchor, and coming back to it sets up a cyclical time, so that when you come back, you're no longer in the same place. And sometimes the question has changed, and you must formulate a new one, in line with what's happening now. When you lose your relationship with the question, you only find what you already know. On the other hand, I make these precise choices intuitively and afterwards, I'm often surprised by the depth of my intuition. When I started this research, I didn't know why I had chosen hand-eye coordination as my subject. I thought that the explorations Lisa had given me, such as following your hand with your gaze, or playing with moving your hands in and out of your field of vision, made people move in a funny way, like when you do a “reverse”, for example. I was also interested in the duet, the relationship, the conversation, which, in my opinion, is the basis of Tuning Scores.
I later learned that the eye was more in the realm of the semantic and the hand more in the realm of the sensory. Documenting hand-eye coordination made it possible to observe the spectrum of senses; touch, smell, hearing and finally vision, which unfold between the sensory and the semantic. It meant observing an archive of neuromotor capacities that underpin one another and enable us to move from sensation to verbalisation and abstraction.
The relationship between the non-verbal and the verbal is practised in the Tuning Scores through calls; “report”, and in the analytical practice of “collect”; when we verbally review the choices and calls made during a run. We're constantly moving back and forth between the dance and the words, the non-verbal and the verbal.
Julien Bruneau: At the start of Visions we practised these scores that activated eye-hand coordination, and then each of us worked very freely on a way of documenting that.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, I invited you to interpret, to give your opinion. At the beginning we worked with external documentation tools; cameras, drawing, cutting out paper... the state of attention and the body were at the heart of our documentation practices. The tools were seen as extensions of the body and in service of our states of attention.
Julien Bruneau: After a while we abandoned the tools, camera and all, to develop practices that documented practices. When we got into this, you took the lead, you had discovered your interest. A few of us put ourselves in service of your vision.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, that's where ‘performance as a document’ and the concept of ‘living documents’ came in. In the mornings we practised BMC®, which for me is the pre-technique of pre-technique of Tuning Scores. We practised developmental patterns.
Julien Bruneau: Yes, I remember “navel radiation”.
Anouk Llaurens: That's right, and one morning we worked on the “mouthing pattern” and the “reach and pull”, going towards by initiating movement from the nose (smell) and the mouth (taste). It's a practice that engages you in a spiral, and as I was doing it, the image of the DNA double-helix came to mind. It was because of this vision that I came to understand DNA as an organic document, a living archive, and that I began to think of experience as a ‘living document'.
Julien Bruneau: Conceptually, it was an important step for me when you started talking about our perceptual apparatus as an embodied, organic documentation technology.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, it was quite dazzling. I really understood through experience that the nervous system was an embodied documentation technology and that to live was to document one's experience. Then it was no longer a question of “poetic dance documentation”, but of “poetic documentation of lived experience” because it's much broader than dance. “Dance” became “lived experience".
The research was producing a lot: documents, practices, scores… And I wondered how I could channel this proliferation, this luxuriousness, to stay closer to the question, which was in fact twofold: documenting the hand-eye relationship, and doing it in a poetic way. I have a taste for paradoxes, and I wanted to put into tension the notion of documentation - which evokes grasping/fixing - with the poetic, which evokes something that cannot be grasped; the elusive and even a certain dissolution of identity. Georges Bataille puts it very well when he says, in L'expérience intérieure: "The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it.” From this discovery we developed a performance called documents vivants [1] (“live documents”). We continued to study the dialogue between the hands and eyes, but this time in relation to ordinary objects that were available in our working environment: a pen, some tape, a sponge, a cable, a coin, a paper plate. I'd been very moved to hear Lisa talk about how babies' hands organise themselves to pick up an object and use it. Like babies, we let ourselves be sculpted by the objects and the actions we wanted to perform with them.
They weren't beautiful objects, but functional ones, completely banal. It alluded to the aspect of Lisa's work that encourages you to make do with what's already there, within your reach, in your immediate environment. It was work shaped by explorations of the environment and objects with your eyes closed, allowing you to taste their materiality, their physical qualities, their shape, their weight, their sound, their smell... to the point of forgetting your knowledge and thus opening them up to other possibilities.
Julien Bruneau: Yes, it's a bit like forgetting the memory you have of these objects and letting yourself be touched by them again, as if it were the first time you were interacting with them. We've got used to responding reflexively to certain affordances [2] and not others. Your practice offers spaces where we can expose ourselves to all the affordances offered by a given object in each situation and take the time to observe how we might respond to them.
