PAR DOCUMENTATION Karola Luttringhaus

MAKING PIECES
INTRODUCTION
My PAR essay engages with ideas around expression, signification, and translation. While interested
in the larger paradigm of creating and communicating meaning/signification through theatre arts
in general, which would include elements of place, clothing and atmosphere, here, I am more
particularly looking at the moment of choreographic emergence: investigating the choreographic
processes around improvising to generate movements that are imbued with emotion or situational
information and externalize such information from a place within the choreographer into a form of
expression and communication. The process of choreographing is hence one that discovers and
translates; one that contains a form of translation from embodied kinaesthetic expression into text
and narrative.

PSYCHOLOGOCAL SPACE & TRANSFORMATION

Through my work I create psychological space. I create an environment that is designed to
invite immersion into a different world. I think of my work as telling stories and creating
worlds. This is not to escape reality, but rather to use creativity and its tools, often
metaphorical and allegorical in nature, to engage with various questions that affect our lives
today. I seek to create spheres of transformation. Movement, sound, lighting and space are
thought of as catalysts, inviting viewers and participants to enter alternate states of mind to
contemplate, think and experience differently.

My choreographic work and my movement research bring me to language, to poetry, to

philosophy to critical thinking, ... to not-thinking... they bring me right to the doorstep of
something that presents as emergent, as personally, and as inter-personally illuminating,
which in turn again inspires creative and kinaesthetic practice for processing and integrating;
a process of kinaesthetic learning through movement and reflection.

PROCESSES
Within my choreographic practice I engage in a number of different processes. These processes set in
motion a certain way of thinking, which moves me and influences my creative states of mind and
then seeks to connect to an analytical process, a reflection about meaning, about sense, and
purpose. For me, art is an intellectual exercise as well as a journey toward consciousness as art
manifest, excavating the components of socially accepted norms, and igniting conversation about
points of friction, to put them in conversation with embodied and non-cognitive ways of knowing and

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communication.

Through the creative process I seek to de- and re-construct embodied, visual, political and
philosophical renderings of life experiences, to open eyes and to fine-tune our perceptiveness and
our appreciation for life and all those who share it.  

COMPLEXITY & INTUITION

My choreographic process in particular is characterized by a simultaneously analytical and intuitive
approach; allowing works to manifest themselves as multiple interlocking nestings of parallel 'stories'
that bear witness to the complexity of the situations explored. Intuition here plays a vital role.

When I begin choreographing I imagine opening a set of double  doors at the back of my head to
allow a flow of creativity to take place that channels ideas and helps transform and translate inner
being into external shape, timing, and matter.  These doors are about the size of my hands and I love
them very much..

WHY I MAKE AND PERFORM PIECES

 to discuss the underlying messages within my pieces with my audiences
 to excavate knowledge about myself
 to research and gain a deeper understanding of the world, and of the topics I engage with
 to make a positive difference in the world
 to engage in philosophy
 as spiritual practice without being religious or 'spiritual'
 as a practice of presencing, of being alive in the moment
 as a mindfulness practice
 to ask audiences to reflect back to me what they see in my pieces, and thereby to help me learn
about myself and about the topics I translate from the intuited world into the world of form.
 because i enjoy the process
 because I enjoy being in that state of mind
 because it allows for a kind of connection to people i do not get in any other areas of life
 because this is how I express myself and articulate with others, it's part of being human ...
 to borrow Alva Noe's words: to reorganize myself and the fields of my reach
 this list will be continued...

FOUNDATIONS

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ANGER
I spent 20 years making social critical performances. I was angry and often not able to put words to
my anger. When given the opportunity to create "wrath" from 7 Deadly Sins, I jumped at the
opportunity and danced wrath. I felt the anger and I allowed it. After that, my anger was less strong.
It was a turning point. Along the road of anger, are little offshoots of paths that lead elsewhere. I
often stopped, looked, entered a few steps and got drawn back into the current of the angry road.
Many people are on the angry road.

