This dimension of the sketch is manifest in the work of Adam Kinner, a multidisciplinary artist who practises in the areas of music, performance, dance, and theatre without formally attaching himself to any discipline. His work merges performance, choreography, and documentation in productions that generate reflections from an accumulation of gestures. During a recent artist residency in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, Kinner created the exhibition Notes on Visiting (Notas sobre <\/em>Visita\u00e7\u00e3o)<\/em>,2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - <\/span>This two-month residency, offered by the Goethe-Institut at the Vila Sul, in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, took place in June and July 2017. The exhibition was presented at the Salvador de Bahia Goethe-Institut from July 21 to August 18, 2017. 4 <\/a> - <\/span> bringing together a composite collection of documentary images that bear witness to the process that set the project in motion. Several of these images, culled from archives related to the dance scene in the state of Bahia, focus on the choreographies of Yanka Rudzka and the notations of Lia Robatto. Kinner developed Notes on Visiting <\/em>from choreographic documents, including schematic drawings portraying an array of spatiotemporal movements. He establishes a significant relationship with the note<\/em>, be it sheet music, notations, graphic inscriptions, thoughts, or any kind of fragment variously connected to performance. Freed in a sense from the variables of \u2009\u201cbeginning\u201d and \u201cending,\u201d the note engages the most indeterminate and hypothetical aspect of the process. About writing for dance, curator Mathieu Copeland suggests that a score \u201coffers in equal manner a free choice and the possibility of permanency for an ephemeral and transitory object.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - <\/span>Mathieu Copeland, \u201cChoreographing Exhibitions: An Exhibition Happening Everywhere, at all Times, with and for Everyone,\u201d in Choreographing Exhibitions<\/em>, ed. Mathieu Copeland and Julie Pellegrin (Dijon: Les Presses du r\u00e9el, 2013), 24. 6 <\/a> - <\/span> Playing with accepted notions of continuity and permanence, this notation system is inscribed in the margins of traditional regimes of perception and knowledge: it generates discrepancies that are productive of new possibilities for apprehending the world. The score simultaneously illustrates and embodies a moving structure. Robatto\u2019s sketches and, more broadly, any form of choreographic writing contain the potential experience, in all its fluctuations. While the score is constantly awaiting a (re)activation, its existence is independent of it; it is perpetually in progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Author and curator Peter Eleey examines the complex relationship between movement and its representation. In this relationship, the writing of dance serves both for documentation and for production, which he explains in terms of space<\/em> between the recording of movement and its incorporation. This space is crystallized in Kinner\u2019s work, in which the functions of the note are blurred by the anachronistic and undifferentiated representation of the various documents that set off the creative process: those that document the project and those of which it is composed. Eleey approaches these \u201cnotational drawings\u201d from the perspective of their connection with the present, a space between action and image. In his view, one should refrain from imagining these actions as completed, for the meaning of these drawings rests on the tensions that emerge from the suspension of movement that they implicitly contain.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - <\/span>Peter Eleey, \u201cIf You Couldn\u2019t See Me: The Drawings of Trisha Brown,\u201d in On Performativity<\/em>, ed. Elizabeth Carpenter (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014), <http:\/\/bit.ly\/2onMc4w>. 8 <\/a> - <\/span> This state of ambiguity is productive; it brings to light a different spatiotemporal form, one that does not derive from the historicizing rationale in which the document usually participates. In Kinner\u2019s work, the image could incorporate this kind of function, since, even in its finished state as a printed photograph, it possesses the incomplete attribute of a fragment: one cannot tell if it comes \u201cbefore,\u201d \u201cduring,\u201d or \u201cafter.\u201d According to theoretician Philip Auslander, performance documents may even produce their own events, if one approaches them as performative documents whose descriptions usher a world into existence.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - <\/span>Philip Auslander, \u201cSurrogate Performances: Performance Documentation and the New York Avant-Garde, ca. 1964\u201374,\u201d in Carpenter, On Performativity.