이스라엘 출신의 안무가 로템 타샤크는 대도시 뉴욕에서 사람들의 움직임을 관찰하여 분석한 글과 렉처 퍼포먼스 <정상(正常)의 광경들>을 선보였다. 작가는 비슷한 규모의 도시에서 살아가는 서울의 관객과 함께 움직임의 자유에 대해 사유하고자 하였다. 홈페이지에는 온라인 강연 당시의 기록인 영문 녹취록와 국문 번역본, 그리고 타샤크의 논문 전문(하단에 링크)을 공유하고자 한다.
An Israeli choreographer Rotem Tashach presented a lecture-performance via a video call based on his essay Spectacles of Normalcy, an analysis of quotidian movements that are spotted across the city of New York in places like a corridor, gym, subway, swimming pool, street, etc. Through this, he invites audiences to imagine together how freedom of movement can be achieved in the city of Seoul. Here in this homepage, the text recording of the lecture (EN), the translated excerpt (KR) and a full-length version of the article will be shared along.
Spectacles of Normalcy, 2019
정상의 광경들, 2019
Rotem Tashach 로템 타샤크
Rotem Tashach, Spectacles of Normalcy, 2019
Presented by greenroom @ WESS, Seoul
KR(excerpt)/EN Presented by greenroom @ WESS, Seoul
제 이름은 로템, 이스라엘 출신의 안무가입니다. 저는 자유에 관한, 특히 몸의 움직임의 자유에 관한 질문들을 탐구합니다. 뉴욕에서 살아가다보면 사람들이 도시 공간 내에서 어떻게 움직이는지에 대해 자주 생각하게 됩니다. 그러다 보면 도시 공간 내 사람들의 움직임과 스튜디오 안에서의 무용수의 움직임, 혹은 도로나 신호등 같은 장애물이 없는 공간을 자유롭게 누비는 사냥꾼의 움직임 같은 것을 비교해보게 됩니다. 이처럼 어떠한 움직임도 허용되는 완전히 자유로운 공간을 상상하다보면, 뉴욕과 같은 대도시의 공공 장소 내 우리의 움직임을 규정하는 세 가지의 패러다임이 있다는 것을 깨닫게 됩니다.
1.
가장 주된 패러다임은 직선적 움직임으로, 이는 통로, 인도, 도로, 복도, 계단과 같은 곳에서 이루어지는 움직임과 관련되어 있습니다. 이러한 공간에서 우리의 몸은 이쪽 또는 저쪽으로, 즉 양방향으로의 직선적 움직임을 경험하게 됩니다. 이 같은 직선적 공간에서 바닥에 주저앉거나 춤을 추는 사람, 지그재그로 걷거나 바닥을 굴러다니는 사람을 보는 일은 흔치 않은데, 이는 우리가 공간의 규율을 따라야만 하기 때문입니다. 앞서 걷는 사람과 같은 속도로 따라 걷는 것은 앞 사람을 불편하게 할 수 있으며, 따라서 우리는 속도를 높이거나 늦추야 합니다. 반대편에서 걸어오는 사람이 있을 경우에도 우리는 비켜서서 공간을 양보해야만 합니다. 이는 직선적 공간에 경쟁적인 움직임이 내재되어 있음을 의미합니다.
2.
또 하나의 움직임의 패러다임은 엘리베이터에서 찾아볼 수 있습니다. 이는 몸의 움직임을 강제로 멈추는 공간으로, 그저 서서 기다리는 것 외에 이곳에서 우리가 할 수 있는 것은 없습니다. 인간의 움직임을 고려하지 않은 채 고안된 이 같은 공간은 인간의 몸에 굴욕감을 줍니다. 이는 비행기나 지하철에서도 마찬가지인데, 장시간의 여행 동안 우리의 몸은 비행기나 지하철 공간 내에 갇힌 채 마치 화물처럼 이곳에서 저곳으로 옮겨지기 때문입니다.
3.