Anouk Llaurens: It's a relationship with objects that takes us back to the child who explores to learn, and also to the world of puppetry. In fact, I think Lisa moves like a puppet: she's moved, animated by what touches her.
Forgetting also opens up the question of meaning. John Cage used to say, “Poets should make non-sense”. And for me, this kind of exploration, like Tuning Scores as a whole, is in line with what Cage says. It's a “de-study”: it starts from a framework to break it down. That's why study and poetry are linked. I like opening spaces of strangeness – perdre connaissance in French–not recognising. When things shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I have a taste for poetry that emerges from the ordinary. It's a question of how we look at things: the marvellous comes from the way we look at things, people and situations. It's a way of looking that remains at the level of the senses, before we start to interpret things mentally and psychologically. It's important to cultivate this open, innocent way of looking.
Julien Bruneau: In documents vivants, we drew on our know-how as dancers to question everyday actions or ways of paying attention to everyday life.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, how does an everyday gesture or action become a dance, through your commitment to it and the way you live it?
Julien Bruneau: For me, documents vivants is a form that's quite close to the orientation and methods found in Tuning Scores, but which don't exist in Tuning Scores as such. It's the score of an heiress who is imbued with a history, a certain way of seeing things and working with them, a way of cutting them up.
Anouk Llaurens: It was “developmental”, as Lisa would say. We cut up the action to reveal the different layers: looking, reaching towards, grabbing, taking to look, taking to move, throwing in the air and catching and, finally, sending to someone else.
Julien Bruneau: This movement, which is normally continuous and organic, was also cut out to show the whole path of attention and how attention mobilises the body. An important aspect of Lisa's work is the movement of attention. Working with an object is also a pretext for making the movement of attention palpable.
Anouk Llaurens: We also worked with calls, inventing new ones like “meet”, when we wanted to stay in touch with an object for a long time. Some calls were aimed at the way we looked, like “peripheral”; ‘open peripheral vision’, or “focus”; “focuses”, or “frame”. Maya [Dalinsky] had introduced the inhibition call, “inhibit”.
It's a bit of an outlier, somewhere between a study and a performance, a sort of performance by slightly zany scientists who use observation and attention not for mastery but for poetry. We asked ourselves how we could share this, in what context. We had the opportunity to perform it at a Contredanse event on the documentation of dance. Then we were in residency for a month in the Contredanse documentation centre. We called the residency Documents vivants. It was organised in a rather wild way. No one had ever done a residency of this kind there. We worked alongside the documentalists and the people who came to consult the archives. We lived together and contaminated each other. It was entirely appropriate to work on poetic documents in a real documentation centre. It really made sense for me to bring Lisa's practices into it. On the one hand because she has collaborated with Contredanse on several projects, and on the other because of her work as an editor for Contact Quarterly with Nancy Stark Smith.
Finally, for me, Tuning Scores are also a practice of poetic documentation in which you spend your time replaying your experience, going back over it, repeating it. You replay your habits, what you've seen, how you look at things. The whole work is based on memory as an anchor for learning and change.
It was certainly the practice of Tuning that revealed my interest in memories and led me to the questions I've been asking for some years now about the poetic documentation of lived experience. Through my research, I'm interested in the present side of memory, in its living side; in memory as a support for living in the present. Relying on memory also means making links with lives other than my own, with other times. I also have a sort of obsession with lightness, with forgetting, with the desire to get out of time. There's a beautiful sentence by René Char: “In poetry, you only inhabit the place you leave, you only create the work from which you detach yourself, you only achieve duration by destroying time.”
Julien Bruneau: Yes, and it's something you've formulated more specifically in your subsequent “living documents”: in The Wave and Tremor. As in the Tuning Scores, you're interested in this notion of measurement, of the ‘life span of an event’. You even talk about the life span of a memory. It's also about giving space to the memory, giving it time to live and at the same time giving it space to die.
Anouk Llaurens: That's it, letting it live, letting it die, letting it live... In my work, as in the Tuning Scores, time is cyclical, not a linear one that's always moving forward. As Lisa would say, "There is nowhere to go”. There is nowhere to go, which I would translate as ‘nowhere to escape to’. It's an ecological time: it lives, it dies, it returns to the potential from whence it came. It's not a question of always producing something else, but of it always being able to reproduce itself differently. What I took from Lisa and replay in my living documents is an ecological practice that capitalises as little as possible. It recycles, puts things back into play.
