A Contrite Heart: AN Artist Statement
Irina Kruchinina
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IRINA KRUCHININA, born in Moscow, Russia, is an interdisciplinary performance artist and scholar exploring poetry as intermedia between various modes of human expressions. She received her two M.A. degrees in the Swedish Language and Western World Literature from Moscow State University in Russia and in Performance Studies at the Department of Communication Studies at LSU. She also holds her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens. She creates spectacles, installations, and dances in the form of poems exploring the metaphorical aspect of human experience. She abstracts physical elements from their contexts and rearranges them in a poetic manner, by rhythmic, acoustic, visionary, associative, and other intuitively palpated correlations. Focusing on the process of creating phrases that intertranslate musical, embodied, verbal, and virtual lines of thoughts, she approaches live arts as a medium of communication. She has been actively collaborating with Music, Art, Theater, Dance, and Digital Media artists directing, devising, choreographing, dancing, creating and animating visual art.
YouTube: @irinakruchinina3037 Instagram: ingegerd90 |
Abstract
The video poem A Contrite Heart features a poem by Alexander Vertinsky (1918) that appears in a slightly modified form of incantation repeated by the main character and narrator in Mikhail Bulgakov’s short story, A Psalm (1923). The video-poem reenacts the story as a commentary to the poem. Methodologically, A Contrite Heart offers an intermedia approach to poetic translation where I work with the acoustic, visual, spatial, and psycho-physical aspects of words. I stay in a dialogue with the philosopher of language performativity J.L. Austin and performance scholar E.K. Sedgwick exploring what the word does, how it shapes and affects my senses. I am exploring my actions informed by poetic words, without perceiving “any aspect of performative relations as definitionally settled.” I allow the words, their consonances, ambiguities, contradictions to slow me down, change my spatial directions, and ultimately, rediscover the story I am telling as mine in the video poem. In my performance, I focus on the psycho-physical aspect of the poetic experience by repeating the words and constantly changing intonation and movement patterns as a part of the telling. Video-editing allowed me to slow down my attention on the correlation between words and physical dramaturgy even more: the need to calculate the timing of the appearance and erasure of each letter kept me suspended over one word for hours. My hand clutching the mouse, my facial muscles contracting – I was caught in the illusion of seizing the word, letter by letter, that pretended, in its turn, to mimic, letter by letter, what I was trying to seize with it. The video-poem witnesses disillusionment and dissolution of everything that can be said or understood.
The video poem A Contrite Heart features a poem by Alexander Vertinsky (1918) that appears in a slightly modified form of incantation repeated by the main character and narrator in Mikhail Bulgakov’s short story, A Psalm (1923). The video-poem reenacts the story as a commentary to the poem. Methodologically, A Contrite Heart offers an intermedia approach to poetic translation where I work with the acoustic, visual, spatial, and psycho-physical aspects of words. I stay in a dialogue with the philosopher of language performativity J.L. Austin and performance scholar E.K. Sedgwick exploring what the word does, how it shapes and affects my senses. I am exploring my actions informed by poetic words, without perceiving “any aspect of performative relations as definitionally settled.” I allow the words, their consonances, ambiguities, contradictions to slow me down, change my spatial directions, and ultimately, rediscover the story I am telling as mine in the video poem. In my performance, I focus on the psycho-physical aspect of the poetic experience by repeating the words and constantly changing intonation and movement patterns as a part of the telling. Video-editing allowed me to slow down my attention on the correlation between words and physical dramaturgy even more: the need to calculate the timing of the appearance and erasure of each letter kept me suspended over one word for hours. My hand clutching the mouse, my facial muscles contracting – I was caught in the illusion of seizing the word, letter by letter, that pretended, in its turn, to mimic, letter by letter, what I was trying to seize with it. The video-poem witnesses disillusionment and dissolution of everything that can be said or understood.
| etudesdec2023kruchinina.pdf |