도시 공간 내 움직임을 규정하는 마지막 패러다임은 ‘지정된 자유’입니다. 움직임의 자유를 얻기 위해 우리는 도시를 가로 질러 특별히 지정된 공간에 가야만 하는데, 그곳에서도 특정한 움직임만이 허용됩니다. 요가 수업에서는 요가를, 아이스스케이트장에서는 스케이트를 타는 것만이 허용되기 때문입니다. 다시 말해 규범에서 벗어나는 움직임은 이러한 ‘지정된 자유’의 공간에서도 용납되지 않는다는 것을 뜻합니다. 과거 인간의 움직임은 매우 유기적이고 혼재된 형태로 발전해왔으나, 현대에 와서는 매우 분리되고 고립되며 특화되는 양상을 보입니다.
들뢰즈와 가타리는 유목적 공간개념인 매끄러운 공간과 정착적인 공간 개념, 홈 패인 공간에 대해 논의한 바 있습니다. 뉴욕을 예로 들자면, 뉴욕의 도시 공간은 수많은 통로들로 나누어져있으며, 이는 홈 패인 공간의 예라 할 수 있습니다. 이곳에서 우리는 이쪽에서 저쪽으로 이동하기 위해 얼마만큼의 시간이 걸리는지, 몇 번의 정거장을 지나야 하는지 끊임없이 세야 합니다. 또 하나의 특징은 하나의 움직임이 다른 움직임을 – 마치 한 걸음에서 다음 걸음으로 진행하듯이 – 계속해서 대체한다는 점입니다.
수영장과 연못을 예로 들자면, 수영장은 도시와 같은 홈 패인 공간인 반면, 연못은 매끄러운 공간이라 할 수 있습니다. 이 같은 매끄러운 공간은 고대 로마의 표준을 따라 격자 형태로 만들어진 뉴욕의 공간 구조와는 매우 다릅니다. 도시는 완전히 추상화된 일종의 데카르트적 공간이며, 그곳에서 우리는 생각없이 공간에 완전히 종속될 뿐입니다.
이러한 예들을 통해 나는 움직임의 자유를 촉진하고, 인간의 몸을 고려하여 도시를 만드는 대안적 방법들에 대해 생각해볼 필요가 있음을 강조하고자 합니다. 이는 우리의 움직임을 규정하는 도시의 공간이 우리의 정신 건강 및 복지는 물론, 개인과 사회의 관계 형성에 있어 중요한 의미를 갖기 때문입니다.
My name is Rotem. I am an Israeli choreographer or a choreographer who grew up in Israel. I deal with questions of freedom; that is specifically freedom of motion. What can we do with our body in terms of movement
While we live inside of urban areas specifically New York City at the beginning of the 21st century. When i am thinking of freedom of movement, I am comparing freedom of motion to what a dancer can do in the studio and how we can move in the studio, or to the space of the nomad or to the space of hunters/gatherers. So I am looking at New York City. I am thinking about how people move in New York City and what they can do. In my mind, I have both the freedom of what it is like to be in a dance studio and to dance. Or what it’s like to be a hunter/gatherer and move around the space where there are no streets, there are no traffic lights, there is no place that confines you. Imagine, for example, you are on a vacation on some nice beach out there. You can walk around. You can sit down on the sand. You can go into the water. You can swim. You can come out of the water. There are a lot of things you can do with your body at the same time. And one after the other, you don’t need to go anywhere. You are already in a space where all of these activities and all of these different movements or motions can come together in a space that allows you to just be and just move yourself as how you’d like to move yourself. In contrast, when looking at the city of New York, I was looking at what is possible while you’re living in such a big city, especially in New York. And I’ve come to realize that there are three choreographic paradigms that really govern the public space.
1.
