ON GIGS

MARTIN HARGREAVES:
I'm glad we're talking now, because it feels like there's been some developments in your research practice… does it still have the title Sonic Feelding? An expanse of anything where practical work is done, suitable for dealing with questions as a team, following desire and intuition, without the need to answer them directly.

LOREA BURGE:
Yeah!

MARTIN:
So maybe we can start by explaining what that is?

LOREA:
Sonic Feelding An expanse of anything where practical work is done, suitable for dealing with questions as a team, following desire and intuition, without the need to answer them directly. is the title that I'm using to encapsulate the part of my research that's looking at the body in movement and in contact with space, others and objects. As instrument for creating music, facilitated by the use of some technology like microphones, and processed - or not - through loop pedals and Ableton. The core of it is the body as instrument. And I'm at the beginning of what feels like a huge universe.

MARTIN:
Where did this interest in sound, or in the notion of instrumentation or music come from? Was this something that you were busy with in different projects, or was it insisting upon itself, and then you just thought, ‘okay, I'm really going to just focus on and address that’?

LOREA:
It’s been rising slowly over the course of ten years! I think probably in huge part because music is a big part of my life. I love going to see live music, always have. And the sort of social circles that I move in are with musicians as well. When I watch live music I get that feeling of. ‘‘Damn, I wish that was me doing it!’. But I don't play any instruments. As a form, I find it really compelling, and also I love how accessible it is. It seems like one of the most accessible and widely accepted art forms there is.

MARTIN:
Yeah, you can invite a friend to go to a gig, and they can either like it or not, but there rarely seems to be that kind of thing where they're like, ‘Oh, I won't get it.’

LOREA:
Yeah. Whereas although gigs seem to be part of mainstream culture, it’s also still a space where you can be experimental. There's something about the sonic that, I think, because you're tuning into your listening sense, your hearing, it allows a state of relaxation. Or like low-key-ness where your attention doesn't have to fully be engaged to experience it. People can be chatting and drinking and still feel like they've experienced the gig.

MARTIN:
And you can also be listening and drifting in your imagination. Sometimes there is stuff to look at, but sometimes what you're looking at is really just the making of sound. Because often, I guess, in gigs, you don't have a full view – it depends on the space - but you don't have always a good picture of everything – especially if you're short or if the tall people are standing at the front!. And also there's different types of sociality going on. One of the things I find I always have to take care of is my annoyance at other people, because often, when you go to gigs, people have gone there to be social, and they'll talk all the way through it. And you have to be fine with that in a way that you don’t in a theatre. I went to a gig not that long ago, and people started moshing, and I was like, “this isn't moshing music! What on earth are you doing?!” But then I realised, okay, that's how they want to experience the gig and I just have to remove myself so I don't get punched. If we then are talking about mainstream theatrical spaces for dance performance, it's quite controlled what your relation to the event is, or should be. And there are codes that people know or don't know,

LOREA:
Yeah and I think that's the thing that people find off-putting as an audience to go to in dance, because it requires focus and the following of social codes that people aren't always accustomed to. That's been something that I've always been intrigued about; if there's a way to bring the relaxed environment of a gig into dance, or bring dance into that relaxed environment itself.

The work that and Hannah and I were making with Unbaptised Infants - we've always ended up making the sound for our works through singing or we had a very basic loop pedal that we would put some hums into, and that would suddenly create the track for what we were making. And then we made three works together, and we realised more and more that our approach to choreography had a lot to do with how the work sounds. We were thinking about the sonic journey of the work. Sonic Feelding An expanse of anything where practical work is done, suitable for dealing with questions as a team, following desire and intuition, without the need to answer them directly. feels like, for me, a very direct continuation of what we were doing together but now I’m placing it much more at the forefront.

