0:00-1:10 [melodic singing, not in English]
[percussive vocalization]
I'm Gary Cook. I was invited to be a photographer
and videographer during the Judaica project.
This is my perspective on what I saw. I've tried to deconstruct the project to
simplify it for my understanding as much as yours. I came up with some key
phrases. Laboratory: this is the studio space
where the work is done. It's seen as a lab, and the whole
project is treated as an experiment. The discoveries they are looking for are
within the area of research, theater, song, and performance, and how the
bodies of those in the space connect and react
to everything around them. This is the most difficult concept to understand,
and the term they use for this is "embodied research."
"Embodiment" means how the practitioners feel emotionally and physically,
and relate their own experience of culture, life, and memory
to the work they are doing. That's what I've tried to show in this documentary.
[singing in background] To me, this film is like a pop video--a short explanation
to an involved project where hours and hours of recording took place.
Everything you see here--film and still images--
were taken by me, recorded at the universities of Huddersfield and
Manchester in 2017.
[background singing]
I'm Ben Spatz. I am directing the project "Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork."
[vocalization of a single syllable]
The project is, it's an attempt to create a kind of laboratory inside of
the university, in a way modeled after scientific laboratories,
but, um, working with human materials. So it comes out of
theater, and the idea of a theater laboratory,
looking at, uh, the idea of the laboratory and the model of the laboratory,
and the advantages, also the difficulties the limitations of this idea of the
laboratory and how it works in the university
context as a place of the generation of knowledge.
There's incredible amount of joy and freedom,
freedom in exploration. The way that we use, the way that we
work with our bodies and voice is incredibly liberating because it doesn't
aim to produce certain type of theater production
or movie, so it is kind of really raw, in a way. And this type of work,
um, being able to do this type of work as a part of your job is a luxury,
both for an artist and for a researcher. Usually you are immediately expected to
produce some results. You know, you've done this today;
tell us, like you asked me, what you have learned. Whereas we
took our time and that time is so joyful.
There are different ambitions for the project. Probably the narrowest one is
just to put forth this idea that the the laboratory of human practice could
be a real kind of thing, a real place in
academia. It could really be a laboratory. It could live alongside laboratories of
engineering and laboratories of railway science and laboratories of chemicals.
Could also live this laboratory of the human or laboratory of the humanities.
That's kind of the basic attempt. There is then deeper and more
complex stuff, because whatever we're doing we're
always also working with personal material.
So even though we don't speak about it immediately, or even though we don't
speak it to ourselves necessarily, there are
so many things which are coming up. Through a song, a little bit of a memory,
or some association. So the roles would be practitioner: the person who is in
custody of the songs and is in the space, and does things.
Different kind of things. Performative things.
But also has huge freedom, doesn't have to do anything.
Can lie down and sleep. We haven't really tried that, but there
is possibility of doing anything. The second
role is director,
who has many tools.
He can give tips and tasks. He or she.
But he or she can only be in charge of time. So to tell
when the session is finished.
He or she can change the flow of the rehearsal, the work, the experiment, or can
support it and work on it, what is, whatever is happening. And the
fourth role is the videographer,
where you stand behind the glass eye of the beautiful friend of ours, Nikon D750,
um, which we try to treat as a friend,
because we realize this is fourth partner in this work.
[singing, in unison and in counterpoint]
The biggest thing that I've learned is that,
is to re-, to return to the audio-visual recording.
Yeah, a lot of emotions. Um
There's always fear. Fear of not doing sufficient work,
fear of not being able to articulate what you're trying to
explore, fear of being misunderstood by the co-practitioner or
eventually being misunderstood because we're working with camera
all the time. We're recording what we're doing and then we're editing those
things and creating some videos, and there are crossing dramaturgies
of three of us. There is the dramaturgy of the practitioner,
dramaturgy of the director, and also dramaturgy of the person who holds the camera.
And i think the most important thing
that i've learned so far is that this place of embodied research
has something to say
in this new era of the audio visual. And it is something ethical and something
political that it has to say about what the circulation of this kind
of media means, and what it does.
[singing]
Spatially difficult word, organic, and its history is in any case
exceptionally complicated.
[singing]