Ein Gastbeitrag von Melanie Maar:
On experiencing ecstasy / trance / euphoria at different settings and influences.
Melanie Maar in conversation with sound / visual artists Christian Schroeder about trance / euphoria /ecstasy:
When going to a sound concert, for example by Phill Niblock, being into minimal work that is affecting a deep concentration and sense of loosing time space, one is agreeing, desiring to an experience of a sort of ecstasy or trance.
It is ritualized in the form of a concert set up.
All roles clarified. Artists, audience, sound space.
Through the listening there can be a falling into a desired trance space. Deep into one self where nothing else is present. A getting lost in one self. One is guided into that state by the sound. Being moved into that state of deep self sensing, spacious experiencing.
When the sound stops, the state holds for a moment, but then ceases.
Somewhat like in a hypnosis.
Trance, ecstasy, euphoria are states one usually doesn't accidentally fall into, but is willing and interested to do so. In a circumstance ‘designed’ for such phenomena. What is then the relationship to a psychosis, a psycho somatic episode, a near- death experience, all non-ritualized experiences of loss of space time self?
What is the role of performance and specifically of contemporary dance in such a dynamic?
When one is not only experiencing the sound as a transmitter into ones own embodied experience, but witnessing someone else's embodied experience on stage, or in the ritual space? The one of the dancer, or of a person in trance.
What effect does the witnessing have? Is there a catharsis, a sensing it in one’s own self, is there a ‘jumping’ of the performer’s movement state onto the witness body mind?
When I work with repetition, there are moments when a deep satisfaction, an euphoria can rise from the exhaustion, or the boredom, or the concentration field….
A sense of loosing one’s boundaries of self and merging with all matter and time.
Also the clinical description of a psychosis.
I sense that I am being moved as much as actively moving.
A dynamic image (rather than a voice) is showing me what’s next.
I assume the manner in which the ‘force’ that moves us makes itself known is
individual to the protagonist. As a voice, an image, a sensation….
Like Polke did, I could describe it as a ‘Wesen’, a separate beingness, part of our particular force field, that communicates with an aspect of ourselves that is willing to execute, to manifest its wish.
Maybe trance, ecstasy, euphoria, being moved are all interrelated phenomena.
‘When I perceive in myself a state of being moved, in a voluntarily induced trance for instance, or perceive in someone the state of being involuntarily moved by any symptoms as in Parkinson’s…. in both phenomena I perceive separate realms of beingness.
The beingness of the ‘mind’, the beingness of the symptom, the beingness of a state of nervous system, the beingness of the feeling realm and personality of myself or of the person with Parkinson’s.… These equal spheres of intelligence can suddenly emerge.
In such occurrences it seems that our will, our mind is not the single reality, the singular ruler at that moment. Our body is not just the executing machine.
Rather an improvisational relating between all these states of beingness occurs. Bringing forth a new phenomena of being moved by this dynamic relating that a sense of “I” can surrender to and witness.’
Melanie Maar
August 20th, 2018
Melanie Maar is a New York based dance artist from Vienna Austria. Her work shares a sentience between movement and sound, animalism and humanism, femaleism and objectism, between resonance and struggle. It’s a feelingness she desires to relate to, to observe and to follow into all process oriented projects. www.melaniemaar.com
Christian Konrad Schröder lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Since 2012 he is co-running the „Rauschen-Space“ as a member of „Kollektiv Rauschen“, an interdisciplinary artist group based in Vienna. www.ckonrad.net/data
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