DISSERTATION Emergence Karola Lüttringhaus 2021

EMERGENCE

HOW THIS ESSAY IS COMING ABOUT

The structure of this essay follows the structure of my choreographic process. It all begins with a
huge amount of information, ideas, images, and associations, gathered to have around me and
become 'the soup I swim in'. Slowly I work my way in to individual scenes. I edit, I add, I edit. There is
no forcing it, it has to come about on its own time. Some major topics appear and get pushed aside,
others persist or become more important. What remains now is a continuously dynamic network of
complex, intertwined, three-dimensional, and experiential elements. Together these create
something that was not there before and that lives on in our minds and bodies for an indeterminable
duration and in a multitude of ways.

All movements have their own emotional or narrative companions. For me, the movement and the
meaning can not be separated, and creativity and the body can not be separated. I liken the structure
of my pieces and creative process to the bio-tensegrity of the body, which is characterized by a visco-
elastic contiguous web of interconnected tension and compression elements, arranged in fractal
organization of larger and smaller connections. Movement in one area causes movement at all other
areas. Like hypertext this essay links forth and back and across into the other parts of the portfolio,
which I suggest you view before reading this text.

This essay is a representation of my way of working and it is also a piece. By 'piece' I mean the
structure that serves as the basis for the emergence that takes place when it is shared in a
performance. As you are reading and engaging with this essay, it is a performance, which is also part
of what makes a piece, that it has come into existence. A piece is an organism, more than the sum of
its parts.

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WHY I ALWAYS WRITE SUCH SHORT PARAGRAPHS (for Lynette)

Headlines are like scene titles. They are broader gestures, that can linger for longer than the detailed
content of the little chapters they create, and hold their content in tangible ways in our memory
while reading. Headlines and smaller gestures then, together, orchestrate in the ways that the body
does as well. In complex, multi-directional waves, dealing with timing, interference patterns and
negotiating togetherness. The essay emerges from the play of its parts, which don't really exist as
separate parts, but do indeed have identities and a will of their own. As I write, I fill in the smaller
gestures, like cells and particles, that make up the more easily perceivable groupings, to reveal the
endless complexity of the whole, which also doesn't stop at the skin, but includes you, as you read...
So we are dancing together across time.

Really short paragraphs also help me find my way in something complex. If I didn't have headlines, i
would get lost in all the little letters.

DISCOVERY AS WELL
Generally speaking, things show up for us as we are ready for them. By listening more closely to
specific moments in choreography we enable discovery, understanding, and emergence. Something
new is created that couldn't exist in this way before. It is made of parts that we discovered along the
way, of the energies that are released in the making and in the performance of it, and the personal
and interpersonal resonances it evokes long after the actual experience is over. The dancer dances a
dance with body parts and narratives that are components of a paradigm, a landscape, and
existence. But what they make together is new, manifests only for a brief instance, exists in its
becoming, and makes way to something else that wasn't there before and never will be there again.
And so life births itself.

LINEARITY, TIMING, TRUST & CHAOS

This emergence can not be done for everyone at the same pace within the same linear continuity.
Linearity can be a burden and skew the picture of the whole and how it functions. Yes, linearities do

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exist, they are directional multiplicities, such as the many kinetic chains within the body: but while
being chains that react in a chronological fashion, they also interact and effect one another across
vectors, and form cross-undulations that present more of a picture of 'chaos'. I don't really like the
term chaos, because to me it expresses a sort of victimization in the face of events that are
beginning to push and pull us around and we become undone. Using the term chaos here is
misleading perhaps, but I will use it in the understanding that while over time we do become undone,
life is a series of agreements that resonate with one another in unpredictability that is entirely
trustworthy. The whole thing is trustworthy, all of life and death. But this is hard to grasp for
someone like me who has learned to resist reality at all cost. The above mentioned linear
multiplicities provoke a complexity beyond our conscious control. To fight this state would become
chaos, to emerge and flow with it, would be effortlessness. So, instead of reducing the magnitude,
and inhibiting the complexity, trust and abandon can be a method for flowing within.

Chaos is only that if the full picture is inaccessible to us in cognitive analysis and we insist on
understanding and dominating the events. The problem is a learned response of rejection of anything
that is not easily reducible to cognition. The complexity can only be grasped and aligned with in fully
embodied ways. Through experience. Through living.

A scene that we see in a dance performance resembles more a simultaneity than a linearity. It speaks
to us clearly and we struggle only to translate it into words, although we do not struggle to connect
to it in 'other' ways. I will leave this statement vague, as I have no explanation at the moment. But
these other ways are part of my interests in writing this essay. We struggle to recognize that there
are other ways of connecting, feeling, knowing, because we have rationalized ourselves to one way
of knowing. To remain open to these other ways and to practice recognizing and living with and
operating through them is an inherent action of choreography. Intuition falls into this category. We
are the complexity. And we can trust that it is the method to achieve clarity and to walk, dance, or
live cohesively.

