the hammer without a master

”Ciocanul fara Stapan” (The Hammer Without A Master) - a contemporary creation.

A proposal for the ERSTE Bank project for documentation of Romanian contemporary dance during the 50ies and 60ies initiated by Manuel Pelmus.

This proposal comes out of the common interest that Florin Fluerasi and Brynjar Bandlien share in expressiveness and affect in a performative context, using external, pre-existing images to create new performative experiences.
In this project we would like to use as a reference the contemporary dance performance ”The Hammer Without A Master” by Stere Popescu that was premiered at the romanian opera in 1965 and later created a scandal in Paris.

Since much of the original choreography is lost, and a fully restored version of the work is impossible, we are interested in gathering all the information which is availeble and make a contemporary work. We will use the remains of the original piece, but with tools and aproaches contemporary of today. Much inspired by the approaches used in the work ”Last Seen” by Sophie Calle.

In 1990 Calle was invited to exhibit in a museum in Boston where six famous painting were stolen. After having interviewed the museum guards, cleaning personell and other employes of the museum who had been seeing the stolen paintings on a daily bases, Calle placed the descriptions of the paintings in the frames where the original works had been hanging. In this way, the performativity of the works became visible. Not the original works, but the intepretations of them.
We are interested in sampling poses, costumes and makeup from existing footage, frazes of choreography from descriptions of movements given by participants of the original work, dynamics from descriptions of qualities found in written critics of the work and any other piece of information we would be able to gather from statements by other vitnesses such as audience members.

Expressionism: Expressionism is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; it is a subjective art form.

Expansion: Starting from the extremities: pre-set choreography, costumes, make-up, props, music and set design, facial expression, hand gestures, poses taken from pictures, paper critics, interviews and other historical sources, we would aim to explore even further. Since a restoration of the original choreography is not possible, we wish not to try and make a piece at all, but rather create an expanding structure based on the scraps of material, and explode their possible intepretation and meaning even further. For every new element, action, part introduced, the possible intepretations of meaning are opening up instead of narowing down e.g. every part we introduce, also introduce a myriad of new possible readings of the piece.
The actions stay concrete, but the context keep opening up.

Affect: Our aim would be for the performance to establish an affective expression, a mode of performing these expressions that transforms from being effective to becoming affectiv over time.

Working from the periphery and aiming for expansion, the only place where the different elements meet and are held together is the body.
What bodily state appears when confronted with so much external information?
If the body is given time in these conditions, will it adapt and form new behaviour/states?
What happens to a spectators perception when the references don’t add up and narow down, but are rather continuously being added to?
How will a spectator perceive a piece in which the only direct communication is happening on a body to body affective level underneath all the visual input?
The work process will last over a period of three months, in november 2008 and february and march 2009 at the CNDB in Bucharest.
The work will be based on the experiences we make during the process and upon the document’s that are available from the pre-existing piece ”The Hammer Without A Master”.
The process will culminate in a performance by the name”The Hammer Without A Master”.
The participants in this work are Florin Flueras and Brynjar Bandlien (see CV’s).
For the last two weeks of the process we would like to invite Antonija Livingstone, the canadian dance artist who presented her work at the CNDB last june (see CV), to join the final stage of the work process and to join us in the performance as a guest.

Brynjar Bandlien