Practice
-s
ALWAYS ALREADY
is a vehicle for new practices and mythologies to emerge through artistic and socially-engaged works such as performance, workshops and public mediation. It seeks to reclaim collective consciousness and rehearse new ways of being together.Following Argentinean artist Silvio Lang’s claim of ‘’we artists don’t create artworks; we invent practices’’ ALWAYS ALREADY approaches artistic work as the invention of forms — ethical, relational, and sustainable ways of being-with the world.
This echoes what Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui describes as interior decolonization: the ongoing dismantling of empires within.
The containers through ALWAYS ALREADY function as temporal ponctuations within an otherwise seemingly continuous, accelarating time.
Rather than seeking answers and certitude as anchoring points through the vaccum of time, we choose to inhabit uncertainty and to discover orientation through embodied pratice and performance research. Each project generates new structures, new collaborations, and new questions.
Dance, ritual, queer temporality, post-humanism, ecology, myth-making, process, questions, research.
QUARTIER GÉNÉRAL
PROTOTYPING
COEXISTENCE
Plural Spontaneity — Pattern Emergence — Reclaiming Agency
A mantra that community members of Proto have adopted, has become one core principle of our work. Games and systems focuses on relationality, rather than seemingly separated agents. It expands awareness from individual to collective, to the space between bodies rather than solely sensing one’s body. Researching ways to coexist is a positioning, one that declares: « We do not yet know all that is possible... » hence our stance to pursue explorations towards new forms of togetherness. Inspired by The Ecological Thought as Timothy Morton sees it, we use The Ecological Body, one that surrenders to recognize the human condition of relationality : we are always in relation to something or someone. Thinking, sensing and coexisting in systems of complexity.
With Noël Vézina, issac endo, Marilyne Cyr, Caroline Namts, Eli C Carreón, Emma-Lynn MacKay Ronacher, Naomi Hilaire, Vanessa Brazeau, Nora Côté.
BODY AS LANDSCAPE
Breathwork — Felt Sense — Cooperation — Imagination
Despite playing, working and coexisting often in urban settings, remembering the body as landscape refocuses our attention towards nature all around us, and within us. It is an ecological stance to think and situate ourselves within relational intelligence, complexity and change, as well as tuning in the ecology that circulates within and throughout the body. The body is a site of complexity where multiple systems overlap, coordinate and collaborate with tangible, yet subtles forces. The intelligence brings about movement, so why not dance with it ? The practice of surrendering to our natures within and to be moved by it, subverts contemporary assumptions that we should consciously, intellectually know where we’re going before we start moving. What if the body already knew what to do ? The body always already knows where to go. Each moment it scans availability and when the mind allows to soften, the body responds and moves in unpredictable, sublime ways. Use your breath, your sensations, your intuition, and your imagination to guide you. Surprise yourself or rather, let yourself be susprised. You don’t yet know what the body can do. Let it show you.
FUTURE MYTHOLOGIES
Fiction — Worlding — Speculative Fabulation
Creation is a way to inhabit a collective fiction thanks to the technology of our human bodies and our ability for imagination. Performance opens a breach and allows for new ideas, visions and cultures, to exist as possible futures. A dance, a song, a symbol or a sign, if evoked with emotion, becomes transmission. A seed of felt sense, set to spark potentiality the collective consciousness. Whether it’s through dreams, fiction or even gossip, humans exist with and through constructed fables, fabricated to align us in the same plane of existence. Always Already likes to challenge current beliefs about identity, society, and the world, through temporary imaginary consensus, which we call future mythologies.
PERFORMANCE
RESEARCH
Experimentation — Improvisation — Response-Ability
If the present moment is ever-evolving, constantly moving on to the next moment, moment-to-moment, performance is one of the only technologies that allow for such profound presence. Performance is always already an experiment of time unfolding as we sit together to witness, experience, be moved. It is also a collective agreement: we acknowledge the situations presented to us are fictionnal, yet we are experiencing them in real time and our bodies are affected by it. To enhance that feeling of existing together in an unprecedented present, performance remains research.
One strategy to keep a work alive is to infuse it with empty space. If a work is woven too tight, it no longer breathes, and becomes artifice, a mere product we long to reproduce. However, by stretching the score, we allow the spontaneous, unpredictable present to be felt. Authenticity of the present moment, through the prism of an artistic work, clashes with ordinary life, which triggers a feeling of uniqueness and magical.
SCORES AND
PLAYGROUND
Curiosity — Permission — Play
When performance is research, permission to play is granted. And when artists are playing... well, do we really have to finish this sentence ?
With Nelly Paquentin, Nicholas Bellefleur, Charles-Alexis Desgagnés, Léa Ratycz Légaré