Scores for the End of the Present: Notation Systems in Performative and Visual Arts and Their Relationship to Different Temporalities

The project investigates systems of notation in dance, music and visual art with the aim of developing and formalising a new graphic and pictorial language for scoring what theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli calls “the end of the present”. Taking its cue from Rovelli’s assessment in The Order of Time that our present means nothing in wider cosmic terms, and grounded in performance theories aiming to go beyond the medium’s focus on presence towards more complex performative temporalities (Amelia Jones, Philip Auslander, Adrian Heathfield), the project aims to explore how a disjunctive understanding of an event’s “here” and “now” might affect the role of a performance score. Considered in its double chronology both as a document of a past event and as an instruction for a future one, the score has a potential to disrupt the immediacy of a performance, as an event happening exclusively in the present, through the temporalities of its past and its future. The research questions how the distinct genealogies of notation in the performing arts (dance and music) and the tradition of visual art abstraction intersect to provide the background for an open ended visual language that can incorporate incongruous timelines and notate what is absent, invisible or inaccessible. Existing systems of notation and their relationship to their respective performance practices will be examined, in parallel to asking how materials not directly associated with the medium of performance use a similar visual grammar. As an artistic, practice-based research project, the proposed inquiry will not only investigate, compare and analyse existing literature and visual material but will aim to develop a new lexicon of visual components and techniques through drawing, performance, film and photography. As such, it will not only identify and classify, but also trace and compile, new Scores for the End of the Present in a study interweaving text and drawing, an exhibition, and a series of performances.

This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-PD-24-128.