The main paradigm is the one that is linear such as a corridor. When you think of corridors, think of everything that has to do with a linear way of moving in one direction. That is, pavements, roads, hallways, staircases. Think of what those places make our bodies do and how they make our bodies move. We can either move in a certain direction or in the other direction. There is no point in us, for example, sitting down on the ground or you don’t get to see someone starting to dance. Or zigzag. Or roll on the floor in a pavement in New York City. Everyone just has to walk. Now consider what those hallways do to us. We have to oblige. We have to follow the rule of everyone that is moving around us. So I cannot walk at the same pace someone who’s walking ahead of me. Because that’d be a little bit creepy like I am following them, right? So I have to go past them. Or I have to slow down. And it’s also weird to be walking side by side to someone because that’s also very very weird. So in a sense, it makes for a very competitive environment where I have to either walk faster to past a person in front of me or slow down constantly while at the same time, people that are coming towards me I have to clear the path for them so we are struggling for the same space. There is no one way for us to move in diagonals or to stop and just stare around/look around. We have to keep the pace of the pavement. This is the first choreographic paradigm. It really governs most of our lives when we live in an urban society, especially in New York city.
2.
The other choreographic paradigm is an elevator. But I also mean everywhere where you're forced to stop moving and there’s nothing for you to do with your body. It is a place that really humiliates the human body in many senses. Think of a situation where you go into an elevator. There’s really nothing for your body to do other than just stand and wait. We practice different senses of differance, right? We just stand and we wait. But we don’t stretch. We don’t sit on the ground. There is nothing really for us to do; human movement is not taken into account in that situation. This is the same when we go into the airplane seat when we take our places inside of the airplanes. We are just locked in that place. Our bodies are locked in that place for many many many hours. There is no stretching. No lying. There’s nothing we can do to levitate that situation. We are just treated as cargo in many senses. We are just shipped from one place to another place. The way that the human body needs to move just in order to be is not taken into account. And that accounts for a great number of spaces that you are encountered in our everyday movement. Like an elevator, but also a subway car. When you go into a subway car, you don’t practice any kind of physical activity. We don’t allow ourselves to move things around. There’s nothing for us to do other than wait and bite our time until we get to where we need to get.
3. The third paradigm of choreographic movement that we have is that of designated freedoms. In order for us to enjoy our bodily movement and the way we actually move, we need to cross the city and get to places that are very specialized and very particular in what they allow our bodies to move. So if you go to a yoga class, you can practice yoga. If you go to an ice-skating rink, you can do ice-skating. There’s no sense of doing yoga in an ice-skating rink, is there? Or have you ever gone to a dance club and try doing yoga in the dance club? There’s just no point in doing that. Or have you ever gone to a yoga class and try to just dance? So what happens is that we are not allowed to step outside of the norms. We are not allowed to do anything other than that very very limited physical activity that that space provides. And of course, we need to pay for it. So in a sense of human movement, which can be seen as something that evolved and changed in much more organic and much more intertwined in previous years, now it’s become very very separated, very isolated, very specialized. We need to cross the city. We need to get to another part of the city. We need to walk into a place. in that place. We can only practice very particular movements.
Let me restart by referring to Deleuze & Gatari’s inspirational article that’s called “Smooth and Striated.” A lot of this paper was inspired by Deleuze & Gatari’s paper. In this, they divide and describe two very different statues. One is striated which comes from the latin word stratum, layers. That is, a space which constantly is striated by something that continuously divides and separates that space. If you look at New York City, for example, (Sunmi, can we look at the photo of new york from above?) you can see that it really divides its space into many corridors. That, by the very definition, is the definition of striated space. It’s a space that’s constantly divided, constantly put into a certain rhythm. When we think of street light on broadway or on the sixth avenue, for example, it’s not a place for us to be. It’s a place for us to traverse, to get across to get to the other site. No one says OK, I will go to a certain place in the pavement on the sixth avenue and just hang out. We don’t do picnics on sixth avenue. We don’t play ball on the sixth avenue. It’s just a place for us to cross. Now, this has tremendous implications in our psychic well-being in what it does to us because striation or moving in striated space is constantly counting, we are constantly thinking how much time will it take me to get from this part of the city to the place where I want to go. How, how many subway stations will I have to wait until I get there. How many miles should I cross. How many kilometers should I cross. How many steps should I take. This is really what characterizes moving in striated spaces. The experiences are empty. It’s not a place that we are waiting for. It’s not like we are waiting to be in a traffic jam. We are not waiting to be on the subway. It’s just a place that’s kind of empty for us and there’s nothing for us to do in that space, but wait for it to be over. The other thing that it really characterizes is that in terms of movement, it’s made of one movement unit that continuously replaces itself. like the step. one step after one another.
