Tele Visions

Sara and Marcos conceived the evening as an experiment in telepathy: have you ever had paranormal experiences? Do you know someone who has telepathic skills? Did you ever hear a ghost? Have you ever had premonitory vision? Did you hear of astral voyages?

The telepathy plays on the following assumption: what if we all have telepathic powers to send and receive messages between each other? In the setting of Tele Visions, there are two groups in front of each other (the audience watching the experiment and the members of the audience chosen to be the receivers), with Sara and Marcos in between as the senders of the message.

The senders are sending out a message: an instruction to be performed by the receivers. This message is only visible for the audience. The sender and the receiver “telepathically” communicate the message by looking into each other’s eyes. The receiver performs the message without knowing what the message is.

The triangular relation created between the performers, the audience and the senders creates a multitude of layers of reading and engaging in the dynamics of the performance.Finally the work reflects back on: what a performance is, what it produces, how virtuosity and failure works, what our expectations are.

—–

“We let other forces enter the work: chance and understanding on a level of communication other than language. That way we empower the people involved in a collaboration in which everybody is engaged in creating meaning.”

Workshop – Tele Visions

In an attempt to include chance and other contingencies in the work, to destabilize power relations based on linear logics and to question the effect of belief and make belief in a performative environment. Can we create the magic by creating the rules for the magic to happen? Like an “Experimental Magic” without magicians. Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation and prediction?

The workshop will propose other notions of autorship and collaboration. The aim is to question the idea of responsability and ego in a creation process, and to work with possible speculations of audience’s expectation: in between the artist’s desire and the audience’s desire. The notion of “thirdness” is used by Manente and Simoes to create a space of dialogue and experimentation.

During the workshop Manente and Simoes propose an embodiment of three roles present in their protocol of “telepathy”: the performers, the audience and the writers/artists. In each role there is a topic to unfold: expectation and participation of the audience, the power of language in a performative environment and the (de)responsibility of the performer. The dispositive offers the possibility to create a third existence which is “a self”, “an entity” other than us, with own quality and ability to perform.