<\/em> 10 <\/a> - <\/span> Indeed, the document becomes a performative site in its own right, employing an active<\/em> vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other images on display in Notes on Visiting <\/em>refer to the performance Intempestivamente<\/em>, produced as part of the exhibition and presented at the end of the residency in the new wing of the Escola de Dan\u00e7a da Universidade Federal da Bahia. Construction of the dance school\u2019s building, begun in 2013, was never completed. Exposed to the elements, the concrete structure is deteriorating. In collaboration with three dancers from Salvador de Bahia, Ana Brand\u00e3o, Nefertiti Charlene Altan, and Thiago Cohen, Kinner proposes a series of constant, slow-moving actions by a nebulous, abstract mass of four bodies that can be neither apprehended as a whole nor reduced to its constituent parts. Voices and surfaces are its materials: the performance is driven by the interactions between the loud, dense sounds the dancers emit and the many surrounding surfaces\u200a\u2014\u200abodies, architecture, and others\u200a\u2014\u200aand by interactions between the surfaces themselves. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Intempestivamente<\/em> calls up Brazil\u2019s colonial past in conjunction with the venue\u2019s dance history; it sounds out notions of progress and linearity; still more, it introduces the idea of a future that, in the end, remains hidden. From the point of view of untimeliness6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - <\/span>The original French uses intempestivit\u00e9<\/em>, which is much closer to the Portuguese and refers directly to the title of Kinner\u2019s work.\u200a\u2014\u200a(Trans.) 12 <\/a> - <\/span>\u200a\u2014\u200aa concept that implies inconvenience and disruption\u200a\u2014\u200athe state of the institution is brought into focus through gestures in dance that echo it and that, out of step, never fully attain completion. Their complexity rests in part on an interactive and non-antagonistic relationship between outside and inside that allows us to rethink the concepts of institution and structure. Ultimately, Intempestivamente<\/em> produces new realities by repositioning certain thresholds and pushing back on some boundaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paradoxically both provisional and eternal, that which appears as unaccomplished may provide avenues for action<\/em> within both prior and forthcoming configurations. In a text accompanying the exhibition, Kinner evokes the creation of new futures, but also of new pasts, perceptible in the form of a series of marks. As concrete as they are conceptual, these marks\u200a\u2014\u200atraces, voids, openings, and so on\u200a\u2014\u200aupend orientations and compose new histories, new places. In this perspective, the performative charge of the incomplete would provide strategies for making visible that which, though not absent, is indiscernible in its current condition. Kinner\u2019s gestures, those partaking in the process of research and documentation, those arranging the material space of the exhibition, and those, danced, taking place in the framework of performance, thus bring to light elements that were seemingly invisible, such as the colonial underpinnings of the history of Brazilian dance and the deterioration of the dance school\u2019s new building. It was the first time the school\u2019s dance wing was used in a presentational context, access to it having previously been denied to the students who wanted to use the space. One can only hope that this performance constitutes a favorable precedent for the community. Now made visible, these elements become accessible for broader undertakings or investigations, though necessarily contingent upon other levels of authority. This encounter between the gesture and the (outside) world, in which each is concurrently conceived by the other, modifies to some degree the parameters of the various systems involved in and by it. Understood in terms of engagement and sharing, the dialogue that ensues brings in its wake subtle breakages, momentary detachments from normative patterns, while nonetheless maintaining continuity. Kinner uses performative procedures that belong to the very concepts of historicization and institutionalization to unravel those concepts and rehabilitate their dynamics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, one may approach the sketch as a mode of visibility in which its latent capacity for action allows issues to be highlighted while revealing their underpinnings. Better yet, this praxis of the unfinished may in itself constitute an operation that provokes variations and changes bearing new realities and generating new structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Kinner_notas-sobre-visitacao2\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO06_Johnson_Kinner_notas-sobre-visitacao2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Kinner_notas-sobre-visitacao3\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO06_Johnson_Kinner_notas-sobre-visitacao3.jpg\")
Notes on Visiting (Notas sobre Visita\u00e7\u00e3o)<\/em>, exhibition views, Goethe-Institut Salvador Gallery, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 2017.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Kinner_notas-sobre-visitacao\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO06_Johnson_Kinner_notas-sobre-visitacao.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Intempestivamente\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO06_Johnson_Kinner_Intempestivamente1-scaled.jpg\")
![\"Intempestivamente\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO06_Johnson_Kinner_Intempestivamente2-scaled.jpg\")