Artists Statement
Performance, June 11, 2022, Konvent Berga, Public Event.
We Move Together or Not At All is a choreographic installation that places consent, multi-sensory performance archive, and species inter-dependency in conversation. This performance by Sasha Kleinplatz and Navid Navab takes the form of an excitable plant-filled greenhouse with a dancer moving in its centre and it will be presented on June 11 at Konvent, a former convent of nuns located in Berga that has been converted into an experimental laboratory. Choreographer, dancer, and interdisciplinary artists work collaboratively to build performance scores meant to raise the temperature, moisture, scent, and bacteria in the greenhouse and co-orchestrate states of sensory access to the participants gestures, human or none.
Through this practice the sweat of the dancer becomes a source of heat and humidity that supports the plant life. We frame this sweat and heat, and the plant life that they support as the barely visible, archival trace of performance, as emergent formations traversing condensation, movement, sound, and affect. The performers are augmented with sensors that respond to torque, horizontality, verticality, and percussivity. A responsive scenography transcodes qualitative variables of the performance into sound, vibration and condensation, as multimodal gestures towards a non-linear understanding of how the plants may experience the events within space.
- Sasha Kleinplatz is a dance artist in Tiohtià:ke, Canada. She is the co-founder (along with Andrew Tay) of Wants&Needs Danse. She is co-creator of the events Short&Sweet, Piss in the Pool, and LOL (Lots of Love) Fest, platforms for risk-taking and community building in performance. [Source: https://www.m-a-i.qc.ca/en/miracle-ing]
- Navid Navab (IR/CA) (t{s/he}y) is a media alchemist, multidisciplinary composer, audiovisual sculptor, phono-menologist, perSonifier, gestureBender, and interdisciplinary artist-researcher. Interested in the poetics of schizophonia, gesture, materiality, and embodiment, their work investigates the transmutation of matter and the enrichment of its inherent performative qualities. Making the imperceptible palpable, Navid uses gestures, rhythms and vibration from everyday life as basis for realtime compositions, resulting in augmented acoustical poetry and painterly light that enchants improvisational, and pedestrian movements. https://www.navidnavab.com