Enchanting Scores
Since modern times, we’ve become distant observers of our environment, in which we at once carelessly intervene. Can “enchanting scores” create the conditions for alternative forms of agency and relationality to emerge? Exploring the value of trance practices in today’s art and society is at the heart of Enchanting scores, a four-days event organized by Sarma in collaboration with choreographer and visual artist Julien Bruneau. It includes a salon at the Kaaistudio’s with philosopher Isabelle Stengers, anthropologist Arnaud Halloy and Bruneau on November 18, followed by a workshop in the frame of Bruneau’s residency at Bains Connective.
Extensive documentation of Enchanting Scores is available here.
An interview by Julien Bruneau with philosopher Isabelle Stengers on their respective collective thinking practices is avalaible on the page Désamalgamer la pensée (in French).
Call for workshop participants
Julien Bruneau and Arnaud Halloy
19-21 November 2013, 10.00-17.00 at Bains Connective in Brussels
The workshop 'Enchanting Scores' is based on some scores that provide a set of constraints triggering a dynamic interplay between interiority and collectivity. We will practice and discuss these scores and set up experiments by confronting them with the anthropological concept of “enchanting devices" ("dispositifs d'enchantement“). Aiming at theorizing the “social and material environments that support spiritual encounters with real or imagined intentional entities,” this notion enables us to address practices of trance and other non-ordinary states. Such states will allow us to explore diverse modes of relationality (with ourselves, with others, with the environment). Eventually, we will open up the question of human agency. While potency for action is often seen as an attribute of the individual, we will approach it as emerging from a web of material, immaterial, personal and impersonal forces the individual is embedded in.
Our starting point will be a score conveying an array of heterogeneous actions towards the making of collective drawings. Dancing, exploring our environment through specific sensorial frames, tracing, editing verbal statements, composing images as well as composing meaning, observing... All of this plays a part in this initial practice that ignites intensity by the friction between distinct modes of experience. The resulting drawings, at once precisely composed and yet opaque, will offer themselves as catalysts or transformative agents. Time and again we will come back to them in an attempt to “read” them. Alternatively by talking, by drawing and by dancing, we will develop an “exegesis” of these drawings, eventually unraveling a landscape of associations, themes, choreographies and figures. Such a landscape will be for three days our shared mythology, always proliferating as it manifests itself in us. We will be facing the demands of that which we have created collectively – the drawings and the mythology they enact – but which is now overwhelming us in an open-ended questioning nourished by our bodily sensations, our imagination, our thinking and our emotions.
The workshop doesn’t require particular physical or technical skills and is open to artists, researchers and anyone interested. The workshop will take place November 19-21, 2013, 10.00-17.00 in Brussels (venue to be confirmed). Fee for participation is 50 euro, which includes lunch. If you want to participate please send a letter of motivation and a CV to elisabeth@sarma.be before November 1.
Workshop participants are encouraged to attend the Salon Enchanting Scores with Isaelle Stengers, Julien Bruneau and Arnaud Halloy on November 18, 19.00-22.00 at the Kaaistudio’s in Brussels. Free entrance. Reservation required: tickets@kaaitheater.be or 02/201 59 59.
Production: Sarma
Thanks to Bains Connective
Julien Bruneau is a choreographer and visual artist based in Brussels. Since 2010, he develops the research phréatiques (aquifers), with the collaboration of A. Llaurens, S. Si Ahmed, L. Myers, M. Dalinsky and J. Peeters. This project leads to performances as well as exhibitions. Currently J. Bruneau is working on an on-line publication on oralsite.be and develops the project “some crosscuts of some of our improbable bodies” in the frame of a MA at the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (Theaterschool.) His work is/has been supported by a.o. Sarma, Bains Connective, Netwerk, workspacebrussels, Vooruit and Les Halles.
Arnaud Halloy is a Belgian anthropologist, assistant professor at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France) since 2007. He traveled to Brazil where he conducted extensive fieldwork in the Afro-Brazilian Xangô Possession Cult of Recife, in the North-East Region of Brazil. Arnaud Halloy’s main interest goes to the mutual influence between contextual and cognitive dimensions of religious transmission, exploring the tight links between cognition, emotion, perception and cultural environments. He is now focusing his research on emotions and the senses, and their specific role in possession learning process, oracular systems, “empowerment” of artifacts and “traditional” transmission.