ON DIY

MARTIN:
So Sonic Feelding An expanse of anything where practical work is done, suitable for dealing with questions as a team, following desire and intuition, without the need to answer them directly. is definitely your research now. I’m interested in the fact that you are a trained dancer - you've had training as a dancer but not a musician – and the sonic element that you're interested in doesn’t come from a place of existing knowledge. And what I’ve seen of it has a DIY aesthetic. Is it DIY because you're interested in DIY politically? Or is it DIY just because you are literally doing it yourself? You're just teaching yourself. Are you interested in gaining some sort of expertise in music?

LOREA:
I think I was intrigued by approaching music as an opportunity to learn a new skill. Challenging my brain. I like the DIY aesthetic, and I like the DIY attitude to life generally as well. It’s empowering and it makes anything feel possible and accessible.

MARTIN:
I guess that loops back to this notion, or this interest in the gig format as being one that's not about elitism or exclusionary practices. It's not a kind of invitation to an audience to come and marvel at your musical technical skill, necessarily.

LOREA:
Yeah, definitely. Virtuosity and skill is not something I'm interested in. I think I'm much more interested in desire-led approaches more than skill-led. And in the ‘working it out’.

MARTIN:
Super interesting! What does that mean for you ‘desire-led’?

LOREA:
Following curiosity and desire for a thing, or interest in a thing removed from the barriers of technicalities or skill. I think this is something I'm always drawn to when I watch things. It's something that I notice a lot as well. I think you can really see when someone is invested in something because they're curious about it, and they're engaged with the novelty, or when something feels novel and new, I think that transmits. It’s not really a rehearsed performance state, because they're actually genuinely engaged in the thing. But the presence that is transmitted feels far more authentic and interesting to me than the presentational side of virtuosity and skill, if that makes sense?

ON LABOUR

MARTIN:
Yes, but it's not that you don't have skill. You're a skilled dancer and you've danced for other people. So it's not that you're trying to get rid of skill, as such, but you're not directly addressing our attention to it. From my experience of watching the documentation of B Field I understood an invitation to watch you utilise whatever skills are available to you in that moment, to follow a set of questions, not necessarily even to an answer. Obviously, in some ways, you know what some of these movements in space will do now, because you've done some rehearsals, but it seemed like you were still interested in asking what happens if I do this?

LOREA:
Yeah, it's still a question. The form is a question. And I think that's key to me continuing to do this. For as long as I don’t know what will happen, and I feel like I'm still learning things and discovering things, I'll probably remain engaged with it.

MARTIN:
Your desire is still the main driving force. If B Field asked the question, ‘what if a solo was only myself?’ Since then, you've started to ask, “what happens when I invite other people into a solo practice?”…So what's that been like for you so far?

LOREA:

I would love to keep expanding this world to meet with others. So far my experience of this has been limited to a residency that I did in Bilbao last year. I invited artists from different mediums and practices to join my in the studio to co-work. The question of what music can come out of my body opened up into what music comes out of each person's practice. So if my practice is movement - what about someone who works with sculpture? What's the sound of their work? As they worked, I recorded all the sounds they produced as a consequence of their labour. And that was a really interesting process for me, because suddenly I found myself in a more defined role as a musician. It was important for the process to be transparent about the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing or how to use this technical equipment properly - this is still very much a learning space for me, and I'm interested to learn together. It was also a really nice way of gaining access to people's practices using sound as the entry point into someone's world.

MARTIN:
The mixtape that you recorded from the residency in Bilbao is a super interesting way of documenting this learning together. So what I'm listening to is like a field recording? Which I guess comes back to this notion of the field that you're interested in. It's a field recording that you've edited, after the effect, to create a standalone composition. This is another way of engaging with an audience that's quite distant from standard ways in which dance documentation engages with audiences.

LOREA:
Yeah, but it still invites you to relate to bodies in space and time in some way, because of how I arrived at those sounds. In all of those tracks there's something of labour always being present. You can hear the effort, and imagine the action. I think that's something I'm interested in, generally, with work as well. Process as performance - where you can see people at work, hear people at work – this is a very key thing for me.