Julien Bruneau: I also have the impression that what's present in her work and yours - and this is what you were saying earlier about the simplest objects - is making do with present circumstances, not producing memories, not constantly producing something else and going elsewhere. This is also evident in the relationship with space and the environment. Lisa explicitly says that everything is contained from the start, everything is there, in the initial situation, and there's nothing to invent. All you have to do is actualise the potentials that are produced by my presence at a given moment in this space that has such and such a characteristic, such and such an atmosphere.
Anouk Llaurens: And then you realise that what you call “environment” always refers to yourself, because the environment is what you can perceive, there's no separation.
Documents vivants gave substance to another practice of poetic documentation developed with Sonia Si Ahmed at a.pass [3] , which we called The Breathing Archive [4]. We talked a lot at a.pass, and the raw material was words. I was always asked the same question, ‘What is your research?’ and I answered it in dialogue with my mentors, my peers. So, every conversation replayed the question. My interlocutor would point out things or project subjects that interested her. It was like multiple “replays”. The way of talking about research was specific to the relationship. I recorded and transcribed the conversations and turned them into an archive of my research in this particular context. There were also photos and transcriptions of scores transmitted by Lisa on the relationship between the eye and the hand...
After creating the paper archive, I invented a score to play it, to make it breathe, to make it dance. At the time I was still practising navel radiation from BMC®, which is a whole-body breathing, a movement of concentration and expansion starting from the navel. I drew an analogy between this practice and crumpling and uncrumpling pages of text. The mass of the archive became like an externalised body, a kind of matrix that could breathe and live with our own bodies.
The score used to perform The Breathing Archive is a form of collective editing. It brings certain memories to the surface and combines them with others in unexpected ways. The score is also developmental. As in documents vivants, it is composed in layers: listening, touching, smelling with eyes closed, then seeing, reading and reading aloud. It revisits the spectrum of the senses, enabling us to move from the sensory to the semantic.
Julien Bruneau: Once again, as with documents vivant , it's a process that is normally continuous, organic, and taken at face value, but here it's deployed step by step. So, all the layers underlying the action of picking up a piece of paper and reading it are made present. All these layers of activity had their own status and time for exploration: touching, crumpling, uncrumpling, seeing, looking, reading aloud.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, and the players navigate their way through the different layers of memory. They start sitting around a table with the pages piled up in the centre. The first time the archive is played, the pages are printed but not folded. By the second practice, the pages are already marked, crumpled, printed with action’s memories. And each time the archive is replayed, new folds are formed, new traces, new grooves. It gets more complex. You can practise the score with different groups of texts to get deeper into them and generate new readings, new encounters, new associations.
Julien Bruneau: It's true that you can play the score with any text, but it doesn't necessarily have the same relevance. I remember that you were dissatisfied with certain iterations because they didn’t have the same density once you were replaying the score without involving words that referred to the research itself.
Anouk Llaurens: It's true that playing the a.pass archive was the most interesting experience because it was a kind of mise en abîme. I also experimented with another collection of interviews that I had published in MIND THE DANCE [5], IDOCDE's online documentation. It was interesting because the interviews were with Baptiste Andrien and Florence Corin about their process of documenting the work of Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Anna Halprin for Contredanse. The interviews referred to the layers of culture that underpinned my research and from which the score had emerged. The mise en abîme worked here too.
Julien Bruneau: What also strikes me in The Breathing Archive is that you had hours and hours of interviews, pages and pages and pages, and you didn't choose, or chose very little in fact. And every time we played the score, it was an opportunity to pick our way through this mass of thoughts, words and memories in very small chunks. It reminds me of what we were saying earlier that there's nothing to invent, that it's all there and all you have to do is actualise the potential. Here, it's as if this archive of words materialised a whole potential of questions you were asking yourself in your research and that every time we played the score, we were passing through them. We were dancing through these potentials, leaving the vast majority to vibrate in the air, without them being explicitly touched or actualised.
Anouk Llaurens: It also makes me think of the description of Shiva's dance in the book Tantra Illuminated by Christopher Wallis: certain things emerge from nothingness, they manifest and live for a while, then they die and rejoin the potential that is inexhaustible and always overflowing on all sides. But what's interesting here is that you can see it, the potential is materialised in a mass of crumpled paper. It's a chaos from which shapes emerge and into which they return.
Julien Bruneau: Well, when it starts, it's a pile of crumpled sheets that have already lived and then when you finish, it's chaos, haha!