Project of Undoing
As person, and by extension as an artist and choreographer, I was motivated by a gut feeling that said
something like "what society is telling me is not true" which led me to spend 20+ years critiquing the
culture I live in; the sexism, racism, narrow mindedness, judgmentalism, the anthropocentrism, the
oppression, colonization, the cruelty, the genocides, the exclusionism, the rape of the earth, the
delusions of grandeur. All the while I was , and still am, and will probably never fully escape my role
of, an active participant in all of these behaviors and systems. What does it take to make a change,
real change? My performances typically drew audiences who already agreed with my ideas, or they
came to be entertained and didn't understand what I was doing. In hindsight, this offers an
interesting exploration into why I choose to make performances. Why do people make
performances? I believe that these answers are usually much more complex than appears on the
surface. I did not make performances to entertain. Although I certainly wanted to be liked. I did not
make them to lighten people's loads. On the contrary, usually I am angry with them, and I accuse
them of environmental disaster, -isms, or ignorance. And their obliviousness to my efforts at
provoking them deeply, made me more angry. I create pieces to entice a conversation around topics
with people, to cause an internal shift that brings people and myself to think, and internalize, to point
the gaze toward the self, to entertain personal solutions to our big social and environmental
problems, instead of perpetuating the externalization of blame onto others, and authorities. We have
to be the change. Within this I am attempting at changing myself. I need to wake myself up.

SOFTENING & GRIEVING

Through teaching a movement approach I call "BII - The Body's Intrinsic Intelligence" which is deeply
inspired by Frey Faust's Axis Syllabus, I began to allow myself to soften. To not put so much effort into
my "crafted" life: my goals and obsession with achievement. But to look at life as happening right
now, in this moment.
Instead of looking outward at my audience and what my audience perceives while watching me, I
could turn my focus inward into the experience of what it was I was exploring and criticizing. In order
to change my audience, I have to change myself. This process, I now believe, has to go through the
various phases, like grief, the different stages of grief. As an artist I was grieving, and my grief was
being expressed on stage. My process is a psychological process for catharsis.

WISDOM IN OUR CELLS

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There is wisdom within our cells. I knew that which others had discovered as well, simply by listening,
by engaging with processes that solicit imagination, clarity, and a kind of channeling. And I know that
what I am doing here, analyzing, writing about these aspects of life, is a foolish (or counteractive)
attempt at describing that which can not be described, because as soon as you describe it you limit
its reality and you alter its existence. And as soon as you attempt to describe you engage in busying
the mind and trying to halt the inevitable, trying to affix life, to cause eternal life, safety, security. But
this is futile. By trying to describe we are both getting closer to the thing itself and we at the same
time keep ourselves at arm's length from inner peace. At some point, the describing has to stop. The
living ha to take over, or there will never be inner peace. There is a constant bouncing back from
extreme to extreme, at least within myself and so is my process of choreographing a constant
bouncing back and forth between affixing and letting go.
In the first paragraph of the Daodejing Laotze writes "The Dao that can be named is not the eternal
Dao....." The changing, shifting nature of the universe makes it impossible to grasp and hold on to
anything.
Also, I think that there might be contradiction inherent in everything.
So I mean what I write and I also don't.
Writing this work is a mindfulness practice.

Eckhart Tolle says in an interview (with Patrick Kicken @21:45 of

can you sense the reality of this moment?

I am addicted to thinking, it gives me a sense of grasping on to something, of finding a branch to
cling to. And cling, I do. My grip is so tight, it hurts. I am going to stay with this sense of "I shouldn't
be doing this" for a little while longer. Dancing, choreographing, working on painting, crafts,
gardening... these always feel right. Sitting still and writing often feels wrong. mostly it's the sitting
still part, the focusing on a computer screen, the bad posture, the immobilized spine, the strange
breathing, the neck that hurts. It's the inner hurricane while the outer is utterly still that feels wrong.
The other way around is better. A performance: with a meditative inside, the focus, the state of
consciousness, when not worrying about anything else (such as career, audience response, potential
technical problems, starting late and running out of time, etc) but simply experiencing the role and
the movements, my body expands and contracts, deeply breathes and fills with air, takes space, loves
the moment, feels everything; I am in a state of bliss. Not always, but this state can be reached quite
often. The body expresses quite actively, intensely, and it is even more amazing when this moment is
shared with other people. The connections of dancing together, timing, inner timing (as I extremely
rarely count my dances), timing based on breathing, natural rhythms that emerge from the body, the
level of connection is special. So special that one day, dramatic as I am, I thought while dancing with
my partner: "This is what life is all about, this is it. This is the most beautiful moment. I want to die on
stage." I feel a little deprived, a bit impoverished, incomplete, when not having the practice of
choreographing and dancing with others. I miss being able to dance with others.

