STILL STANDING 2: AN EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO
Artist note by Shabari Rao
Someone asked me: what’s the difference between stillness and waiting? Waiting is predicated on an imagined future, while stillness is concerned with only the present.
Still Standing is turning out to be a series of multimodal works. Each successive work is born out of the previous one and carries traces of the ones that came before it. This is the second work in the series.
Still Standing 2 is an experimental video work. It was born out of a performance project (Still Standing 1), where I worked with 37 participants over 4 weeks, in an exploration of the embodied experience of stillness. The video footage was shot in Lalbagh, Bangalore, on a cold and windy November morning in 2018, on a rock that has been standing for more than 2.5 billion years! But the final video was completed many months later in August 2019.
Still Standing 1 was as much a pedagogical experiment as it was a performance experiment. What does one do with a studio full of nineteen-year-olds? Some trained, others not. How do I use this ‘training’? How do I undo it? What structure or form might enable each performer to feel confident and invested in the performance?
The performance-related questions that drove the project were:
Can stillness in performance be compelling?
When there is no narrative, no scene, no character, not even emotion or even much movement, what arises?
How does stillness get magnified with so many bodies in the space?
How would an audience enter/respond to such an experience?
A loosely structured improvisation that dwelled on slowing down and stillness provided the framework for both a successful pedagogic and performance experiment.
With Still Standing 2, the intention was to create a video that was more than documentation, A creative endeavour in itself, offering the viewer an experience that was whole, not a voyeuristic experience of something that had already happened. And yet this experience is rooted in what has happened before. It can be thought of as the findings of an embodied research process. The questions that shaped this process were:
How do we make an embodied experience available to people who are temporally distant, who inhabit a different time and space?
How can experience (visceral, cognitive) be layered with the modalities available to us such as visual image, text, voice?
How does the viewer’s experience intersect with the performers’ experiences in this displaced temporality?
Some of the discoveries that emerged through the process:
Stillness cannot be (en)forced – either by/on one’s self or by another. At least not the kind of stillness that we were aiming for. Enforced stillness has a very different embodied quality: hard work, stiff, brittle. But what can be done is to provide the conditions for stillness to arise.
There is a difference between allowing something to unfold and making something happen. Allowing suggests a circle to me; making suggests a line, with direction. The energy in both is very different. Stillness is something that needs to be allowed to occur.
There is no such thing as perfect stillness. And yet, when the louder noise/movements are quietened, the stillness that emerges is rich, vibrant, dynamic.
Shabari Rao is an artist, educator and researcher. Her work is rooted in practice based research which focuses on the relationship between body, performance, and learning. More details of her work can be found here.
Navya Sah is a documentary sound recordist, contemporary mover and prose poetry writer. Her work includes 2 feature documentaries, a web series and several fiction short films along with various physical theatre performances. You can find some of her personal writings here.