Philosophizing with children and bodies, with ruler and monsters

Nora Elberfeld: 1004 Zentimeter Mut

How is a mobile explore dance pop-up actually created? And what does it mean when we say that children and young people are actively involved in all phases of the artistic work process? Choreographer Nora Elberfeld takes us on a journey through the creation process of her pop-up piece “1004 Zentimeter Mut”.

About the process of “1004 Zentimeter Mut”. By Nora Elberfeld | January 28, 2024

Test of courage 15: “Dare to do great things.”

How long is freedom?
How big does a hero have to be?
How much distance is there between your nothing and my nothing?

1004 Zentimeter Mut is a piece that was created in close collaboration with children. Together with the core artistic team Guy Marsan (performance), and Judith Jaeger (dramaturgy), we spoke, philosophized and danced at regular intervals with two groups of children – the second grade of an elementary school and a daycare group of preschool children. Their words and associations were the starting point for our texts and various elements of the play, their fears and desires mingled with ours, we built monsters, saved ourselves from barking dogs and the horror clown, from creepers in swimming lakes and a huge wound from which a lot of blood drips.

It all started with a first visit and workshop with a second grade class. My colleague Yasmin Calvert led a session on “Philosophizing with children” on the topic of courage, during which I was initially only allowed to listen in.

How much does courage weigh? Nothing… it’s more like flying. It’s like jumping into the air.
Courage is when you dare to jump off a house. Or daring to go into the jungle. It’s free. I would say courage costs something.

When philosophizing with children (according to Kristina Calvert), a creative process unfolds in which the children search for meanings together and express their thoughts. Using visual materials or objects (a cuddly toy, picture book or word and picture cards ranging from abstract to figurative), they search for unambiguous and ambiguous formulations and begin to feel and make associations. When dealing with word-picture cards and sorting them together, for example, the aim is to put terms and motifs in relation to each other and to justify why, for example, one card is placed next to another. Sometimes these reasons are logical and argumentative, sometimes they simply arise from the shapes and colors of the cards, always creating new connections and spaces for thought.

We brought the children’s words, associations, ideas and movements into the rehearsal room, where they ended up playing ping pong with the materials that surrounded us and our physical movements. We negotiated proportions and dimensions, rehearsed how big we or everything around us could be stacked, and finally ended up on stilts and under very tall big and tiny little hats (stage: Doris Margarete Schmidt). A yardstick unfolded into a giant snake and was desperate for an answer to the question: “Can you measure courage?” We encountered wild animals and looked our own fear in the eye.

I’d take 1300 for courage.

As we progressed, we expanded the joint meetings and philosophizing to include workshops in which we involved the children in physical research, developed courage and fear scores together and showed sequences from the rehearsal material. We explored the extent to which we could “stay calm in dangerous situations” and the children chose the moment when Guy Marsan walks over them on stilts as a favorite moment.

The fact that courage and fear are like two sides of the same coin – which incidentally also made it into the play – was not only reflected by the children. We spent a week intensively examining our own fears as children and adults and comparing them with the children’s fears. During this time, we encountered eyes everywhere in everyday life that became the symbol and epitome of fear.

And so it was fear that paved the way to courage: Test of courage 3: “Speak out your fears.”

In 24 tests of courage, we looked into the face of the lion (test of courage 1), practiced being different (test of courage 12), shared the room with a monster (test of courage 13), jumped into the unknown (test of courage 18), endured emptiness and heaviness (test of courage 21) and looked each other (and above all our young audience) in the eye (test of courage 24).

When we climb our self-built monster towards the end of the play and look it in the eye, we symbolically meet our fear at eye level. Perhaps fear never disappears completely, and sometimes plays foreground and sometimes background music, like the sound of Gregory Büttner. Perhaps it comes back in very different forms, regardless of whether we are tall or short. “1004 Zentimeter Mut” does not aim to suggest a guide to being courageous or the elimination of fear, but rather to make visible how fears are part of life, are allowed to be and at the same time require a way of dealing with them in order to keep the frightening things in check.

At the last performance at an elementary school, there was such enthusiasm and an urge to move that we quickly changed the post-performance talk to a joint night dance. The children began to physically recapitulate the play on their own, climbing the wall, imitating the animal movements and showing us their own acrobatic moves. This experience showed me that the process of mediation is not finished with the play process, but can be further developed with each performance, how mediation and the artistic process intertwine. Above all, it made me want to try out new things at each performance using small pivotal points and to continue to incorporate the children’s reactions.

That afternoon, we beat the record for autographs and drawing eyes on forearms…

It’s in my stomach, tickles me and wants to get out. It’s green or orange or gold and glistens – like glistening bright light, like sunlight. You can collect it in your whole body – it’s also in your head – in you, in me. Is far and near – is here and there. Is invisible.

PLAYFUL, POLYPHONIC LISTENING

Lea Moro: EARS TO SEE

What do we perceive when we listen more closely? How does our perception shift when we focus on our ears? Together with the young listeners and participants of Lea Moro’s piece “Ears to See”, the Berlin radio artist and researcher Kate Donovan (www.mattersoftransmission.net) embarks on a multi-layered, acoustic journey into the environment of the fabrik Potsdam.

