Report week 3
We read alltogether the text “The Laugh Meter”, written in the New York Times in 1916. It is about trying to fix the time of public's essential share in the performance through laughing.
Bojana wants to create some performance investigating the issue of “laughter time”, what happens in this in between, which impact on the presence of the performer.
We saw an extract of Lilia's performance “SOB”.
A proposition of Thomas: himself, Lilia, Bojana and Coralie had a practical laughing session, each on his turn is filmed while laughing – of interest was the sometimes confusing border between forced and genuine laughter.
Coralie: talked about her wish to work on the humor of children. It will be a visual anthropology, with a cognitive linguistics and development psychology background. Visual art will be involved, dolls with funny children intervention were showed.
Practical sessions with plasticine. Pictures were token.
Report session 3:
Workshop with Antonia Baehr and Valérie Castang.
The work of Antonia on Laughter is part of a broader work on emotions. Her project is now to investigate to 4 basic emotions (fear, anger, happiness, sadness). Her research is based on workshops she is doing with people using different disposals to observe and study emotions.
Laughter is approached as a musical composition – an issue is the process of creating a notation system, giving account of the sound, the facial expressions, the movement of the body, etc.
We started with an initiation to Laughter Yoga. ( noteworthy is that during one of her performance in Ghent, Antonia was overwelmed by a laughter yoga club, that finaly occupied the stage at the end of the performance. They do not accept the idea that it is possible to reproduce the laugh of someone else, the laughing being something irreductibly personal) After we received a partition of the laughter of a woman Antonia recorded. A partition A. Baehr is interpreting on stage. lots of different sounds, rythms, body interventions. We tried to interpret it alltogether, then listened to Antonia's interpretation, and finaly to the original recording.
The second part of the session was devoted to the study of a wide range of emotions. Starting from an analysis of filmtracks acting several strong emotions ( eg. fear in King Kong, anger sadness in Thomas Vinterbergh's Festen, a baby's laugh, Ingmar Bergman's Persona). After a meticulous observation, the proposition was to find out a notation system that would help us to memorize and who would be readable by others who would interpret the same film fragment. We then went to perform our intepretation of the emotion (without speaking) of the filmtrack. After there was a collective discussion on the issue of the complexity of a notation system, and on the performativity of emotions reproduction.
Report session 4
-Maria Clara: interactive installation with a hybrid creature composed of teleguided cars (toys) and a latex pussy or dick. Was tested in the swimming pool. Mcl also showed her one minute video, the exploration of a hilarous body.
-Davis: brainstorming session on what crazy things we could do with 400 000 euros.
-Christophe Meierhans presented his project about “Paul Bremer: Keynote Address at the TD Waterhouse Investment Conference, delivered 4 February 2005, San Diego, CA” , the strategy of getting progressively drunk. His future work will be about transoccidental identity, observed in international organizations like the UN (cf. former project in Sudan) He will investigate this issue further in Palestine.
-Bojana Bauer: report on her Tuesday session with Lilia and Thomas on her idea of the laughing meter. She used you-tube tracks of humorous film series, these tracks were reproduced. The focus of the work is on what happens during the gap that is the time of the (virtual) public's (fake) laughter.
-Coralie: proposal to interview the art and humour members, format: a half an hour plan sequence, with one funny object, about their relationship to art and humor, and their current research project in BC. This video will be showed in loop during the plankton bar.
