MODE05

BOCAL – Barbara Matijevic and Pirkko Husemann

17/03/05

talking to Eva-Maria Hoerster/ Scott deLahunta (did initial notes)

P: Bocal turns into a myth because outside of France no one has seen something or knows much. I got a proposal where Bocal was described and I saw the presentation last summer in July Vienna. The whole idea seems to have come from the book he published with Isabelle Delauney / his dissatisfaction with dance education / certain schools he sent to / July 2003 to 04 went for one year. Supposed to be a pilot project.

B: No, it wasn’t a pilot project, from the start we knew it was never to be repeated. It was a project based on the idea of a school, not a draft for some future model of dance education. It was done on the initiative of Boris Charmatz as the last year of his 3 yr long residency at the CND in Paris.

He brought together 16 people with different backgrounds and they were mostly French with the exception of five participants who came from Spain, Argentina, Algeria, Morocco and Croatia. It was quite a French orientated project, since it took place mostly in France and in the French language. Only two participants had what you might call a real dancer’s background. Others were mostly from visual arts and design studies, one with the background in medicine, one writer, and I had a formal education in literature and languages. However, apart from 2 people who never before had any contact with dance, the rest had already had professional or some sort of dance experience.

(…about some facts…)

The project started in July 2003 in Vienna in the framework of the ImpulsTanz festival. Boris was preparing the project for quite some time, and the selection of the participants was done over a longer period of time. As Boris travels a lot, the talk about the project did as well. Each participant has a different story, it was through individual encounters. I know only of one case where it was announced on a public posting in a dance school in France. The outline of the project came through e-mail to many people; the exchange started before the selection was made. So, on the basis of this written exchange and personal contact and doing some of his propositions in the studio, the selection was made. Of course, a lot of it was done purely intuitively. I was never even asked to present some kind of CV.

(What was known in advance? Names of the invited guests?)

The project proposal was for one year with some breaks. Before starting it we were provided with the list of the dates concerning the residencies in different places, the public presentations and the names of the people who were invited from the outside. The basic ideas and concepts were also there from the beginning; the emphasis was clearly on self-education. So even when there would be some people from the outside, the idea was to avoid the situation of the master coming to teach the pupils. For ex. when Vera Mantero was invited, it was more about what we could propose to her rather than her to us. The period with Hubert Goddard was perhaps the most conventional in terms of the exchange since his knowledge feeds on the scientific research in the field of the movement analysis. We also had an internet chat exchange with Laurence Louppe, a French dance theoretician. We had the on-line connection projected on the dance studio wall, and we had a 7 hour per day non-stop exchange for 4 days. We called it the Exhaustion of L. Louppe – we basically took turns at the keyboard and showered her with questions. We actually never met her face to face.

Towards the end we went to Dubrovnik, Croatia, with Steve Paxton. The exchange was equally done in the studio and in the talks after the public presentations as it was done on the beach and in the mountains. Each of the last public presentations (T.P. ˝Travaux pratiques˝) also included two guests from the outside (Jan Ritsema, Raimund Hoghe, Frans Poelstra, Gaetan Bulourde)

P – So the starting point was to invent your own learning and teaching system.

B – Well, the idea of the first summer in Vienna was to squat the workshops in the ImpulsTanz – we took all classes possible, from tai chi, contact improv, ballet for contemporary dancers, hip-hop, capoeira, dance for the handicapped ..to classes with obscure names such as budo-flux, or choreographing the mind, etc. We had the luxury to try out and switch as many classes as we liked.

Next step was to go to Brest, France where we worked in the Le Quartz theatre and lived in an old manor house in a forest just outside the town. For 5 weeks we dealt with the invention of a dance class – we tried out a class with a silent teacher, or a class where the teacher who is present only as the image on a screen or the voice on a tape. We tried sometimes several teachers at once and students following whichever one. We also tried creating quite chaotic environments where there would be different resources for students to feed on during class, such as books, videos, music, recordings with different instructions, props…

We also did dance class read out as a lecture, or given through a written correspondence. We also used what we got from the Vienna classes and taught it in your own way to someone who didn’t take that class, e.g. teaching a Benoit Lachambre workshop to someone else. The practice of the Authentic Movement that some took in Vienna was transformed into Authentic Teaching.