By Kate Donovan. | 12 July 2022

On an unusually warm and sunny March day, we were waiting outside fabrik Potsdam for Ears to See, the performance by Lea Moro, to begin. We knew that it was going to be exploratory and sensory. We knew that it was going to be about listening, but I wondered what kind…

As we waited, I began to move between the sun and shade in the yard outside. There were the sounds of kids waiting, of someone on the phone, more kids playing at the playground nearby, people sitting outside at various terraces having lunch. There must have been the sounds of birds, perhaps water (we were not far from the water’s edge), or boats, but I must admit that my recollection only leads to human-generated sounds. I wondered if we were about to embark on a journey into noticing—the lichen, the buds pushing through into Spring, the matter resting on the water’s surface. I looked down among the cobble stones and noticed minuscule flowers growing in the dirt in-between.

Anna Tsing has written about the art of noticing, and although she is writing about assemblages in human and non-human world-making in relation to capitalism, many current practices of listening use a similar strategy to prioritise perception as a form of attuning, of caring, of paying attention to the often neglected things, which may lead to a recognition of both relationality and difference. The title of the piece we were waiting for —Ears to See/Ohren Sehen—shows an intentional dynamic shift towards de-centring the visual in order to make space for the audible; an intentional shift that Arthur Russell also sang in 1986: “I’m watching out of my ear”.

But this was not the only perceptual push we were about to encounter: listening was not meant in a purely auditory sense, but as a more tactile mode of reception and attunement—sensorial, and imaginative.

Once inside the theatre, it slowly became apparent that we were in ‘the heart of the city’. One kid asked “Warum machen sie das so langsam, alles?” a great observation, and indeed, one could argue that slowing down is the first step towards noticing…

We were split into three groups, handed headphones and led outside to begin our polyphonic journey. Our headphones were actually radio receivers, receiving both the voice (and breath) of our guide, and, later, the audio she played. She explained that “the antenna connects us”, and there was a distinct sense of collectivity in this radio bubble— we were all receiving the same signals from our guide. Bound by invisible frequencies, we were all intimately engaged, especially with the sound of her voice. Small-scale radio transmissions are often used to create site-specific, collective listening experiences, in sound walks, guided tours and similar activities, yet it is rarely mentioned as part of the technological infrastructure; perhaps ‘radio’ seems too anachronistic.

As is often the case with child pedagogies, an element of anthropomorphism was used as a tool to create a connection with, or empathy for, non-human others. These entities were given a (human) voice. But kids are used to this; remember all the bears and rabbits in picture books who wear clothes and carry watches and sleep in beds with pillows and blankets? This is not to say that kids don’t get what’s going on or understand the power dynamics of anthropomorphism; this is to say that kids usually have a more playful imagination. Part of being playful is suspending disbelief: more things become acceptable under the umbrella of playfulness.

One of the beauties of radio is that the removal of sound from the sound source (the invisibility of the origin of the voice) lends itself to the imaginary. We could hear the voice and story of the snake in the sewers right outside the manhole, and could therefore imagine what we could not see. In this sense, listening can be like reading—the visual aspect remains unbounded in the plasticity and fluidity of our mind’s imagination. Radio/ theatre-maker Pavlica Bajsić Brazzoduro speaks of the collective nature of imagining through such a listening experience: “we have the freedom to create associations and images in our heads and because of that our listeners become our co-creators. When the image is missing and we are only left with the sound, that break allows for our brains to turn to the inner mechanisms of imagination and it evokes our conscious and unconscious thoughts, our emotions, memories, projections.”

Listening through headphones created a very particular listening experience. In a way, we were cut off from our immediate sound environment, yet bound to one another through the collectivity of our shared sonic reception. Our guide suggested that we leave one earphone on and the other off, in order to be able to listen to our environment at the same time. I don’t think anyone in our group went for this (perhaps uncomfortable) option, also because it requires more focus to pay attention to the environmental and narrative layers. This is not to say that polyphonic listening cannot work: in our radio art project Datscha Radio, we make radio from gardens and encourage listeners to tune in from a garden or outdoor space – most explicitly in 2017 (Donovan, 2018). In these layers of listening, the sounds of one’s immediate space weave together with the sounds of the transmission. This can unfold in a sense of collectivity through a shared listening experience with others both near and far, and simultaneously produce a kind of grounding with the immediate environment. This is an experience of polyphony. In terms of listening, Anna Tsing writes: “When I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together” (2015, 24).

Such listening requires time and concentration, and this theatre piece, perhaps because it was aimed at young audiences, was too dynamic for such an engagement: we were on a journey, noticing where we were and what was being narrated to us. This was a more physical and tactile listening, perhaps more akin to what Cecilia Vicuña would call “Listening with the fingers” (1983). But polyphony was there in another form, in the form of voice/s, narration, storytelling. Multiple entities spoke to us, out of multiple times and spaces. A snake took us under the earth, into the sewers. Water took us back to its origin at the beginning of Earth-time.

There were moments when we were guided towards allowing ourselves to be vulnerable—by closing our eyes and walking together connected by a rope; by letting ourselves rummage in the textures of the mud; by getting tumbled around in the eye of a storm. A kind of playfulness is necessary in order to engage in this way, a playfulness that seemed abundant in my kid-companions. Maria Lugones writes “Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight” (1987, 17). Perhaps playful listening could be a way to de- centre the self, to recalibrate the position of the human with/in a bigger assemblage of entities.

Perhaps, by listening playfully we could allow ourselves to imagine, allow ourselves an openness to what we cannot directly perceive.

References