The Wounded Rain

The Wounded Rain as a literal title, embraces both an existential human condition and an insight to the often unexplainable and positively paradoxical in trying to know the unknowable - that is an impossibility.

Han Byun-Chul in ‘The disappearance of Rituals’ proposes the definition of rituals as symbols techniques of making oneself at home in the world - “They transform being-in-the-world into being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable”.

A ritual performance: At the core of this collaboration and creative process is the investigation of trance zones identification and their application to the performative arts. Trance is considered to be a form of concentration, of intensified and focused attention. In particular reference to the performer (actor/dancer) it requires an embodiment of a totality of elements. The tools and techniques include physical exercises drawn from traditional Asian dance performance, offering occasions for questioning the agency of the body in relation to memory, intention, affect and environment. The embodiment praxis will be drawn from experiential events, then diagrammed and annotated, to be contrasted with studies on the physiological mechanisms – muscularity in abstract poetic movements, kinesthetic intentions and imagery. It is the investigation of movement semiotics, the study of meaning-making and affective choreography. The praxis includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.

The Wounded Rain highlights a connection between the body and sexlessness. It challenges ideas in the context of gender de-territorialization, a process that involves non-binary identification through trance choreography and sonic aesthetics. Perhaps, loosely, to dwell into in a kind of shamanistic process within a specific zone of trance. As in the development of the choreographic and the employment of established method, we are faced with new relationship of induction into the trance zones for affectual experience.