A format for thinking about the future. Review by Charlotta Ruth
Four persons calmly wait on the edges of a white dance floor while we, the audience, enter the theatre at WUK, Werkstätten und Kulturhaus, in Vienna. A warm white wash lights hundreds of precisely organized A5 cards spread out on the stage floor. Once we sit, one of the persons introduces herself as the “Performance Host”. We, the audience, are invited onto the dance floor to familiarise ourselves with the themes of the cards. In four different languages; English, German, Swedish and North Sámi, the cards that are grouped in different patterns read words in relation to locality, lineage and imagination. I find myself drawn into some of the words with nostalgia or maybe solastalgia. A sadness towards the transformation of the surroundings and a lack of agency when taking part in this ever changing reality. Together with the others in the audience, I get reminded that I’m here as me, whatever brought me here, before we, little by little, drop off the stage back to our safe seats.
A few weeks after attending Constellation #4 Shows for Futures at WUK, I find myself using Animalarium’s performance for discussing the mechanics of participation with a colleague who also attended the same performance of this live, unscripted choreographic work. We discuss how the audience gains agency and creative power when the rules and mechanics of a work are made transparent. When engaging in this written response towards this performance, I also find myself reflecting on how, when working in the medium of live performance and specifically in the medium of dance, the content, to a certain degree, is always co-created with the bodies and minds of the present audience and that this multi-sensorial way of communicating and playing with intent also has a potential for discussions beyond the frame of the arts.
In resonance with local urgencies, Animalarium’s Choreo-Constellating practice merges systems theory, constellation work, dance improvisation and spoken language. When describing their work, Animalarium points towards how they “...set up the conditions for encounters” rather than present a fixed composition. In the series Constellation - Shows for Futures, playfulness and audience participation is invited through different game mechanics like chance, multiple choice and voting. From a pre-selected pile of cards the audience decides which cards (topics) the performers are to engage with. Through this action the audience is not only handed power to decide, they are also handed more information than the performers of what themes the performance will tackle through its real-time choreographic response structure.
The night I attend, words like; The Unconscious, Capitalism, Danube, Nature as Undivided System, Artificial Intelligence, Our Descendants in 100 years, win the close democratic vote. Some of my favorite words don’t make it, but the gentle participation invited by this vote has drawn my seatmates and myself into a we-intentionality.
The Performance Host asks us, the audience, to direct where on stage the first three cards shall be placed. When Nature as an undivided system, Danube and Capitalism have gotten their position on the floor the three performers are invited to enter the stage. Standing on top of a card each but not knowing which word it reads on which card, they begin relating, sensing and perceiving its theme. Little by little the performers allow their bodies to act as a medium for their sensed experience. Like in traditional constellation work used in systemic therapeutic inquiry-settings, the performers express with words what they feel, where in the body this feeling sits and also how they feel in relation to the others in the room. In the friction between what they say and do and what I project onto their actions, a common creative space opens up. Knowing what it says on the cards makes me participate with my own associations actively and independently. Laughter breaks out when the topic “Nature as an undivided system” confronts “Capitalism” with a question: Why is your topic making such an awful sound?
In everyday life, the same physical action can mean very different things. Handing over a pencil might be an act of giving, lending, or returning, depending entirely on context. In this way human cognition is unique in its ability to read and infer intention to an action and also to coordinate attention, goals, and actions with others. What enhances the playfulness of Animalarium’s performance, is that the audience is invited to exercise this cognitive capacity through, in each mind, co-creating the intention of the improvised actions on stage. My own participation opens the space between action and meaning: linking the written words on the cards to the bodily expression, and actively shaping the perceived relation between the performers’ actions and the topics they inhabit. This openness towards the meaning-making shifts my participation from what Astrid Breel defines as “a participatory outcome” of a performance towards the modality of a “participatory process”. Through the sometimes absurd relationship established on stage, I find myself engaged in a thought process about capitalism and how it relates to the world that invites humor and welcomes the contingent associations of my own sense-making. To, in this way, be invited to shape my own thinking, makes me realise that when we, as performance makers, engage with modalities of participation where the outcome is not pre-determined, the societal here and now can be dealt with in a co-creative and non-didactic way.
Later this season, I attended two other performative works dealing with future scenarios. As both works included immersive and choice-based participatory elements but were conceived within the lineage of theatre, they prompted me to reflect on the difference in reception between attending narrative performance and Animalarium’s associative choreographic game. Coming from a dance background, I need to acknowledge my biased yet firm opinion that choreography - and specifically participatory choreographic models - holds a potential for systems thinking and for hovering within complexity that few other media, including narrative theatre, can offer. In the two theatrical works, I became the receiver of impressively researched and well-crafted possible futures; in Constellation #4 Shows for Futures, I became part of a thought process.
In improvised choreography, space and time dimensions are intrinsically part of every decision. This means that when engaging with reflections or individual interpretations filtered by choreographic material I, as an audience participant, am not only confronted with thematic content but also thematic relations in regards to when, where and how. A solution is not served, but when attending Constellation #4 Shows for Futures, I become an active witness and co-creator of a process. This means that when I, in Animalarium's one, and only time performance, observe how "Artificial Intelligence” gets isolated on stage because “our descendants in 100 years” cannot stand its constant interference (my interpretation) I am confronted with a concrete relational situation. As this situation is conceived through my brain deciphering a spontaneous choreographic situation, it makes me actively reflect, in a non prescripted way, on the role AI gets if we don’t shape its integration in the societal system. It puts me in the position of considering what my active stance is towards this question, rather than reflecting upon if the situation composed by Animalarium is something that I believe in.
When, as an audience member, I actively engage my mind in shaping my own thinking about the future, I can - rather than being concerned with the believability of a theory-heavy presented future - direct my own knowledge toward areas that hold urgent questions for me. In this way I interpret the choreographic score in Constellation #4 Shows for Futures as a carefully sculpted redistribution of agency and attention that moves my thinking beyond the realm of the art. By giving the audience partial knowledge - of words, rules, and relations - Animalarium activates a space where intention is not delivered but inferred, negotiated, and embodied. The performers’ movements do not illustrate the cards; instead, they open a productive gap in which meaning is generated between bodies on stage and the audience that actively “reads the intention”. In this gap, choreography functions as a system for thinking-with complexity: spatial, relational, and temporal at once. Like in social life, intention here is not fixed but co-created, relying on our capacity to read, project, and align with others. Remaining physically still yet cognitively active, I participate fully, without knowing what the future will bring. What stays with me is not an inscribed narrative outcome, but the felt experience of a lustful rehearsal for how we might sense, decide, and imagine futures together. It makes me imagine a close future where artistic practice based knowledge is not isolated to spaces of artistic inquiry but where at the next UN Climate Action Summit the delegates are confronted with embodied interpretation - not only facts, science and capitalist lobby.