LABRYO/ This turning Europe

Immersive installation, performance & formation of a temporary autonomous ensemble, Banancompaniet, The Freeport, Stockholm, Sweden, 8 May > 6 June, 2021.
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7 personages
3 days of labour
1 day of play

with All of You

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Labryo - This Turning Europe, in itself,  for itself, as installation performance, and as a temporary ensemble, offers a choreographic work-intensive for 7 chosen performers during 3 days leading up to harvest full moon in Virgo, engaging in the oldest known votive choreographic pedagogies and techniques negotiating the core of what has become known as European cultural heritage.

On a 4th day, the process, and its becomings, will be exclusively presented sitespecific for 1 day during 4 hours open endurence improvisation, Labryo will be transmuted to You, as an immersive passage of bordering throughout ancestral voices, in tat the former test site for elecron acceleration in Stockholm, now transformed into a Kunsthall.

The site is continously open for public as a non performative installation of floor drawings, tracks and traces of the previous event throughout the week, where the film program and artworks by other artists will be exhibited.

On a 4th day, the process, and its becomings, will be exclusively presented for 1 day during 6 hours open endurence improvisation, Labryo will be transmuted to You, as an immersive passage of bordering throughout a warehouse for tropical fruits, and throughout ancestral voices, in the Freeport of Stockholm.

On a 5th day, the 19th September, the site is open for public as a non performative installation of floor drawings, trax, traces, and video recordings of the previous event.

Documentation >> https://youtu.be/bmWC9AV3n1U

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The installation performance and temporary ensemble Labryo is envisioned and directed by Roberto N Peyre in choreographical collaboration with the musicologist-, pedagog-, choreographer-, artist-, Barbara Crescimanno (It/Sicily), expert on Chorós and other traditional musicalities of the Mediterranean. Crescimanno is the director of the etnomusicological Institute Arci Tavola Tonda in Palermo, where she teaches the course Chorós as part of her research program Ninfe di Sicilia since many years.

The 7 piece ensemble consist of the performers Majulah Drammeh, Anna Öberg, Shaya Khalil, Caio Marques, Anna Koch, Roberto N Peyre and Barbara Crescimanno.

Labryo is produced by Weld, in collaboration with Nordiska Konstförbundet NKF, through generous support by IASPIS/Konstnärsnämnden, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse and Institut Arci Tavola Tonda.


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ABOUT

Within the resonance of a recent surge in interests and engagements concerned with traditions of somatic practice and esoteric ritualism, animism, and notions of the sacred, not least in relation to cultural heritages and the human biotope, Labryo offers itself as a thorough engagement with notions of traditionalism beyond the mere referential. It is a careful listening to the programmations of sustainability and entitlement within tradition (verb) itself. Labryo makes a choreographic mythopoetic laboratory of conscious de-writing and de-drawing of objecthoods, laying intuition bare and able, for what its worth. Labryo is a function of de-programming,  utilising a thoroughly hyperstitious engagement in de-rendering a most prestigious European ethnomusicological heritage of social music and dance culture understood as so-called votive folkloric traditions, dating back to the foundations of classical antiquity in the Mediterranean basin.

In the upcoming public encounter with this Labryo on the 18th September, audiences are invited to pass throughout the premises and zones of a 3000 m2 space guided and in negotiation of corporeal sound-, rhythm-, momentum-, in formation, as multitude yet an unique cell. As a polymorph organ we incant, enchant, evoke, lure and metamorph sensibilities of the labyrinthine intersection of  X.
This Labryo dancing ground and spirits invoked, will also be further underscored through the successive tracing and drawing up of a choreogram on the ground negotiating the surface of the abyss below.

Participation in this Labryo at any phase, to any degree (even avoidance),  equals processual development of the ensemble and movement continuously becoming throughout the polymorf re-assembling multitude, a collective body in itself, opening up and closing as a living tempel, a port, a vent, a mouth, a hunger, as site of the sacred. A revolting feedback enfolding, spiralling.