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ALLEGORY & NARRATIVE

My work and choreographic processes are deeply narrational and investigative. Through various
mechanisms of feedback I create, what Joe Dumit (2a Joe Dumit) described in a conversation with me as
"a play of emergence". I apply abstract concepts and personifications of ideas, situations. I do this in
multiple layers. A piece usually consists of many layers, from plain factual to psychological or
philosophical, environmental and political topics. I always have some ulterior motive, some underlying
message I want to communicate to my audiences. What marks my works is an interconnectivity: one
thing leads to another, informs another, illuminates another. The evolving shapes resemble fascia or
onions, because of the multiple loosely fused layers, and tensegrity structures such as the neural
networks in the brain, where there are hubs, intersections, connectors and highways: relationalities that
physically affect one another.

By trusting my intuition to detect relationalities, and by actively working on translating one 'voice' into
another, for example movement into language or language into movement, I seek to trace the
connections of the expressed, and back-engineer the character and meaning of a movement, or a persona
of one of my performance pieces. The idea of this process being a game, or play, is also interesting, as it
invites notions of improvisation within a set of given parameters. This, I would argue, is also the function
many of the joints in the body. The body serves as blueprint and metaphor for freely improvised yet
respectfully response-ive articulations of all kinds. The joint is an allegory.

The process of developing the message, the message to myself and eventually for participants and
audience, is a process of emergence and learning for me that has a profound impact on my life: I am
learning, revealing, and discovering. Only work that has these characteristic is work I am capable of
doing. The work, the action, the sensitive listening to the connections reveals something, helps me
understand something. I process something. I change with it. In that the act of choreographing, or any
other type activity, like gardening, painting, making music, or walking, etc stands for this process and in
that sense, the work itself, being, is an allegory.

I think perhaps that life is allegorical in general. In some ways, things reflect and point at one another for
shared components, chemistry, and experience. We recognize ourselves in our work, in the things and
beings we encounter. I think that this has something to do with love. Narrative, to me, is a sequence of
events or concepts we think of as related and intercausal. Narrative does not always follow linear
structures, but it does have a meaning beyond its form. Holding meanings within, offering connections to
other themes, movement-language expresses inter-connectivity and relationality, reflecting on the
various layers or dimensions of existence. I perform pieces to discuss the underlying meaning with the
audiences for the purpose of deepening my research and understanding of these topics.

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Lynette Hunter defines allegory

Lynette hunter writes (p. 270):""we may define the material in allegory as that which gives
meaning a place to occur but which does not become meaning itself." In my work, that which
carries the meaning, often has also, a meaning, a more superficial, or more obvious
narrative. I like layering and , yes, sometimes, the container for the meaning is extremely
abstract. Since I would, which I resist, categorize my work, I would say that it falls under the
genre of Tanztheater. Within this, everything holds messages embedded in its form. starting
with the scenic design, which is psychological space: a black space, which seemingly looses
orientation, walls and floor disappear i blackness, the lighting is cropped off the floor so it
disappears and the lighting is shuttered to not hit the wings (curtains that block the audience
from viewing into the backstage area and simultaneously allows actors to enter and exit)

p.271: "Holquist focuses on language and the reader, emphasizing that the question is not
just about langue and parole, but a continuum of activity that generates social meaning from
the constant tension between canonization
(or representation) and heteroglossia (other speech/the speech of others
marginalized from power)."

p.272: " Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

p.273: "Yet pluralist concepts often end up simply being the obverse face of universalism.
Allegory, however, is uniquely suited to engage with the locations of partial knowledge that
have resulted from concepts of differance in aesthetics coming together with the new
political realities of an enfranchised population. The"

"Roland Barthes' I967 essay on "The Death of the Author" replaced the author with the
scriptor, the discursively structured individual who writes, and the birth of the reader. Michel
Foucault's essay "What is an
Author?" (originally published in 1969) positioned the writer as discursive, not uniquely in
touch with universals, but socially constructed or constituted.17 The"

p.274: "encouraged allegorical encounters with readers.

Some of the most remarkable opportunities for literary allegory in the late twentieth century
and beginning of the twenty-first come from writers from countries that were once subject to
direct European colonization. Salman
Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980) remains an engrossing experience through its ability to
cross the domestic with the personal with the political, leaving a Euro-American reader
unsure as to whether the dislocation is due

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to the cultural difference, the social difference, the political difference, or indeed the
difference in focus between the personal and the political"

PROCESSES & PLACES TO GO THROUGH -

CATHARSES
ALTERNATE REALITIES
I need to enter different modes of consciousness in order to channel a piece and to create movements.
Engaging in art is facilitating this shift in consciousness which informs me about interconnections and
that, in turn, facilitate communication and the transmission of information, of meaning.