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, as in the Single Image Score, everything starts off very structured, everyone takes the same side. We share the same ‘image space’ (more or less). Then, we act out what we imagined, which aligns with the potential of the space. And as soon as someone makes a call, we start to deconstruct, to make the situation more complex and messier. And with “resituate”, it's the common point of view that diffracts and becomes multiple. Making calls is a study-practice that proliferates from a simple situation. It's like a seed in a garden, it proliferates from a micro-something and creates a jungle. But the jungle remains organised. And all the things that my research has produced through these devices are luxuriant! It's like a permaculture garden. To ask a question with a call or with an operation is to disrupt in the good sense of the word, in the sense of re-establishing a certain order, an organic one.
Julien Bruneau: It’s like making all that life available! And so are we, when we play a Tuning Score or a Breathing Archive score, we become more alive. At the beginning we sat at the table, all straight and serious, and then by the time we finished, we were a bit drunk, weren't we? We even reached a frenzy where we threw paper balls at each other and ended up under the table sitting on piles of paper.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, when you play seriously you sometimes find yourself in very comical situations.
I thought there were far too many words and not enough silence in The Breathing Archive. We started developing The Wave, in search of silence. We became interested in the lifespan of events, in how long an event lasts, and also in the spaces before and after the event. In its emergence and its dissolution, its decay. By working with a single word as a document of experience, that memory-word became a condensed experience. There were always several people performing it. There was still the multiplicity of perspectives, a proposition diffracted by several voices, several points of view.
Julien Bruneau: First there was the preparation.
Anouk Llaurens: It's more a case of not preparing. It's about emptying, undoing, in the sense of relaxing. It's about opening people up to being touched by their environment, the ground, the objects around them, the people, the sounds, the smells... It's about opening touch as the mother of all the senses. You lie down on the ground, breathe to open the skin and the deeper layers, and settle into your imprint. Then you leave it, sit up straight and go outside to collect pebbles, ‘alone in a group’. I invite you to let yourself be touched by the environment, and there I replay the reciprocity of touch, the touch-being-touched score of Lisa Nelson. We're not just being receptive, we're letting ourselves be touched in order to act, and we're acting in order to let ourselves be touched. It's not easy to stay in that kind of in-between, you often choose sides: being more receptive or more active. After collecting pebbles or small objects outside, we come back inside with our findings. We choose a moment from the harvesting experience that still resonates and describe our experience in the first person, present tense. Then each of us condenses our description into one word, which we write in space, on the floor, with the pebbles we've collected. In this way we form a constellation, a visual polyphony that acts as a poetic document of our experience, both individual and collective.
Julien Bruneau: Writing a word is a very clear objective, and it can happen very quickly.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, but it's an intention that has to remain in dialogue with what's going on in and around me at every moment, and that thwarts my project. It's about thwarting your desire to get straight to the point, your desire for efficiency. It's about making the pleasure last. With living documents, I'm trying to open up poetic spaces, and poetics isn't based on efficiency, it takes its time, it takes detours. I recently listened to a French biologist called Olivier Hamant [6], who is developing an approach to ecology based on the concept of the “robustness of living things”. He proposes this as an antidote to the cult of performance that governs today's world and is based on the principle of optimisation/maximisation. Robustness, which in his view is more effective in the long term, depends on the number of relationships created with the environment.
Julien Bruneau: Yes, that's exactly it. Rather than using the pebbles to write your word immediately, rather than being solely in relation with that objective, you're in relation with each pebble, the environment, the others around you... You were also inviting us to stand back and observe the choreography formed by the different bodies in the space. It was about multiplying relationships, multiplying links. When you talk about the poetic, you often use that Bataille quote you mentioned earlier. We start from the everyday, from something very familiar, very banal. By listening to this everyday life, by returning to a very basic relationship with that thing–beyond history, associations and reflection–you reopen its potential, and this ordinariness leads you into the unknown. From the known to the unknown, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. For me, the signature of what is poetic is the blossoming of relationships. Enriching the world with links.
Anouk Llaurens: In the last phase of The Wave, which I call “dissolution”, the constellation of words is dismantled by throwing each pebble into terracotta pots placed inside the constellation. This involves aiming, a gesture that is supported by the coordination between the hand and the eye. I wanted the meaning of the word to dissolve into its sound. Every time a stone landed in the pot or hit the rim it made a little “ting”, it became sonorous. For me, the meaning dissolved into music, the semantics into the sensory. I also had a desire for silence. Ever since I was a little girl I've wondered about words; their sound, their meaning and the relationship between the two. There was a time, when I was maybe ten, that I used to lie on the floor and repeat a word, like “tomato”. “Tomato-tomato-tomato-tomato …”, until, through this repetition, the word lost its meaning and all that remained was the sound, in all its strangeness. I wondered why we had chosen these sounds; “TO”, “MA”, “TO”, to say “tomato”.
