Maratona de Procrastinação (noutros termos): Episode #4 – Christine De Smedt + Mark Tompkins
interviews conducted by Sílvia Pinto Coelho with Christine De Smedt and Mark Tompkins
video and sound recorded by Sara Morais
video edited by Sara Morais e Pedro Gancho
produced by ORG.I.A.
executive producer Marta Moreira
coproduced Teatro do Bairro Alto
support by ICNOVA, FCSH
Christine De Smedt Works in the fields of choreography, dance and performance, with research-based processes, developing different methodologies for performance formats. Has collaborated with Meg Stuart, Mårten Spångberg, Mette Edvardsen, Philipp Gehmacher, Vladimir Miller, Xavier Le Roy, Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon, Bojana Cvejic among others. She curates artistic projects and residencies at the Research and Training Studio in Performing Arts in Brussels, where she was also pedagogical coordinator.
Mark Tompkins American performer, singer, choreographer and teacher based in Paris since 1973, he founds the Company I.D.A. in 1983. He fabricates unidentified performance objects that mix dance, music, voice and text inspired by popular culture: music hall, vaudeville, burlesque and musical comedy. In 2008, he receives the SACD prize for Choreography for all of his work. Renowned for his transmission and passion of real time composition, he collaborates with dancers and musicians.
These interviews conducted by performer and researcher Sílvia Pinto Coelho focus on the role that procrastination can have on creative processes. Slowing down creation and research can be a way of recognizing that the act of delaying, of making things last, can lead to a fertile process of inventing the unknown. Improvisors and artists from the fields of dance and performance talk about their methodologies and ideas in this reformed version of Procrastination Marathon.
Christine de Smedt, one of the protagonists of Crash Landing with Meg Stuart and David Hernandez in the 1990’s, joins us for a current reflection about the contradictory feelings she has about the various types of improvisation. “In improvisation we also organize distraction, joining people, or joining the things that we still don’t understand in order to catapult us to another level. (…) I think that, in this sense, improvisation also holds a profound element of transformation.” (CS).
Mark Tompkins states that “procrastinating can be very positive, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to slip into ‘on hold’ mode. Procrastinating can simply be – ‘Well, I like where I am, why should I go around doing crazy things if I feel fine right here? Or, when I am running, why should I stop there only because it seems as if I should? That is my idea of procrastinating. And in life I am quite the procrastinator, but not in the good sense.” (MT)
The Procrastination Marathon, scheduled to take place on the seventh of June, at the Jardim Botânico de Lisboa, was postponed… Or, is this precisely what it is: something that begins as soon as it is announced, and which is indefinitely delayed. Could this be a part of the procrastination project? If so, a marathon only underlines what already exists, but disguised as numerous plans for accomplishment. So, are they plans for postponing, or for procrastinating? If for “covidic” reasons confinement is prolonged, the meeting is reflective, in lieu of providing a real life gathering. Eight interviews about the power of these encounters were proposed and are now available on the TBA website. In place of a procrastination marathon we have access to concrete discourses, approaching encounters that are difficult to describe. What is improvising? Conversing? Playing? Finding relationships, connections, nexuses? Positioning ourselves? Knowing how to perpetuate the place of not knowing?