Kairos time: the performativity of timing and timeliness … or; between biding one’s time and knowing when to act

This paper investigates contemporary performance and artistic practice through the prism of kairos, a concept that in spite of the ‘temporal turn’ within the arts and humanities - and its familiarity within literary and rhetorical studies - has remained relatively under-interrogated in relation to artistic making and thinking. Kairos is an Ancient Greek term meaning a fleeting opportunity that needs to be grasped before it passes: not an abstract measure of time passing (chronos) but of time ready to be seized, an expression of timeliness, a critical juncture or ‘right time’ where something could happen. Kairos has origins in two different sources as Eric Charles White notes: archery - “an opening … through which the archer’s arrow has to pass”, and weaving - the “ ‘critical time’ when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp” (1987, p.13). The Ancient Greek art of technē (referring to a ‘productive’ or ‘tactical’ knowledge, rather than craft) is underpinned by the principles of kairos (opportune timing) and mêtis (cunning intelligence). Alternatively, for philosopher Antonio Negri, kairòs refers to the ‘restless’ instant where naming and the thing named attain existence (in time), for which he draws example from the way that the poet “vacillating, fixes the verse” (2003, p.153.) Drawing Negri’s writing on the ‘revolutionary time’ of kairos into dialogue with Ancient Greek rhetoric, this paper elaborates the significance of kairos to contemporary art practice and critical imagination, identifying various artistic practices that operate as contemporary manifestations of Ancient technē, or analogously to Negri’s ‘poet’: practices alert or attentive to the live circumstances or ‘occasionality’ of their own making, based on kairotic principles of immanence, intervention and invention-in-the-middle

The Italic I: between liveness and the lens

In this article, the question of ‘the alternative document’ is addressed with reference to The Italic I, a practice-based artistic enquiry developed through collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton. Evolving gradually (since 2012) through a series of research residencies, exhibitions, publications and performance-lectures, The Italic I explores the event of repeatedly falling apprehended consciously as an exercise of mind and muscle, tested out in physical and cognitive terms. The conceptual implications of falling itself (conceived within The Italic I as both a bodily-kinesthetic and verbal-linguistic act) have been elaborated within other research articles, where we have framed the purposeful action of surrendering to a repeated fall as a training practice or exercise for cultivating a willfully non-corrective tendency in thought, speech and action; for operating against expectation, against normative conditioning (Cocker and Thornton 2016, 2017). For this context, our research focus shifts to address the functioning and performativity of the various ‘documents’ generated within The Italic I, exploring what is at stake at the threshold where live and lens meet, in the gap or interval between live performance and lens-based mediation, between event and document

The Italic I: a 16 stage lexicon on the arc of falling

The Italic I is a practice-based collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton that explores the different states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall.1 Rather than an accidental occurrence encountered by chance, within our artistic investigation falling is apprehended consciously as a training exercise for mind and muscle, tested out in physical, cognitive, and even linguistic terms. Within The Italic I the act of falling is slowed and extended through the use of both lens and language, as a means for attending to its discrete phases or scenes. Central to our performative-poetic enquiry has been the production of an artists' publication (of the same title as our project), comprising photographic performance-documents presented alongside a textual lexicon generated in the 'free-fall' of conversational exchange (Fig. 1). The publication is not conceived as documentation (of a performance), but rather as a performative enactment of our enquiry, an exercise companion. We approach the production of the publication as a form of training in and of itself, requiring a specific physical and conceptual practice undertaken towards building — increasing and deepening — our collaborative capacity. Less a step-by-step manual for instructing another on how to fall, we propose the publication The Italic I as a spur or prompt for cultivating a willfully non-corrective tendency in thought, peech and action, for operating against expectation

Notion of notation >< notation of notion

Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014–2017) is an interdisciplinary research project involving artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker (working in dialogue with Alex Arteaga, Christine de Smedt and Lilia Mestre). The project unfolds through two interconnected aims: to explore the nature of 'thinking-feeling-knowing' operative within artistic practice, and to develop systems of notation for reflecting on this often hidden or undisclosed aspect of the creative process. We ask: What systems of notation can we develop for articulating the barely perceptible micro-movements and transitions at the cusp of awareness within the process of artistic "sense-making"? How might we communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within practice, without fixing that which is contingent as a literal sign? Drawing on findings from the first year of the research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (including field-work undertaken during a month-long research residency within ImPulsTanz [Vienna, 2014] and a one-week residency-workshop working with researchers at a.pass [Centre of Advanced Performance & Scenography Studies, Brussels, 2015]), we consider notation (and its related technologies) through a diagramming of the multiple, at times competing, forces and energies operative as drawing, writing and choreography enter into dialogue through shared live artistic exploration. Conceived as two interweaving artists' pages we explore these concerns through two interrelated concepts: the notion and notation of (I) figuring and (II) the (choreo-graphic) figure

Popular music, psychogeography, place identity and tourism: The case of Sheffield

Tourism and cultural agencies in some English provincial cities are promoting their popular music ‘heritage’ and, in some cases, contemporary musicians through the packaging of trails, sites, ‘iconic’ venues and festivals. This article focuses on Sheffield, a ‘post-industrial’ northern English city which is drawing on its associations with musicians past and present in seeking to attract tourists. This article is based on interviews with, among others, recording artists, promoters, producers and venue managers, along with reflective observational and documentary data. Theoretical remarks are made on the representations of popular musicians through cultural tourism strategies, programmes and products and also on the ways in which musicians convey a ‘psychogeographical’ sense of place in the ‘soundscape’ of the city

Positioning discourse on homophobia in schools: What have lesbian and gay families got to say?

This paper reports findings from a study in England, which investigated the experiences of lesbian and gay parents in relation to homophobia in primary and secondary schools. The study was part of a larger European Union project investigating the impact of family and school alliances against homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools across six nation states. Qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven lesbian and gay parents from five families were conducted to explore their unique experience and perspectives on these issues. Discourse analysis was used to facilitate understanding of how lesbian and gay families negotiated the outsider/insider and public/private spheres of the school and communities of which they were a part. Parents identified a number of strategies to address their experiences of homophobia within schools. The findings have implications for how social work recognises and promotes diversity and equality when working with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families, as social workers have a powerful role in supporting families. This involves recognising the strengths of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families in their assessments