‘This is hardly an invitation’ opened may 22nd in Frascati Amsterdam. The performance was a collaboration between sound artist Mark Morse (aka Morsanek) and choreographer/performer Hillary Blake Firestone. The performance was part of Density +/- 0, one event in the Amsterdam art manifestation My Name is Spinoza organized by SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) and the Amsterdam Spinoza Kring.
Intent on placing Spinoza in a contemporary context, Violet Bureau commissioned several choreographers and sound artists to create duo performance work inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Body without Organs.
Floriaan Ganzevoort made the lighting design for this performance.
‘This is hardly an invitation’ opened may 22nd in Frascati Amsterdam. The performance was a collaboration between sound artist Mark Morse (aka Morsanek) and choreographer/performer Hillary Blake Firestone. The performance was part of Density +/- 0, one event in the Amsterdam art manifestation My Name is Spinoza organized by SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) and the Amsterdam Spinoza Kring.
Intent on placing Spinoza in a contemporary context, Violet Bureau commissioned several choreographers and sound artists to create duo performance work inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Body without Organs.
Floriaan Ganzevoort made the lighting design for this performance.
The performer/choreographer Hillary Blake Firestone (born in VS) was artist in residence at DWA for the period of two years, further more she is well known as teacher and as performer in the works of Keren Levi, Beppie Blankert and many more.
This is hardly an invitation takes its cue from Deleuze & Guattari’s depiction of the Body without Organs as being ‘full of gaiety, ecstasy and dance…colours and sounds’, an anti-concept flamboyantly and belligerently opposed to ‘a dreary parade of sucked-dry…bodies.’ In this respect, one might expect a raucous fiesta, a rock opera, a flag corps, a farce.
Meanwhile, engaging D&G’s edict of ‘the organs, not the organism’, the performance plays host to a set of practices that seek to re-configure the body and disrupt its organisation. The performative act as an attempt to inhabit and shed the body’s distinct physical layers; a process of emptying in order to be filled. On these terms, the work travels towards an abstract, internal limit: a stationary journey from totality towards what could perhaps best be described as molecular truth. Or God’s own flea circus…
In his live audio score, Mark Morse combines an array of feedback generators with waveguide-modelling software designed to emulate human and animal vocal mechanisms. And yes, dope beatmaking skillz.