365 ROUTINES

Original video ’48, 2017
HANA ERDMAN & NINA KURTELA

Live performance ’48, 2018
NINA KURTELA

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How do we relate to a specific locality today, when the age of globalization has eclipsed into mass migrations, violent displacements, and ever-present instability? Where do we belong? What is home to us? And where do we find shelter, when nationalism is the new norm and hate, fear, and segregation push for stronger borders and higher walls? Is shelter a physical or perhaps an imaginary space?

In May 2016, we – Hana Erdman and Nina Kurtela –, two artists and two friends, made an agreement. Due to our frequent travels, precarious lives, rarely spending time in the same city where we live in, we decided to devote one year of our lives to building our own sphere of belonging: a one year long choreography.

The choreography of “365 routines” demonstrates the on-going communication between two different environments, lo- cations, languages, identities, spaces and times. A common space is generated through the execution of this task. During the daily routines we engage in an imaginary space of belonging that is no longer physical or territorial. More over, it is an emotional space, an abstract space that detaches itself from the parameters of affiliation of whatever kind. In the course of the daily routines the exchange of movements between us through video gradually transforms dancing. Dancing becomes home for to us.

While making “365 routines” we agreed, that our main interest would be directed toward creating immaterial spaces and experiences that can challenge the audience and their ways of looking at performance, dance, choreography and condi- tions of their making. It is the devotion to an ongoing practice and exchange, while exposing the personal, the intimate and the private that enables an interrelational positioning of the audience, one which invites co- habitation and the imagining of the ability to move although exhausted, aged, lonely or not connected to a space of communal sharing and sheltering.

More generally, the work “365 routines” explores movement and the body affected by the conditions today’s young mak- ers live in. Constant mobility, homelessness, exhaustion through traveling and creating works with enormous spatial and temporal limitations leads to the incapacity of relating to one sole sphere of belonging. By collecting movement material and building a video archive originating at different locations around the world – from Taipei to Los Angeles – the work “365 routines” is mapping the peaking pulse of contemporary workerism and how two artists deal with it.

The original video contains 365 daily routines, which were filmed from May 2016 – May 2017 and resulted in 48 minutes long video performance. In continuation of the original, Nina Kurtela committed to learning all of the 365 routines from the movement archives as one incessant sequence. Through an ongoing daily practice she reiterates the choreography. By that a 48 minutes long live dance piece is being constructed currently.

During the live performance the original video is juxtaposed with learned movements, which might synch or might not. A distant time interval of a passed dance and a hyper present one of a happening performance challenge each other. Thereby performativity, live presence, observing and experiencing dance and choreography overlap in transcience and transitivity. Whereas the filmed body moves through abstract spaces only discernable in the subtext of the video notation, the performing body suspends the specificity of a place altogether. The performing body seek a refuge in the filmed body.

Links on videos available on request.