MARTIN:
What's caused that concern to arise for you?

LOREA:
I think it relates again, back into this idea of desire and curiosity. Whenever I see something, I always wonder how it was made, whether its an object or a performance, or a piece of music, or a cake. I'm always intrigued. I’m looking at the final result, but actually, what my mind always goes to, is, “what was the process of getting to that? What were the ingredients? What was it like to make it?”

MARTIN:
I've had lots of experiences of going to studio sharings which have been so much more interesting than final performances. And I guess part of that is because I'm quite happy in studios, and I like understanding something about how something is made. But then when I see the final product I'm dealing with final compositional decisions, rather than - the way that you put it - I'm not dealing with their desire anymore I'm dealing with, somehow a finished surface presentation.

Is there a politics to this visibility of labour, for you? I know you've been working for a while as a freelance artist, and a lot of the time what you're doing is measuring your labour and putting value to it, thinking around how much you can give to a project. Putting economic values on your time and physical labour in between what you might get offered as a fee as a dancer. Because you've got to also balance it with lots of other life demands.

LOREA:
Yeah, it probably does. It probably does play into it. Maybe. But maybe not - maybe these questions of my labour, and that of showing the labour of a work is a separate thing for me. I think the politics come in for me in the sense of disrupting the illusion of things, or in the act of giving everything away. Removing the elitism or secrecy of the performer and just putting it almost so that anyone could do this. Here’s the steps I used – now you can use them. Let’s share – showing the labour as resource sharing – in a sense.

MARTIN:
Like the old punk thing; “here’s a chord, here’s another, here’s a third, now form a band”!

LOREA:
Yeah I guess – I’m maybe more techno feminist than punk!

MARTIN:
Great! What is techno feminism for you?

LOREA:
I guess it's a relation to DIY. Disrupting preconceptions of who can do certain things and what roles are expected. Subverting these and using whatever technologies you have, without being expert in them.

Someone who brought me into this world of techno feminism is a collaborator and friend of mine called Bobby Brim. They’re based in Marseille, and we did the same programme together in Lisbon, PACAP. Bobby is really connected into the cyber feminism world, and hacking, and they make incredible music and performance as well. Meeting them was a huge moment in my process of becoming aware that this is the kind of thing that I would like to explore and be engaged in. They helped me grow my confidence to confront technology and follow my desires.

ON CO-OPS

MARTIN:
In the UK, in the dance training that I know of, in terms of the conservatoires and universities where I've worked, there's very little emphasis given towards technologies. Techniques, yes, almost exhaustively so, but the technical aspects, in terms of theatrical production, or even lighting, sound, the kind of elements that are often used, they're not part of any teaching. There isn't that emphasis within dance training to learning what a lighting rig yeah is, and how to set one up, or learning how to work a sound desk even. There’s always an assumption that someone else will do that for you.

LOREA:
Yeah, I think in general I advocate for more cooperative ways of working. I've been involved in starting a co-op in the past two years, a sauna co-op, and I've been thinking about this recently, how this relates to my practice and general interest in ways of working. With the way that things are going, politically, and all the terrible decisions our governments are making, I feel like we need to start leaning more on each other, sharing resources and working together to build things. And it's been really interesting to do that in the context of a sauna co-operative that's quite removed from art making, but thinking about how that then also translates into the kinds of things that we're doing with the Rose Choreographic School as well, like that, to me, feels like another kind of experiment with co-operation…

MARTIN:
Yeah. I've also, since proposing this project, I've been kind of thinking around communes, co-ops and more horizontal forms of decision making, I know you say the sauna is quite apart from art making, but the more that I think about it, the more that I think art only gets made because of the conditions that allow it to get made and changing those conditions changes what's possible. I mean, the irony, of course, is that the School is funded by a private donor. So yes, so we can't shout from the rooftops about being anti-privatisation, because we're working with private money. But, there's something with the increasing scarcity of arts funding, when there comes a point where chasing that diminishing funding as an individual, following the old model - where it's about you and your career and you compete against each other - seems to be more and more redundant now. The big dance companies still get some funding, but even they have to keep cutting. At what point do we start to insist on other models, and see what they do?. So I'm interested to hear a bit more about the sauna, because it feels like if you're if you're thinking around horizontality, then a cooperative sauna is also a body-based practice…