(Can we look at the swimming pool, for example?) In order to understand Deleuze & Gatari’s definition of smooth space and striated space, I've given you a few examples of a pond and swimming pool. Think how different they are from one another. In the swimming pool, that’s divided into many lanes where we are constantly counting how many laps I’ve done back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And movement goes, one another, the same movement. (swinging arms) One after the other. Like a step. This is the only thing that we get to do with our body in a repetitive movement. We count how many calories we've burned, we count how many minutes we’ve spent in the swimming pool. It’s not like we stop for a minute, and play around. It’s not a place to be but a place to cross. On the other hand, the other space that they are looking at is a smooth space. They compare it with nomadic space. (maybe we can have the slide of the swimming pond now?) So in the swimming pond or in the smooth space, we don’t want to cross that space or to get to somewhere because we are already in a place. And that place allows us to actually be. We already are where we wanted to go. It’s not that we cross the pond. We can play with our friends. We can hang out in the water. The freedom of motion that you get while you’re in a swimming pond is immense. It’s tremendous and it’s very inventive. There are many many things that we do in a swimming pond without even thinking about them because we are. And we spent a lot of time in one space without moving to anywhere without crossing that space. And we are not counting anything. We are just journeying through time. (maybe we can have an image of running on the treadmill?) The cities that are built like new york by the roman standard of the grid system, is made for commodities. It is made for shipping things from one place to another. In many senses, it doesn’t take human beings into account. it takes commodities into account. So it’s very very striated. It’s made in such a way that things can move through it very easily and very fast from one direction to another direction. There are slow little pockets inside of it where human beings actually stay and spend some time and be social with one another, interact with one another. Actually be. Socially be. For example, the idea of the treadmill is a complete abstraction. If you take a hunter/gatherer and you put them on a treadmill, they would not understand what that space is and feel just very weird. There is nothing to do on the treadmill other than run. It’s made in such a dependant way that it’s basically occurred a thesis of cartesian space, which means that it’s completely or almost entirely abstracted. It’s got no surroundings. If you think about hunters/gatherers, they run when they have to run and they climb the tree and ground around them. It’s a ground that they need to look at and they need to be in touch with their senses in order to understand what’s going on around them. The pace in which they traverse the space is very erotic in many senses because it has to take the surroundings into account. When we move in the city, we don’t need to take that into account. We just have our own rhythm of us moving through space which is very cartesian, very abstract. This idea of abstraction comes into almost pinnacle; it’s a place where there are no hindrances. There is no environment. There is no bear to watch out for. There are no rocks that we need to worry about. There are no trees in our way. We don’t need to think about where we put the other steps. It’s always already there. The floor is flattened. It’s made for us in such a dependant way that we can absolutely forget about the treadmill and we can look at the television. So it takes our bodies away from our bodies. It makes our bodies do what they’re doing without us having to think about it and to relate to it to the actual environment. If you think of a flat floor, for example, it does the same thing. If I am stepping on the flat floor of the pavement, I know that it’s so dependable. It’s so obvious that it’d be there in the next step that i don’t need to worry about pavement being an environment. I can forget about the pavement and I can walk at my regular pace. So it is very different from the smooth space. Let me maybe talk a little bit about what Deleuze and Gatari describe a smooth space. They give two examples. The smooth space is a space that is homogenous. If you think of smooth and striated quickly, the striated is the grid and then the smooth is the thing inside the box, inside the grid. It’s the thing that concatenated by the grid. And they give the example of the city which that concatenates nature. It takes nature and it divides it into this grid in order to control it and in order to subjugate it and in order to transform it into a way that allows things to move from one place to another. And I can tell that this is what it does to human movement as well. This is what it does to our freedom as well. Instead of being very organic in what we can do with our bodies and instead of flowing from climbing to a tree or hugging a person, to laying on the ground, to walking around, to wandering about, we now need to get out of it if we wanted to swing our arms, for example. We need to wear clothes, get out of the house, walk in many hallways, go down the stairs, go into the subway, go all these halls, all of these linear corridors, then wait for an hour before we get to the other side of the city. And then walk into space like a gym where we finally can swing our arms around and have some kind of freedom of motion. But we can only do that. We can only do that. so it takes away from your organic possibilities of the body. I am comparing that to a dance studio. In the dance studio, you already are. All of these things you can do with our bodies that don’t need to travel in order to do them. They’re already there, organically composed of one another. You can dance, you can lay around, you can slide. You can do a lot of things.