There were also very short, unannounced blitz classes.

Every morning we used to warm up (individually) while listening to the recording of R. Barthe’s lectures on the subject of ˝Comment vivre ensemble˝.
We also did very long sessions of reading a book and warming up at the same time.

P – I heard you also taught Cunningham without seeing any, is this true?

B – Not really true, although this would be very Bocal we never actually did it.
I once tried to reconstruct a Dore Hoyer training on the basis of one of her solos.

P – This was a kind of hybrid between exercise and performance?

B – Yes, all these classes were very performative. Since most of them created a space for the particularity of each participant, we were in a sense performing the singularities within a collective dance class.

P – Were these exercises performed in front of the public?

B – Yes, in T.P. which was set up as a circular score with 7 stations in which each participant would stay for 4 minutes and then run to the next one, while he would be replaced by somebody else. In all the stations there would be only one bocalist, except for one where we were 6 and where we stayed longer. So this was the place where we showed some of these exercises.

P – You also re-did a festival?

B – When we were in Brest for the second time, we were invited by the festival Les Antipodes. So instead of adding one more performance to the festival, we decided to use what was already there. The idea was to re-create the festival. We even redid the program brochure with our images in the positions of the dancers on the photos, rewrote the texts and the cover but it still had the same format. There were 2 other propositions in the redoing of the festival: there was a room with the predictions of the performances scheduled in the festival program. Based on the text from the brochure, the photos, or the rumors, some 9 bocalists talked and performed what they thought could be a possible staging of some performances.

P – And this was performed as part of the festival program in Brest?

B – Yes, and the second proposition was the exercise room. After having seen the performances at the festival, a smaller group with Dimitri Chamblas as a guest-participant, extracted exercises from it and performed them in front of the audience.

P – Where were the other public presentations?

B – After the Christmas/New Year break, we went for two weeks to Col de Semnoz a mountain top and a ski station above Annecy in the French Alps. We continued giving each other classes in the snow during the day and started setting up the first public presentation which was performed out in the snow during the night.
Then we went to Lyon where we were hosted by Les Subsistences.

Here we did the “poster session” which was something very different. The model for this presentation was taken from science conferences. Each Bocal participant was standing in front of his or her own poster. The audience would freely walk around the room from one poster to the other, and by reading of the poster or by asking a question, they would trigger off the performance (demonstrating / showing / explaining of the poster).

Then we went back to Paris to the new CND building where we were the first artists in residence. At this time we issued smaller groups from BOCAL – so one group went to Montpellier to give a workshop to the participants of E.X.E.R.C.E., a dance education program in the CCN under the direction of M. Monnier.

Another group went to Chambéry, not to teach but to give a presentation and a small group went to give a workshop to Zagreb.

P – You were working with students from the Zagreb school?

B – There is no contemporary dance school there but there are young dance professionals who formed Eks-scena, an independent dance platform where daily classes and workshops are taking place, and this is where we taught.

P – So how were the collaboration and the working dynamics during these 5 week sessions when you lived and worked together?

B – Actually the year was not so clearly divided into equal sessions. We had bigger and smaller breaks, but in a sense even in the breaks you were still in Bocal.
And as far as living together is concerned, we lived together only when we were out of Paris, and most of the participants were in fact Parisians.

The working dynamics were largely set up by the pre-determined framework of residency places and the presentation dates. The meaning of the name ˝bocal˝ is very revealing in this sense: it means any kind of (usually transparent) receptacle or container. Whatever you put in it, it will have this shape. So it was more about how you deal with what is already set up (including collaborating with people you didn’t chose to collaborate with).

As it goes it was not easy, and it was sometimes very difficult to be in this group.

X – What did you hate what did you love?

