the Program STATIC PERFORMANCE – DYNAMICS OF MOTIONLESS by Janusz Baldyga [2018]

September 02 – September 04, 10:00-14:00,
the Program STATIC PERFORMANCE – DYNAMICS OF MOTIONLESS by Janusz Baldyga in frame of the School of Performance 2018.

Last year we accepted the concept of thematic workshops, that time the theme was Presence. The next important element and task for this year participants will be a creation of a common space that will form the workshop context for the first phase, and it will define the behavior of all participants.

I offer the theme “STATIC PERFORMANCE – DYNAMICS OF MOTIONLESS” for this year. We work with the moment of motionless, stop as culmination of an action. Of course, it does not mean that the classes will be abstract from the dynamics. On the contrary, our task will be to search for the relationship between the state of the motionless and the dynamic action. The use of the objects directs our attention to gravity, equilibrium, and overload. We must be aware of the flow of time and the associated exhaustion, which leads to the stoppage of the action.

We are aware of the allusion to the issues of the art of the second half of the twentieth century – I mean the traditions of body art, arte povera or art interventions, which operate such meanings as silence, motionless, emptiness and nothing. We will focus on such concepts as, at a minimum, silence, emptiness, to counteract it to the dynamics of chaos, exaggeration, and overage.

I would like to quote William Blake’s words: “Enough! That is to say, too much … “. They talk about the constant need for the reduction and the threat of unnecessary things and concepts. We are trying to confront restraint and chaos. If we are treating the notion of excess as a keyword, describing the issues of our actions, we can recall its opposite, encoded in the concepts of selection, reduction or the need for choice. So, we appeal to the reduction, excluding superfluous, often useful, but not obligatory things. Clearing the following circles of meanings and means, we approach the essence of the message, the rod around which the sign is constructed.

The issues of the workshops:

1 – Motionless, silence, nothing

2 – Gravity and motionless (a throw and a fall)

3 – Line or point

4 – Map – movement, wandering

5 – The paradox of “dynamics of motionless”

6 – Stop-performance is the art of stoppage.