Noa & Snow

Noa & Snow is a choreographic event during which the audience is given the possibility to write. It is a proposition to discover the everydayness of both practices in a way that complicates the notion of the everyday itself. A writing atelier becomes a performance, a choreographic studio turns into a poem. Conceived as a choreographic social experiment, Noa & Snow gently allows rather than guides, it implicates rather than explicates. The project aims at exploring the capacities of poetry to ignite imagination across several writing modes and genres in order to shed some light on the possible articulations between performance practices, writing practices and poetry. In Noa & Snow the spaces of dance and poetry will collapse into one another to simultaneously question and outline the contours of their spheres, re-mix them. Choreographically the project questions the center of dance; when dance becomes a support and vector for something other it de-centralizes, it questions its potential as a social event. In this project, poetry is both an aim, and a method. Noa & Snow uses poetry as a generative tool for thinking, behaving, learning and choreographing in patterns different from those established by habit and inertia. We work with strategies such as domain-shift, compulsive writing, intense feedbacking, distracted attention to develop both choreographic and written material. Established figures of the art world are invited to fantasize in flesh together with anyone who may want to practice this approach. We understand dance/choreography as a mindset for constantly reconfiguring a vast network of relationships between form, content, disciplines and references. The proposal puts forward not only an experimental artistic presentation but also an experimental mode of witnessing. It implies a specific mode of participation: people are invited to work on their almost daily writing tasks: applications, e-mails, long forgotten instant messages, shopping lists, letters maybe... at the same time as a performance is unraveling. Noa & Snow fosters transversal thinking and living, by creating conditions / situations for dialogue between artists and / or theoreticians from different fields of knowledge, by implicating various sites of cultural experience / production in Vienna and abroad, by sharing and circulation, and by proposing the audience a different way of witnessing performances.

Noa & Snow, a team, a time spent together,a choreographic enchantment, a prefatory charm. Thinking about dance and choreography as a field of expended practices, the correlation between how language speaks, and more specifically writes, of in and around dance has turned into a field of activities for the team, which materialized in The Book, the communication around the public events, the notebooks, our annotations in the margins of texts, the films and the website. Important to Noa & Snow were works that study the multiple layers of our interdependency, our mutual indebtedness and the support structures that sustain our existences; all the infrastructural and maintenance (mostly invisible domestic) work that has to happen, for so-called creative work to come to be (amplified by the pandemic). Following groundbreaking works like The Undercommons (Moten & Harney, 2013), we re- became able to conceive of 'study' as a set of relationships with no clear ends and with no clear names, a complicated interdependency between places, people, and resources (or lack thereof). A life form that can only take shape and endure as friendship, a shared duration, a lived endurance with one another, an understanding of our "mutual indebtedness" (instead of our being subjected to national and global debts), in the terms Randy Martin formulated in the lecture "Dance and Finance" (2013). In Noa & Snow, poetry has been the main research tool. Specifically various forms of collage (in notebooks, books, laminations, cut-ups, choreographic constructions...) have been developed as reflection modes. Although concomitant to the pandemic and despite the sanitary situation, the project came to look at various systems of organizations of thoughts and body, such as language or choreographic events through poetical acts of collecting, borrowing, re-compos(t)ing via collective (mis)readings. Noa & Snow has been the realization, as we danced in & out of confinements, that a space of study could be frictionned into life, tel un génie, up and alongside other writings, writers, translators, dancers and other intercessors. Through an engagement with the poetic, we -literally- slid swords into words into libraries & dances: annotated texts, misquoted, under-understood, (re)mixed, we borrowed stances and, if only for one beat, colored them. Some lexicon appeared, a (dys)lexicalisation of sorts, that conjured words-concepts such as protextions and extracreditorialisation. These bundles- of-words are lending shape to the sensation of resting from the need to be original, or rather lending shape to the idea of travelling with, through and against the different legacies that we are constantly borrowing: Noa & Snow or the sensation that nothing that comes out of our mouths, fingers, keyboards, (mother's) tongues is ours.