B – I guess what I didn’t like the most were the public moments, the switch from the dynamics of research as soon as the date of a presentation would come near. At this point it would all become about demonstration and not about research anymore. For me now the project would be more interesting without the public moments – it made the project heavier in terms of obligations and organizing, which left very little room for improvised agendas and unplanned directions. We knew where and when we went, and when it ended to move to another location and give a scheduled presentation. It was a constant state of adapting to new environments and new scores and rarely did we all look into one thing for a long time. Also because it was very difficult for 17 people to find a common field of interest… And the idea of success, of something that works, is also inevitably present in the presentations, while it was something we never thought about while we were experimenting with different things in the studio.

P – The showing that I saw in Vienna was extremely set – it involved the audience on this parcours.

B – Yes, T.P. had a very set structure. It actually operated by the clock which measured 4 minutes by the station. Again, the idea was to find a way to ˝swim˝ in this bocal, this extreme set up. However, not all of the presentations were like this, the rest were actually a lot looser in structure.

B – I forgot to say what I loved! The more distance from the project I have, the more there are things that I like. I get to appreciate some things more now than when they were happening, since a lot of my energy at the moment went to just being in the group. What I loved about it was being so completely immersed in ˝ the newness˝, of having this constant influx of new ideas, information, people, situations…
I loved the intensity of it.

Christopher – What did you expect from the project?

B – Well, the proposal had a lot of resonance with my experience in dance since I had no formal dance education but I kind of composed it myself by combining different resources that I could get hold on. However, I still wanted to experience different things that are on offer on the dance market and that were not available in Croatia, and having a chance to do it outside of an existing school system seemed like a great opportunity. Of course, there is also the obvious desire of moving for a while away from the very limited scope of dance in Croatia, traveling, making contacts, seeing performances…

M – How would you describe the relation of Boris and the people in the group?

B – Well, Bocal was clearly initiated from Boris’s personal need for this project – a lot of initial motivation of the selected participants came from Boris, his energy, enthusiasm and persuasion. When it was no longer Boris one to one but one to 16, the situation was quite different. He tried to avoid the position of somebody who guides or decides for somebody else, and I guess that adopting quite a distant relationship with the members of the group was his way of protecting himself from this.

I guess the idea was that once he would set up the project, he would be just another participant in it, which of course, was not the case. But in a sense, he had to learn to swim in this bocal as much as we did. None of us knew what exactly this project would be before embarking on it. I mean, once you realized what it was, you could either accept its set up and try to activate your personal meaning and motivation making system; or you could bear a constant grudge against Boris. Of course, you could also leave the project. And we had all three cases.

Christophe -- What did you learn?

B – French!

Well, that’s probably the most evident thing I learned. Because, as with all intense experiences, there are long term transformations that are happening on a semiconscious level and that I am only just discovering. In any case, it is not in the realm of any particular skill or technique, but more in a large scope of perceptibility, sensibility, connectivity to certain things.

Rebecca – What about the emphasis on school?

B – From the beginning it was very strongly pitched around the idea of a dance school but as an art project on dance pedagogy. A school to be played and performed and modulated as we go, and not as a research for a new model of school or any kind of particular knowledge.

X – How was the project funded?

B – It was funded by the French ministry of culture, the regional council and the institutions which hosted the project at the presentation locations. A large part of the funding was also done by the CND in Paris. We were paid monthly, and outside of Paris accommodation and travel expenses were covered. We were working 5 days a week – generally from 10 to 6 but it was quite flexible, according to where we were at the moment.

P – How did the project end?

B – It was in July in Vienna, where it started. This time, we decided to give a workshop instead of take one. So we proposed a marathon workshop called ˇ12 to 12˝ which started at noon and was supposed to last until midnight. It was all going great until the 6th hour when we unfortunately had to stop the workshop because one of the Bocal members was seriously injured.

Sabine -- Did you analyze the project?

B – No, not as a group. Somehow it was impossible to deal with it during the project. The project was meant to have a very strong base in discussions – but in this we definitely failed. I’m not sure why, but we just didn’t find the way to verbalize some issues, and in time things became too accumulated too even start.

Eva – To which extent there was an interdisciplinary transmission of knowledge?

B – The emphasis was not on teaching each other what we knew already. But we certainly did profit from the richness of different backgrounds, although it was more in the usual way of just talking and exchanging books among friends, than within the strict framework of the project itself.