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BACKGROUND & RE-SEARCH

Labryo take as its departure some of the specific psycho dramatic historicising narratives and functions at play within the mythos of European ethnogenesis, and the ambiguous passions at stake therein, with its simultaneous existential, pretentious and political distinctions, classifications, separations, and alliances. As a process it is an equally practical, critical and poetic approach to the both historic-, geopolitical- and religio-mythic understandings of the antique classical Labyrint (aka Minoan labyrint, Λαβύρινθος , Troy town, Jungfrudans, Dance floor of Ariadne).

The Minoan  labyrinth mythos serves as a both haunting and empowering ritual complex with all its historical functions and egregor echoing throughout folkloric realities past and present as a reminiscence of  age old quests for origin, subject formation, entitlement, and sacrifice. Both the swastika and the Meander (Greek Key) is associated with the actual design alongside the bloodline of Europe. Generally described in the earliest hellenistic annals as the sacred architectural plan for the tempel of king Minos, son of the Phoenician woman Europe and the man Zeus, in Knossos, Crete.

The Minoan Labyrinth is a symbol of pilgrimage, the precursor or model for the  “grand tour”, But most of all it is an actual diagram of mnemonic procession, andin that a route to ceremonial votive choreographic communion as described in both historical writings, and oral traditions concerning votive practice in various cults at sacred sites and temples in the mediterranean region and beyond. Thus the focus in the Labryo project is the ”chorós” as it has been practiced since origins of the so called western theatrical tradition. As a ‘collectivist formation’ which, in honor of Dionysus/Pan, the divine function of ritual ecstasy, moves, breaths, incant and operates sonically, rhythmically, choreograpphically in relation to an unison. In particular in relation to cosmic feminine principals central to fertility rites such as the ones recognised as the Elysean Mysteries and its predecessors, where the functions named Demeter/Persephone/Hecate, Desponia/Cybele/Rhea, or Europe/Tanit/Astarte is acted out.

Labryo as a project is the fruit of an artistic research on a set of reoccurring cultural tropes involved with the very specific frictions between historic-, historicist-, religious- and folkloric reproduction of a pre-historic curse aimed at detaching Europeanness from its migratory- and intercultural roots, at times understood as afroasiatic, non-christian, animist, bipoc, feminist, or by any other means, a threatening other. Some of these tropes can be seen as variations on primordial functions and motifs of  ”the primordial sin” understood outside a christian context as the ambiguous separation of mankind from the sacred, with the hope, and challenges of a possible redemption or/and reinstitution, in order to underscore animosity and differentiation.

As it happens, a persisting Scandinavian exceptionalist attitude has struggled at times to situate itself  in a larger continuous migratory perspective in what we call Europe. Still, a common trope, is that Scandinavia is a separate geopolitical unit where only a certain type of Scandinavians migrated in and out, alongside ”exchange” and ”trade” of traditions and objects in relation to the cultural and racial outside. All signs of historic intimate relations and transcultural migration is played down. Yet the recent DNA analysis tell a different story, history is revolutionised as the highly romanticised Viking was the scandinavian name of an office/function and not an conventional ethnicity, the oldest known populations and thus culture in Scandinavia was darkskinned with dark hair, Neandertals were not uncivilised and had larger brains than homosapiens 

The social dance- and game practices we recognise as ”ring dances”, ”line dances” or ”dance games” constitute a significant modality, and remnant of these ancient choreographic strategies. The ruptures and (trans)migrations of bodies, substances, seasons, weathers and cultures, through shifting patterns of micro- and macrocosms, are carrying the potentiality of the poetic accident, and thus power of  transmutation. A celebration of the migratory, and journeying as existence. There are only a few popular examples (outside secluded museal-, religious-, and martial circles), usually without conscious ritual context, still practiced in northern Europe such as the may pole celebrations at summer solstice, Christmas tree dances, the latin American Salsa rueda, versions of contemporary street dance battle formations, the Kvaddans of Færø Islands, and Morris dances, etc. And, yet the coastline of the Nordic Countries contains by far the largest number of historical monumental Minoan labyrinths in the world. The dating on the Nordic labyrinths stretches from earliest bronze age to the present, and are accompanied by numerous scattered, barely recognised, associated folkloric- and religious cultural complexes.