LOREA:
We started as a group of eight, working on the idea of it for about a year and half and then eventually got offered a space to run a trial for our co-op model. We then opened up the application and we have 60 members now. We then had our first meetings as a co-op to discuss and to set ourselves up into working groups; a membership group, a site team, a finance team; a fundraising team. The purpose of the meetings was to decentralise ourselves from being the ‘core’ organisers, opening up into the wider community so that the co-op would run based on the collective interests.

MARTIN:
Before starting out on this idea of the co-op were there people who already had skills in working as a co-op? What it takes to be actually co-operative?

LOREA:
There are people that have experience living in co-ops and there's some people who have a lot of experience with community projects. The skill set within the co-op is really vast. There are architects, carpenters, project managers, people that work in finance, people work in health and safety… Between us we have all of the skills to be able to do this. We just need a permanent site. That's the hardest thing in London!

ON ACTIVISM

LOREA:
The sauna co-op relates massively to my interest to activist practice. Because I guess working in these co-operative models is, in itself, a kind of activist statement. A rejection of one of the ways that our society is constructed and built for us to exist and work in competition instead of co-operation. And this kind of links into my research, or the area of interest, which still feels the most vague in a sense, but most prominent, which is around thinking about mobilising, mobilisation and the organising of people and structures in a choreographic way, or using choreographic tools and thinking as a kind of approach to mobilising.

MARTIN:
And I guess that is also a link to desire? I guess what brings people together, either into a co-operative or into activism, is shared beliefs and desires. With activism, definitely there's a desire for change which is not necessarily instrumentalised into one singular output, but a desire that by coming together then already something shifts. If we're thinking specifically about Palestinian Liberation, it's not that you're thinking that the success of your activism will be only judged on whether or not you free Palestine, as if that is a possible outcome of your actions alone. A desire to enact solidarity with liberation movements is more of the goal. You have some horizons that you look towards, but it's really the question of how do we mobilise and also how do we disrupt certain operations that are already mobilised in larger formations? Like, how do we stop the genocidal machinery of the UK? It's a different understanding of what choreography is and how it operates than, for example, the one that was taught at Laban!

LOREA:
Which I think is, you know, part of the vagueness that I feel around speaking and writing about this part of my choreographic research. It feels far more urgent and important but it's massive, it's expansive, so expansive, so that I feel a bit lost in that, in that desire to bring activism into art, or bringing art into activism.

MARTIN:
…and also understanding how artistic practice is already activism? Or at least can be, but it’s very different to the idea of making art about activism. There’s obviously models where political issues are treated as subject matter for choreography. So, you still use the same production methods, the same relational dynamics, and you just produce a piece about something political, and everyone feels a bit of catharsis. I remember taking students to see sort of that style of political work, and they can feel like they are a better person afterwards for having watched a piece with a political theme. But it hasn’t mobilised them - or maybe it has – what do I know? But the primary affect seems to be to feel better about yourself at the end of the performance even if it hasn’t equipped you with the skills to act politically. I feel like, from what you've been saying around the desire for co-operative modes of production, and also your interest in Sonic Feelding is, it's really the process of activism that's interesting, not an assumed end product. I guess the process of activism is mobilisation, it’s movement but it's also stoppages. It's asking how we resist the habitual speedy forms of movement to overtake us? How do we stop the cogs of certain kinds of machines from moving us?

