ELAH study for a collective of organisms
work in progresS

​ELAH - study for a collective of organisms - Is our second collaboration based on the detailed study of the score of movements from our previous piece HALE - study for an artificial organism.
 
When we started working as a collective in 2012, we were curious about the ways a community organize itself in order to produce a common object. Agreement claims for a certain union of the individuals in order to built something else than the individual approach.
 
Those ideias manifested when we created HALE - study for an artificial organism, a performance in which a huge structure of plastic material is inflated by ventilators and is internally manipulated by the performers through a set of rigorous actions - a score - which is invisible to the public.
 
In ELAH - study for a collective of organisms - as we took out the plastic structure and all the objects used in HALE, metaphorically removing the skin that was unifying a community, we expose the “workers”  inside of the  "monster".
 
More than for the fetish of showing the secret side of HALE, we work on the score as a formal aspect that allows us to have distance from its primordial functionality, opening, as consequence, infinite ways of reenacting it.
Therefore, the score is here as a pretext for us to build upon a greater challenge: To incorporate how the group organizes itself, behaves and deals with the material generated in order to accomplish a collective piece. For whom? For what? For where?
 
This analysis generate two fields constantly feeding each other:
On the one hand the practice of various actions like crawling, taping, inflating, compressing, moving fans, folding, etc, relating with composition, rhythm, space, movement quality, as well as using tools to cross several imaginaries, themes and concepts.
On the other hand the wish to make visible our social choreography composed by our methods of negotiation, election, suggestion, choreographic decisions, distinct languages, multidisciplinary areas of artistic work and nationalities.
 
During our process those two big themes are always in dialogue as our research material, provoking a constant and an intrinsec questioning of the scenic desires.

This objective comes as an answer to a question that has always inspired us in our collective work: Truly functioning as a whole, against any kind of individualism, what can we do that one of us alone could not?