The project started to be articulated in dialogue with the Sicilian Art History-scholar Valentina Carollo during the migration crisis during 2013-15, as there was a sudden change throughout the political landscape in Europe, with a chauvinistic conservative re-turn emphasising the most biased, narrowminded and erroneous narratives and perspectives on both European border policies (inner and outer) and historic accounts on migration. A turn fully selfindulged in certain racist, exceptionalistic and bigotted romanticisms regarding cultural heritage.

The Labryo research became, as I continued, a means of informed resistance, a basis for re-search, a counter narration of the conceptualisations of a fortified European north, and a revision of southernmost Lampedusa shining of hope, justice and connectivity. A research continuing both my previous artistic research, my trans continental family history and concepts of hereditary.  The project has thus encompassed a deeply personal idosyncratic journey throughout these years consisting in a number of visits to significant prehistoric-, and historic sites, etnographic-, and historic museums, and organisations engaged in what can be understood in terms of etnogenesis. Research consist in geographical and archival studies, field recordings, filmings and photos,  interviews and informal talks with activists, academics, museum directors, artists and concerned civilists in Scandinavia, Italy, and beyond.

The aforementioned turn of reductive dissociation when it comes to Eurpean cultural heritge and ethnogenesis, as well as general notions of resistance and correction, are on the brink of being fully historicised as a new world is on the verge of being envisioned trough social sciences, genetics, intensified migrations, and reshuffled weather patterns. Europeanness as it becomes, exist exactly through the permutations of bordering, and so will futurity persist. The Bipoc was always, and will of course always be at present the core from north to south, as well as the, divine and political feminine, gueer, animist, or other.The challenge is the decolonisation, and recoding of the alienating core of white supremacism, and its spell on Europe.

The project is a continuation of my artistic work and research on the contemporaneity of club architectures, carnival cultures, votive choreographies, subcultural resistance, animist sensibilities, and the transmigrations of musicality. Previous related works are Den Svenska Modellen at night club Kvarteret/Fristaden, Ship of Fools at GIBCA, The Lie at Galleri Index, and Labyros at Havremagasine Konsthall.

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Resources:

  • > Klas  Grinell - Ilm al-Hududiyya: un-inheriting Eurocentricity >>
  • Ernesto de Martino - The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, Free Association Books, 2005
  • Sarah P Morris - Daidalos & The Origins of Greek Art, Princeton University Press 1995
  • Katarina Schough - Hyperboré: Föreställningen om Sveriges plats i världen, Carlsson, 2008
  • Elisabeth McAlister - Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance, University of California Press, 2002
  • Maya Deren - Divine Horsemen, The LIving Gods of Haiti, Thames & Hudson, 1953
  • John Kraft - Labyint- & Ryttarlek, Fornvännen. Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, 1977/61
  • Kodwo Eshun - More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Quartet Books. 1998
  • Martin Bernal - Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,Vol 1,2 &3

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About

Barbara Crescimanno

Roberto N Peyre

Weld



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”This turning. Processing passage. Pass and port. A drawing closer of the first final. Race.
Within ones. Once. There is no likeness here but all, there is.
Suddenly none, and then again each and every one.

Origin become all. Begets. White heat, white flight, in blight knight. Late.
Original sinuous, push and pull, ebb and flow. Sensuousness, transmytharian of desires, will travel. Origin of all entitlement, in-her-in-tense. Through and through.

You, a call for ever more. A caross. Across roads, a heart a bordering. Heat as Art.

Towards the Godess. Honey”

(Notations & Itineraries, 2021, Roberto N Peyre )







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