NOT KNOWING
Pursuit
What I have been doing as a choreographer is "cleaning out the attic". I reach into another
dimension to grab things and pull them out of the unknown and throw them into the realm
of the knowable, towards a group of dancers with whom I work to decode some of this that
comes out of this metaphorical attick and I throw it at an audience who I perceive as a sort of
reflective entity, giving me interpretations, translations of these things I throw at them, which
helps me understand who i am, and what the world is.  
This dimension, out of which I extract "things", feels like an oozing sort of opaque, semi-
translucent, foggy realm which i enter at times very deeply and at other times just stand in
front of and glance inside. I tremendously enjoy spending time there. I love this state of not
knowing, of pulling things that will meet me half way, that are ready to be pulled out and
examined in further detail. I wonder why this is a process in life that seems to have
significance. Why is this a thing?
 
My dancers and audience members are mirrors of sorts, that help me understand my
nature, the nature of life.

Being an artist is to continue the curiosity of childhood, it is to continue to grow.

in performance studies you can work from not knowing.

but how do you engage in that academic discussion

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not knowing: not congnitively being able to put words to it,or  

actually not knowing.

knowing as in being open.
not knowing... Lynette has a book on not knowing.  

what is not knowing?

is not knowing knwing, but knnowing differently?
practicing not knowing.
we are makign art, is not knowing. Working on the edge of not  

knowing. of dicovering, of capturing something from the unknown into the known/visual.

entering a different state of mind

confidence in my practice
feeling happy in the not knowing
the moment of not knowing has stood outt o me before as Iwas in UNCW  

theatre on the stage and moving, running, dancing,walking around the  

stage, thinking about my piece, and loving this state of not knowing  

what will happen.

it felt like being suspended in water.
Ekaterina said she is open for everything to happen.

THE UNKNOWN
......

THE UNKNOWABLE
.........
THE BACKGROUND
Eckhart Tolle says (*2): " the background, it is hard to describe because it is not something.

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The sound is something and as it is something it is born and eventually it dies. The
background is not born and dies; it is always there unchanging. You are lost in a surface
world of external appearances and things when you do not know the background dimension,
that could also be called the un-manifested... ... one could also call it a field of peace that
underlies your perception, a background peace...imagine having that background peace in
human interactions, how that changes everything between human beings. ... you will notice
that when you fall back into the dream state of being identified with the stream of thinking,
all the subtle sounds around you you don;t even notice,...   your attention is elsewhere, your
attention, your consciousness is being absorbed by thought continuously there isn't much
left for anything else. ... and so here you are making space, inside you, there is no other way
for something truly new to arise in your life, something truly comes out of the freshness of
the un-manifested, the freshness of Being itself, and takes on form: a word an action, some
creation , a work of art or this or that, or simply a way of being with others that has a
different quality than the normal way of being with others. so that's the only way something
truly new can come in... 
He continues (@14:30): "for something truly new to arise you need to find, not create as
such, because it's already there, you need to find, one could say, that dimension of space.
one could say you have to make space, yes. In one way   the space already wants to come
through, the spatial consciousness, in another, one could say requires your cooperation, you
have to make room, then its a beautiful more harmonious emergence."

At 19:30 Tolle (*2) says: "If you are a master at hitting a ball .. then probably in that field of
activity,... you are probably present,... your're not thinking, planning, right action happens,
and there's a power and people love to watch you... when you stop playing the game you
reenter the normal state of consciousness and then you identify with that skill; it becomes a
mind object; you are 'better at it than anybody else' and the world is telling you that...".  

This passage reminds me of the process of the kind of art-making I experience.  Eckhart
Tolle would probably say that the process of watching yourself think, or watching yourself
change, is a process of dissociation from the thought-made self that insists on
superimposing itself onto the real self, which is the beingness, the greater consciousness of
life, the background that underlies everything and from which creativity can emerge; from
the existence beyond form. 

 
I think one could say that art and the processes around engaging with art-making or art-
experiencing makes the un-manifested available to us.  

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Eckhart Tolle @ 23:00 "... the mind is object consciousness"

then that's a a mechanism you can apply to other areas of life

reading and analysing

then processing, moiving, trying, living, 
bith ar emutually informative
process of thinking
definition for thinking: what is thinking?

INTUITION
GOING THROUGH MOVEMENT

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