We threw the pebbles into terracotta flowerpots, and we could tell that eventually the pot would break. And yet when it did, it was a kind of surprise. Undoing the words broke the container, freeing it from its meaning and its limits. For me it was very interesting, jubilant even. For others it was too violent.
Julien Bruneau: I remember that at KASK, some people were annoyed, and others were unsettled, by taking responsibility for breaking a pot.
Anouk Llaurens: For me, breaking the container also means freeing the word/the form, from its meaning, moving on to another level. It's an initiation. Unfortunately, I haven't managed to communicate all that. You carry a lot of layers of memory with you through your work and it's not easy to know where to start to pass it on. And at the time we are living now, with the interpretation of “care”, which in my opinion is a bit puritanical, it's not politically correct to come up with a practice that breaks an object. There's a kind of obsession with repair that's understandable... The world is wounded, and the emphasis is on repair. But you can't have one without the other. Life depends also on gaps, breaks, interruptions and death. In the language of Tuning, this is, among other things, the call “end” [7]. The rift, the interruption, is also the possibility of life, like when a mother’s water breaks when she is ready to give birth, or in the seed that splits under the thrust of the germ. For me, breaking the container is not gratuitous violence, it symbolises opening up to a new life.
Julien Bruneau: But what I also find interesting is that, by breaking the clay pot, you get in touch with the material it's made of.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, and when the pot breaks, the container merges with the content, and in the end the pebbles are on the same level as the pieces of pot. In the end, it's a shapeless heap. Form, formless, form...
Julien Bruneau: At KASK there was also another element of tension: aiming just right. There was also a lot of frustration about not getting it right. That's what made the silence difficult because a lot of people were excited by the ambition to succeed. Once again, it was difficult to find the balance between intentional action and receptivity. Action took up all the space and you couldn't appreciate the spaces in between, the resonance.
I think about The Wave in relation to Lisa's scores, for example the Blind Unison Trio. Here, the challenge is to be in unison with your eyes closed but knowing that it's impossible. It's tense and, at the same time, perhaps something lightens up, because you know you can't do it. But with The Wave, it's very possible to write a word.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes. I still have to work on the score. And perhaps The Wave was an intermediary proposition, necessary for the development of the next practice.
The Wave gave birth to Tremor, a ritual for oblivion, which we're working on at the moment. Tremor means trembling in English, evoking the trembling of energy, the vibration. Tremor can also evoke fear. In French, in the sound of the word “tremor” [“très-mort”] one can hear ‘very dead’. It may refer to the fear of letting things die. We're interested in unlearning and forgetting as an eco-somatic process of recycling and transformation to stay alive. Perhaps it's a question of forgetting what is not essential in order to remember what is. It’s about the positive aspect of forgetting, forgetting for life.
In Tremor, we contemplate the life cycle of memories linked to the place where we are. We continue to work with the memory-word and its calligraphy. We use sensorial practices, explorations of place and movement, to call up memories we have within us. We revisit these memories first by putting them into words, by describing them, then we condense the description into a single word that we finally materialise through different calligraphic practices. French linguist Alain Rey talks about the word as a concentration of energy. This ties in with the performativity of magic words like “ABRACADABRA”, or the notion of mantras. We write with different materials that are more-or-less stable: seeds, fire, smoke, listening to their affordances. Now we're focusing on seeds because they're a living material and there's a direct correlation between the word as concentrated energy and the seed as concentrated life.
As in The Wave, we work on a process of formation and dissolution. We start with three small piles of seeds, one person makes an initial gesture to disperse them, and we begin to calligraphy the word from this starting landscape. Then, when the word has been formed, we undo it and reassemble the seeds in a pile. Again, it's like breathing, it expands and condenses. I call it a ritual because it's not a performance, it's not a show, and it's not a workshop either. Ritual conjures a notion of cycles, seasons and community. It marks a moment of passage, of transformation. It has a spiritual connotation.
When we share this ritual, we ask the participants to observe what this process of calligraphy does to them and whether it evokes a memory. We invite them to do the process of describing the memory and condensing it into one word. If they wish, they can then entrust us with this “word”, which joins the collective memory and can be brought back into play in another iteration of the ritual.
