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art as a responsive practice
reps
Reps : dance as a responsive practice 1
Performed, filmed, and edited by Justin Tornow
Sound score: Mount Kimbie, Tunnelvision
Description: A danced praxis of theory in motion, this spontaneously improvised composition explores the relation between sound, impulse, dance, person, objects, space, and digital variations as they emerge from a remembered experience.
Research notes: There are three variations that act as surrogates for the original recording, in which only the sounds that the dancing makes in the spatial-sonic context of the material space as I was dancing to the music using headphones. The process of creating variations with altered starting points for the sound score offered a theoretical rabbit hole of sense, perception, and memory as it intersects with editing software.
Filmed and edited June 2022.
Happenings
As an ongoing project that is both public art event and practice-based research, Tornow purposes the Happenings* model to celebrate experiential, spontaneous, and collaborative creative situations. Every Happening is an experiment in art-making in real time, and is a unique expression of the people who contributed to it. At a Happening, various art-making stations are activated at once: As participants interact with the stations, they make creative decisions that shape the event as it is unfolding. In this way, Happenings dissolve the separation between performer and observer, which allows us to co-create an inclusive work of art that pushes the boundaries of conventional performance and build community through creative activity.
Allan Kaprow, 1966: The fine arts traditionally demand for their appreciation a physically passive observer, working with his mind to get at what his senses register. But the Happenings are an active art, requiring that creation and realization, artwork and appreciator, artwork and life, be inseparable.
*Allan Kaprow coined the term “Happenings” in 1959 to describe these avant-garde productions. Read Kaprow’s essay in ARTFORUM journal Vol. 4 #7 (March 1966)
June 21, 2019 - Third Friday, CCB Plaza
May 31, 2019 - The Commons Festival at UNC
The Commons residency:
Performance as Responsive Practice
May 31, 2019, 8-9:30pm. CURRENT artspace.
The Commons Residency at UNC- Chapel Hill
As a 2019 resident artist for The Commons, Tornow developed a community art event that was equal parts workshop and Happening to expand the going definitions of “performance.”
Performance as a Responsive Practice explored the experience of spontaneous co-authorship as it emerged from the autonomy of score interpretation and an attitude of responsiveness to the actions (and consequences) of other participants. In the workshop, participants were introduced to performance scores as instructions for artistic activity; the history of using scores for performance, citing Fluxus and Anna Halprin’s RSVP Cycles; the necessity for suspending limiting ideas about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to perform; and the possibility for delight in collective experimentation at the intersection of stimulus and response. Our time together culminated in a unique, one-time-only Happening event, where individual energies, ideas, and contributions collided to create a shared artistic experience.
A unique aspect of The Commons residency was that each artist’s process included an embedded writer who wrote three pieces about the work for INDY Week.
Read the pieces by embedded writer Chris Vitiello:
Week 1
Week 2
And responses to the Happening by writers Michaela Dwyer and Chris Vitiello.