LOREA:
This makes me actually now go back to what you were asking earlier about labour. I think I felt resistant to that question, because actually, I don't see labour as a negative thing. I see it as, on the whole, a giving of sorts. I feel resistant to thinking about how much labour am I really putting into the work in that sense, because if I think about that too much, then I'll stop doing anything! I think if I start to quantify my labour and try to measure it, then it will become a hindrance.

MARTIN:
Yeah I was clumsily referencing a notion coming out of Marxist analysis around alienated labour. The idea that we have created conditions where we sell our bodily productivity, but we don't own the means of production, so we've become alienated from what it is that we're doing. Labour becomes a means to make money, and money even takes over as the thing we desire – it doesn’t just stand in for needs it becomes a need itself. But having said that I don't know many people who enter dance thinking they will become rich like this. That seems to be very poor motivation to enter dance! You enter because there's something about the actual labour, the work of dancing that is rewarding in itself without necessarily already being transformed into money. Though of course, I'm not saying people shouldn’t be paid since economic exchange is still the structure we work within, most of the time. I didn’t want to say labour is a bad thing but I'm just aware that as a freelancer, you measure your time and you value it. Or at least I did when I was freelancing and I was very bad at it and in terrible debt. Whereas if you're labouring as an activist, or you're working on a co-op, you're not making money and that is not the value you ascribe to those kinds of labour.

LOREA:
No, in fact most of my time in life is spent not making much money! At the moment I'm fortunate to pay cheap(ish) rent, which for London is very lucky. So it means that I can do that kind of ‘free’ labour. So yeah, all of these things come attached with lots of other circumstances and privileges. And maybe I would be measuring my labour differently if I needed to pay £1000 a month on rent, which is an insane amount and the sad truth for many.

MARTIN:
It's insane, yeah! I pay over half my wages on rent and it’s become normalised. So I think I’m projecting my labour values onto you!

LOREA:
I think through cooperative working, you start to value your labour differently, because you're thinking that what I put into this is not measured by what I get out of it. It's about a transformative process where something that didn't exist before now exists because we've all collectively explored the desire to bring it into being without concern for how much that gives us back. The biggest thing that I’ve been learning through that, and through what we're doing in the Rose Choreographic School, is how we can make decisions collectively. Which for me is now maybe one of the most key aspects of life generally. It’s been such a steep learning curve in collective decision making that feels so important and feels like something that should be explored from a much younger age.

MARTIN:
Absolutely, I feel like, I'm in my 50s, and I'm just exploring it now, because I've been through all these different institutions where there's been some illusion of autonomy, but the autonomy is within a hierarchical structure. I was quite terrified leading up to the school, because you become so habituated to unequal power structures, and in some ways, they take care of things until they don't work, and then they're impossible to change.

I’m interested if, when you're taking part in the organisation of protests and the co-ordination of people, are you aware at all of using choreographic thinking?

LOREA:
No, not consciously. But that’s something that I'm interested in, and when I've thought about it, then what comes up for me first is the question of what actually is choreographic thinking? What are those tools that we're that we use and what separates them from other ways of thinking and other practices? And that's something that feels very unanswered to me still today,

One thing that ignited my interest, or sparked the possibility of the idea of choreographic thinking relates to something that's happening a lot right now in the UK. When migrants cross the channel in boats, whoever is steering the boat when they arrive in the UK gets charged as being a trafficker. Even though they too are a migrant themselves seeking asylum, just like anyone else in that boat. I mean it makes my skin crawl every time I think about it. But when I first heard about that story, I was so compelled by the image of someone's hand, just the fact of the contact of one person's hand with an object being such a defining factor in this unjust prosecution. What if every single person's hand in that boat was on that rudder. Would they all be charged with trafficking themselves? What would happen with that? This feels like choreography to me.