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DISSERTATION Emergence Karola Lüttringhaus 2021

HOME
"I didn't want to imitate anybody. Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use."
Pina Bausch (3)

I find it hard to see the new, to find the unknown and distill something out of the hardly perceptible,
out of the habitual, into a new piece of insight, into a realization of formerly unknown relationality.
How is something new, exactly? Am I telling the same story over and over again in my
choreographies and in my dancing? Am I succeeding in emergence? There is newness of form, of
pathways of actions, and there is newness in experience. Maybe newness in form is not as important.
as society makes us believe in its insatiableness for cutting edge work and arts - technology
collaborations and so on. What is more important perhaps is being fully, and responding fully, and
moving fully, which allows the habitual to be discovered in more refined ways which could lead to
discovering new pathways into new form. By refining the ability to immerse oneself into the other
ways of knowing one creates possibilities for such discovery.

What Pina Bausch mentions in the above quote is something I have lived for the first then years of my
life as a choreographer. I wanted to be isolated, un-distracted by other opinions, to find something
true to my vision. To find what it was that came from deep inside me, my very own language and
things to say. Would this discovery be something new or something utterly familiar? This did not
exclude artists from bringing their creativity into my process, but it meant being very perceptive to
what these ideas were. I had a very strong sense of right or wrong during those times. Bausch hints at
this in a later quote when she says that she clearly and viscerally knows if something belongs or not. I
tried to leave as little up to improvisation as possible. And I made decisions about every little
element. I usually see the piece in its entirety, the lighting the space, the costumes, the sounds. I
know what's right for this piece, it is like I am searching for the puzzle piece it takes to make it come
to life.

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DISSERTATION Emergence Karola Lüttringhaus 2021

Certainly, as a choreographer, this is where my specificity in choreography comes from. Even though
I am guided by intuition and the trust in its wisdom, I attach myself to that which emerges, hold it,
pass it on to dancers and we play with it. I have to be attentive to the sensation of whether
something belongs or doesn't. All of this takes place somewhere in a nowhere. A locality I can not
describe. But it feels like home.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

(1) Bausch, Pina, quotes from and interview with Bausch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=f04Tk1pqQok&feature=youtu.be) @26:06

(2) exercise, definition etymological definition of the word exercise, from

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exercise#:~:text=%22exercise%2C%20execution%20of
%20power%3B,exercise%3B%20practice%2C%20follow%3B%20carry

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(3) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.azquotes.com/quote/698272

(4) Jerome Bel in 'Le Dernier Spectacle', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aVhozKZDks ,

exampels @ 08:23, 13:00, 17:51 all 3 dancers dancing a section originally choreographed by Susanne
Linke

(5) Rumi, 13th century Persian poet Rumi

(6) Bausch, Pina, quote from: https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-pina-bausch/when-i-first-began-

choreographing-i-never-thought-of-it-as-choreography-but-as-e

(7) Bergson, Henri, "Introduction to Metaphysics", page 2: (http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/int-

meta.pdf)

(8) Bausch, Pina, interview on the balcony, youtubevideo; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s; @26:06:

(9) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s; @26:06: about Cafe Mueller

(10) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s;

(11) quote by Pina Bausch from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/478344-to-understand-what-i-

am-saying-you-have-to-believe#:~:text=%E2%80%9CTo%20understand%20what%20I%20am
%20saying%2C%20you%20have%20to%20believe,not%20existing%20forms%20of%20dance.
%E2%80%9D

(12) Hunter, Lynette, "Ways of knowing and Ways of Being Known: An Introduction"

(13) Chomsky, Noam, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1bHzBoggk

"Noam Chomsky Language's great Mysteries" @00:30

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(14) Beattie, Geoffrey, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=2nyxuiua-JM)

(15) Beattie, Geoffrey, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=2nyxuiua-JM)

(16) Haraway, Donna Haraway, video, talk about the 'humanimal', https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=BUA_hRJU8J4

(17) Noe, Alva, talk, https://youtu.be/HOt4vcBV_fk

(18) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7640514-there-are-situations-of-

course-that-leave-you-utterly-speechless#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThere%20are%20situations%20of
%20course%20that%20leave%20you%20utterly%20speechless,where%20dance%20comes%20in
%20again.%E2%80%9D

(19) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.pinabausch.org/en/pina/what-moves-me

(*9a) Alex Chow (artofchow.com) youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=QTFgJiMtJmg&t=608s

(*9b) "Vollmond" by Pina Bausch, video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=hnyjdPIsKTg&feature=emb_logo

(***7) Ben Spatz https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10462937.2021.1908585 "Artistic

research and the queer prophetic" (1. Knowledge and form)

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