Conclusion: We need to figure out different ways of building the cities that will allow people to actually enjoy a lot of freedom of motion and we take the human body into account. And ask ourselves what it means to stop in many traffic lights along one way, what it means to be considerate to other people in our space one after the other. When we walk outside the door, we have to consider, sometimes, hundreds of human beings in each and every day which means we stop, we move, we stop, we move when we are in a car in the cities. Our nerve system that is subjected to all of this acceleration/deceleration, we get to traffic islands and there’s nothing for us to do before we cross the actual road. The traffic island doesn’t take the human being into account. It takes the cargo into account because the cargo doesn’t care whether it sits on the road for two-three days. But a human being, in the traffic island, if you look at someone running, then they jog in place because they have nowhere to jog in. And that I think has very serious implications on our mental health and well-being and the way we form relations as a society because it essentially there are various places for us to be.
Artist
이스라엘 텔 아비브 출신의 로템 타샤크는 독립적으로 활동하는 예술 감독, 강사, 안무가이자 퍼포머이며 렉처 퍼포먼스 형태의 작업을 선보인다. 뉴욕대에서 퍼포먼스 연구와 인터렉티브 커뮤니케이션 프로그램 석사 공부를 마친 그는 이스라엘 및 해외의 유수 페스티벌에서 공연하였으며 예루살렘 댄스 아카데미, 사피어 콜리지, 키부츠 콜리지에서 학생들을 가르쳤다. 텔아비브에서 열린 인티마댄스 페스티벌(2013-14)의 예술 감독을 맡았다. 주로 댄스와 퍼포먼스 정치학, 역사에 관한 글을 출판하고 강의를 한다.
An independent artistic director, lecturer, choreographer and performer from Tel-Aviv, Israel, specializing in lecture performance. Holding MA degree in performance studies and MFA in Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, he performed in numerous festivals both in Israel and abroad. As a teacher, he taught at the Jerusalem Dance Academy, Sapir College in Sderot, and Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv, Israel and directed the Intimadance festival in Tmuna theatre, Tel Aviv 2013-14. He published essays and given talks regarding dance and performance politics and history.
Selected works: BN2 (2018); It’s All Good (2016); Some Nerve (2015); Morphophilia and Ambiphobia (2013); Paved Life (2012) translated into Slovak and performed by Elledanse in Slovakia and the Czech Republic 2014-15; Polished Concrete made for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (2011), Hudud (2011), Monuments (2010), Corporpolis (2010), Israelica (2009) and Metamorphoses (2008) for Intimadance festivals 2008-2010.
BA in Art History from the Tel Aviv University (2000). MPS in Interactive Telecommunication from New York University (2006). MA in Performance Studies from New York University (2019).
Credit
Spectacles of Normalcy, 2019
Artist/Performer: Rotem Tashach
Produced by greenroom (Sunmi Yong)
Text recording by greenroom (Sunmi Yong)
Korean Translation by greenroom (Nayun Jang)
Funded by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
* Updated on 1st Feb. 2020