When I’m wondering about making work that could be more explicitly activist, out of the same sense of desire and urgency that drives my activism, I still feel such a tension, because it feels so new to me. All the work that I’ve made so far feels very ambiguous and nuanced in that sense working with just the labour, the process of doing a thing, and exposing that process of the thing as the work itself. The recent performance that I did in Rockingham Community Centre, audience members commented on this feeling that it gave them, a feeling of them feeling held and feeling like they were taken on a journey with me. And I was interested in that because that's quite a nice distraction from life, in a sense - having a moment to just kind of go somewhere, wherever that place is. Whereas activism is not a distraction it’s a direct dealing with life. This is the tension I feel.

MARTIN:
But then there's also this thing, which is what you said earlier around the sauna co-op, where we can use these spaces to imagine being with each other otherwise, in a way that isn't reproducing the violence that you're subjected to and that we subject others to. So, being held by a performance isn’t just a distraction from life it can also suggest other ways of living, maybe? Maybe your work is speculation? A space of imagination where we say, ‘okay, things are bad, but I don't need to keep telling you things are bad, because you probably know that, so what can we do for each other now?’ I also heard positive feedback about your performance, and the entire event, again because it was kind of a DIY space. It wasn't arts council funded, and it was very much about community. So I'm guessing, if people are saying they felt held it's partly because you're addressing the situation with imagination – rather than a protest about arts cuts, which of course is important, you worked co-operatively to imagine other models to get work made and to address audiences.

LOREA:
Yeah, definitely. But there is something for me about protest that isn’t just about imagination. It holds you and others accountable, right? And I think there's something in this accountability, I think that's maybe what I'm interested in manifesting, and wondering in what ways that I can bring this question of accountability into performance.

MARTIN:
Yes it’s an interesting question about how far you can go with social engagement. I know of artists who worked in a socially engaged way until they reached a wall and decided to become a social worker. And other people who had been social workers and were frustrated with all the things you can't do within the realms of social work, so they needed to become an artist. So there are different affordances within clearly structured forms of engagement. In social work you have measurable outcomes, you have a direct interface with the policies that impact the issues that you're engaged with. You're practically on the ground, but then you're also caught in systems that you have very little possibility to change. Of course there are other kinds of systemic problems in art but sometimes what art making does is it gives you the fantasy, maybe, of creating other kinds of systems of accountability?

LOREA:
Yeah, I've always thought of choreography as this system, a new system, or a way of externalising what otherwise feels incommunicable, which is why I find it so hard to talk about, because it's precisely engaging with the things which feel much more abstract. Maybe for me it becomes more tangible through externalisation. For me, any meaning that a work might have always comes way after I've made a thing, right? I never start thinking I'm gonna make a piece about whatever. I just start working.

MARTIN:
So Sonic Feelding isn’t ‘about’ sound. Sound is the material with which you're working?

LOREA:
Yeah, I may find meaning in what comes out afterwards, that then can be still tangible in a more political sense maybe?

MARTIN:
And for you is there a difference between meaning and being meaningful?

LOREA:
Oh Yeah, totally!

MARTIN
So it can be very meaningful for you to work with different practitioners and understand the sound of their practices without thinking that has a representational meaning. You’re not wanting to make something that becomes an essay about labour practices, which I guess was my mistake almost earlier on! I think partly because I'm not really a maker of work in that sense that sometimes my job is thinking about meaning, or dramaturgically I’m often thinking about the logic of a work, which is different from finding it meaningful.

LOREA
Actually, over the course of this conversation, you've now mentioned the term ‘socially engaged practice’ a few times and that's something that I had never thought about as maybe something that I'm doing. But actually, reflecting on my interest in sound and music, and then in co-operative working and in activism, this term feels like it’s starting to make sense to me as a practice, as an artistic practice that I'm engaged with across these different forms. Maybe ‘socially engaged’ is what I’m doing? I think I've said this to you before, I find it really hard to talk about my work and what I do and make sense of it outside of the doing of it. Things are always moving and shifting.

MARTIN
I think this focus on meaningful work, rather than the meaning of work, is enabling you to do all kinds of wonderful things so maybe making sense of it can come later, if at all!


References:

For more information about Lorea's work see her website