Weak Movements

A choreographic system in which the composer can play — or "show" — a movement pattern to a sculpture or object. Every movement is retained in memory, forming the basis for new variations across time, space, and synesthesia. The work is music drawn in equal part from graphic structure and from dance, conceived as sculptural practice and autonomous performance.

We are always in motion, whether we choose it or not — never being, only becoming, and always becoming-other. Memory becomes score: the past pressing forward into each new movement. What is remembered does not repeat; it endures, and in enduring, it changes.

The object is not inert matter waiting to be moved. It receives, it remembers, it performs — a thing with its own vitality, acting when no one attends it. We do not move it. We meet it halfway: two motions, each becoming through the other.

The method was used in Verdensteatret's installation Enter ghost, exit ghost, re-enter ghost at Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022.

Directly in front of where I have sat down hangs a white canvas that moves seemingly at random by means of a mechanism. It is surprisingly lifelike, and it gives off intimations of spirit. Where Fried worried about the size of object art and that it might tower over the beholder, here it is the canvas's interplay with the air around it that gives life to this otherwise dead object. There is something almost eerie about it, creating a level of tension in a room where there is otherwise no one but me for as long as I am there. I become deeply fascinated by how theatrical and communicative the room appears despite existing independently of me. Whether or not I had sat there, the canvas would have moved — but in the moment I experience it, it becomes communication.

— Julie Rongved Amundsen, "Varighetens kunst" (The Art of Duration), Scenekunst.no, 17 March 2022. Translation mine.