We did two residencies at Radical House in Brussels in winter 2022 and spring 2023. We worked on a beautifully soft and slippery concrete floor. The calligraphy practice was very horizontal; we caressed the floor. Then we moved on to Les Minières, a project in Normandy that combines artistic research, food cultivation and publishing. When I heard about the Les Minières project, I realised that by working with seeds, we could plant our memory-words in the earth and make them grow. There was no need to break flowerpots with pebbles like in The Wave. With seeds we could rely on the forces of life. For new life to unfold, something has to die. Like the parable of the sower in The Gospel of John: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Julien Bruneau: Yes, that's right, die and fertilise the soil.
Anouk Llaurens: We went to work at Les Minières and wrote our words with broad beans, which are seeds that fertilise the earth and cleanse it of pollutants. We literally sowed memories to revitalise the land and encourage future generations. This revitalisation of the soil is also a metaphor for what Lisa and the Tuning Scores have helped to revitalise in me: the life force, the desire for nature and for something wilder too. I find a seed that grows wonderfully wild.
Julien Bruneau: So, you end up with too many words in The Breathing Archive, and that leads you to work on just one word in Tremor. It reminds me of the call in Tuning Scores, as a word that acts upon the situation. That's also what you mean when you talk about Alain Rey, who says that the word is condensed energy. It's the energy of memory that's condensed in the word, but it's also performative energy.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, that's why I'm fascinated by what David Abram says in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous. He talks about the power of words in the Kabbalah, the performativity of words. There is also the Christian tradition of ‘logos’. It's the verb, but as information, it's energetic. It's true that a call is a word that acts a bit like a magic formula. “Pause” is a magic formula that opens a world.
But I don't know if the words in my work operate quite that way yet.
Julien Bruneau: I wonder, are you trying to do the same thing with words that you were doing with objects - the tape, the sponge, the cable - in documents vivants? That is, to make yourself available to the expressive affordances of these objects? Aren't we also trying to do that in Tremor by looking at the performativity of any word? When we play Tremor for a group, aren't we trying to make people sensitive to these words, by relying on the affordances they offer? Graphic affordance first, because we work a lot on spelling the word, but also procedural because we're also interested in how the word emerges, how our mind recognises the word and plays with trying to deduce where it's going, what word it's going to create. And once the word is there, what affordance of recollection or anamnesis does it offer?
What does it produce in the “spectators’” imagination, what memory does it conjure? And even before we invite them to turn to possible memories, my supposition is that the word already has an expressive value for people, even if they don't think explicitly of a memory, by virtue of the sensory process of writing the word. Suddenly, these grains that have been organised, these lines… The “p” that I misread because it should have been read the other way round and it's a “b”--ah yes, suddenly it says “woodpecker”! Even if there's no image, no precise memory, there's still a shudder of something happening that makes the word active.And in saying that, I'm reminded of what you said about bringing words back to life.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, sowing it means bringing it back to life.
Julien Bruneau: Conceptually, I think there's something interesting in this relationship between the calls, the words you use in your work in different ways, and what actually happens with these seed words that you sow and that bear fruit. The words that appear in Tremor or The Wave, how are they sown, planted, in what environment, in what soil, what do they produce? The calls in the Tuning Scores can be seen as words that are planted, sown in the soil of the proposition [the dance] in progress.
Anouk Llaurens: And what conditions allow what to grow, to vibrate with all its power? Lisa talks about a “learning environment”. What is a learning environment? She creates fertile conditions, nurturing learning environments that enable everyone to realise their intrinsic potential, their tastes, their abilities, their opinions and their desires, in a relationship with the whole and in service of the whole. It's a practice that fertilises the world in which personalities are both specific and open, and gain precision by being in contact with each other. It's an antidote to the capitalist regime that simplifies, homogenises, impoverishes and kills for the material enrichment of morbid personalities. It is an antidote to the ambient morbidity. It is a power that re-fertilises the world.
Brussels, 19/08/2021 and 22/05/2025
Notes:
[1]http://somework.be/pages/Documents_vivants
[2] “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. ...It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979.
[3]https://apass.be/ post-master program, Brussels, Belgium
[4]https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/view/the-breathing-archive#$
[5]https://mindthedance.com/#article/34/the-skin-is-the-most-external-layer-of-the-brain
[6]#290 — Robustness: The benefits of imperfection
[7] In my opinion, all the Tuning Score calls act as interruptions. They are breaks that question old and useless patterns so that something new can happen.