ACTION POTENTIAL
2023, Gallery 400, Chicago IL
ACTION POTENTIAL was a performance to many audiences and an audience to many performances.
choreographing collaborators: Claire Molla + Courtney Mackedanz
ACTION POTENTIAL housed a series of live performances inside an installation, Place of Replace.
The title of this work was named after a neurological event I find poetic. An action potential can happen after a neuron is triggered by the sensation of a stimulus. After that triggering, electricity from one neuron travels to the next, like a signal. These initial steps are determined and somewhat straight forward. But as these signals are passed from one to many cells, the system becomes increasingly complex, and what follows is our perception, which is virtually unpredictable. How we respond to the world around us is then looped back into our body as we continue to adapt and learn.
We carry on in this cycle of feedback and feedforward as we tune to our world. It’s an interdependent system of absorbing and offering information. I’m moved by this because our bodies are already attuned to moving in systems that listen. It’s no wonder movement itself is a type of thinking.
As partipicants within ACTION POTENTIAL performed, I only knew most of the systems in the room. And I say most because there will always be surprises in an unscripted performance. Everyone who participated had a unique experience, but we are all tethered to a system that changed with each iteration.
Following a lineage of performance artists who worked with chance operations, I use performance as a container for hyper awareness among everyone in the room. Being witnessed in this way is transformative. It’s not scripted or rehearsed, but left open to engage in a complete presence that only performance can offer. I believe these practices of co-creating in real time continue to be a potent strategy for listening to and for one another and suspending expectations together.
As I untangle the ways listening behaves, I’ve been reflecting on all the internal and external systems at play in my lifetime, and how I’ve grown weary in the impossible task of sorting it all out. We know there are systems in power compartmentalizing life rather than bringing it together. So how can we possibly be asked to listen, or tune ourselves, to the lifeless systems that are set by a select few? I think the complication and consideration there is important as an artist. I remain hopeful that in our shared curiosity and togetherness, we will continue to breathe malleability into our systems.
The questions I felt most anchored to in this work revolved around fluency in attunement and if listening might stabilize us more abundantly in our world.
“The eye seized on these small details, on the infinitesimally darker patches where two brush strokes had collided, because there was nothing else to grasp: no view, no closure, just a radiant openness, as if the ocean had come into the windowless room.”
Olivia Laing on Agnes Martin, in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
