Gergo D. Farkas

Stockholm University of the Arts, 2024

Supervisors:

Anne Juren

Aron Birtalan

Organ-ing is a multidisciplinary choreographic project that operates through a set of obscure organs that expand from spaces into bodies and from bodies into spaces. These organs don’t have vital functions and don’t seem to want to be named either; one could absolutely survive without them. Their byproducts are dances, sounds, objects, and poems: a gathering of lovers in lust for touch.
Organ-ing is a strategy for a worlding that doesn’t stop at the body's borders. It is realised through an interest in the organ as a form that holds things as well as an ongoing formation. As an organ grows, I learn what it does. The project doesn’t follow linear paths of causality concerning what forms what: these organs shape and are shaped by what they create and hold. While realised and felt inside the human body, they also pour into and out of it. They might be organs of a human but they aren’t human organs.

These emergent organs propose a sense of fiction to intertwine with the body’s pre-existing narratives, whether medical or holistic, and bring forth an array of fantasies that weave together the felt sense of the body. The organs of organ-ing don't mean correcting or questioning what is already there. Instead, they twist or expand mostly pre-existent physical capacities to fabricate a body lustfully entangled with itself and its environment, with the ability and deep desire to belong.

The following five short chapters are footnotes to a website created to serve as an alternative thesis within the context of the Master Programme in Choreography at the Stockholm University of the Arts. 

(1)

The first organ I encountered in an artistic context was probably Ria Higler’s liver in early 2017. Ria was a teacher and researcher of dance and somatic practices, one of the most influential figures of the Amsterdam-based School of New Dance Development until her passing in 2023. As a 20-year-old contemporary dance student coming from formal dance training, it took me plenty of time to understand how my dance can be affected by a part of my body I cannot directly move. Since then, a lot has changed. I realised that I was not that interested in moving things anymore; I wanted to be moved instead.

In my understanding, to be (consciously) moved by an organ, one needs to move the organ first. I can distinguish a couple of strategies here: bringing awareness to, breathing or sounding into, shifting the weight or changing the musculoskeletal structure around the organ region. Of course, these simple strategies intertwine; the categories differentiate between intentions rather than actions. They show that the experience of being moved, in this context, needs facilitation, and facilitation is labour. 

Seven years later, during our first supervision session, Anne Juren, choreographer, dancer, art researcher, Feldenkrais practitioner and one of the supervisors of my graduation work, told me that there is a sense of passivity in dancing with and through organs since organs do their thing without us focusing on them. Passivity has been an essential part of my field of interest as a dancer who wants to be moved and as a choreographer worried about finding themself at the top of a rigid power structure. I’ve always dreamt of creative work that, at some point, will take over and show me how it's done. Still, decisions have to be made, and organisation needs to happen. I now see organs as forms and organ-ing as a process cultivate a space where material can emerge and decisions are made in Present Simple Passive. At first, this recognition made me question the choice of the word passivity, but then, I considered Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on passivity and passion stemming from the same word, passio, Latin for suffering, and things became immediately more apparent. Ahmed finds this connection “a reminder of how ‘emotion’ has been viewed ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason”. She then adds that “the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body. Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as closer to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement.
We can see from this language that evolutionary thinking has been crucial to how emotions are understood: emotions get narrated as a sign of 'our' pre-history, and as a sign of how the primitive persists in the present.”(2) (Ahmed, 2014)

I spend much time walking around the living room in counter-clockwise circles, listening to music on my headphones. An activity I often view as a maladaptive behaviour that keeps me away from doing the real work – work that I was taught to register as such, like writing quantities, fixing dances, or finishing books. I tend to feel like I am doing nothing, but somewhere between the t and the h of nothing, I get tired, exhausted even. This feeling makes me think of David Cronenberg’s movie Crimes of The Future, in which Viggo Mortensen develops new organs in his body and is drained the whole time. Viggo’s body is in labour, producing these new constellations of cells that are then cut out of him with erotic performativity.(3) (Cronenberg, 2022) 

I am fascinated by labour more than work because it is something one can just go into and be in. It acknowledges reciprocity—it is an effort I make and an effort that makes me. Furthermore, labour points towards the inside of the body, away from fabrication (the work of our hands), and towards process (the labour of our body).(4) This retraction from the body's extremities – alongside the thought that the product one’s hands create could be viewed as an extension of one’s body – makes me find Ahmed’s use of the words less able to transcend the body instructive. Perhaps the most justifiable reasons to transcend the body are connected to production, at least in the socio-political context in which this practice is facilitated.

The organs of organ-ing transcend the body, too. Yet, even while I am writing this thesis, after creating a dance piece, writing poems, and choreographing a website all through these very organs, I don’t think their sole reason to be with me would be to produce. So, what do they do by transcending the body?  (Ahmed, 2014, Arendt, 1958)

Originally, organ-ing was meant to be a strategy for lovers, a choreographic practice that envisions an assemblage of (super)sensitive humans, objects and spaces, and dreams about their relationships while assuming they are reciprocal. In lovers, utilitarian approaches are overruled by intentions of care, coexistence, and solidarity towards non-human beings. Relationships are initiated from and maintained by the position of the lover. Unwrapping this exact position is the other process at the core of this research.

When I say strategy, it sounds like I knew what I was doing. This is far from true. The answer to how organ-ing can be used to create spaces where humans and non-humans are entangled in reciprocal sensuous connections is one in continuous emergence and will stay in that very state even after this thesis ends.

Some of the possible connections of this entanglement lie within an attraction to passivity and dealing with things in a femme way, as well as within a desire to see outside the rigid box of anthropocentrism. I use femme instead of feminine, as used in Ahmed’s quote above because I want to refer to a politically activated internal ontology(5) rather than a set of qualities and behaviours traditionally associated with women.
I find it interesting to think about how a post-anthropocentric approach points towards the future while passivity and, through that, emotionality might still be considered primitive. If I had a point (I do not), my point would be very similar to how Lucie Tuma and Jens Badura describe their interest in their artistic research it's doing it – the force of passivity(6). A post-anthropocentric approach requires passivity because it is this very passivity that allows us to investigate ourselves as objects within a process. We are objects to things. Similarly, I am an object to my organs, whether my original ones or the ones that emerged through the process of organ-ing. (Ahmed, 2014, Badura & Tuma, 2015, Taylor, 2015)

I have never been too keen on anthropomorphising objects to a noticeable level. Still, in my earlier work, in some cases, a certain level of effect was made through anthropomorphisation. I am doing a long, sensuous dance with a grid in my solo Deep Fake. I refer to the grid as my dance partner, and so do others after watching the show. I am not firmly against anthropomorphisation because even though I find empathy tricky(7), I believe empathy makes beings stay in touch and at the end of the day, staying in touch matters to me the most. Still, I do not find the act of making a non-human look or act like a human to be a post-anthropocentric strategy, as it still highlights the human way of doing things as the ultimate way of doing things.
Destabilising the non-human to move it towards the human is an option, but would that allow one to cradle a way of thinking-doing that is not cemented in our human identity? I do not think it would. 

How about attempting to destabilise the human instead?  (Ahmed, 2014)

I copy-paste two quotes here to keep us company.

"The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek. Atoms are mostly empty space, and electrons, which lie at the farthest reaches of an atom, hinting at its perimeter, cannot bear direct contact. Electromagnetic repulsion: negatively charged particles communicating at a distance push each other away. That is the tale physics usually tells about touching. Repulsion at the core of attraction. See how far that story gets you with lovers. No wonder the romantic poets had had enough.

The quantum theory of touching is radically different from the classical explanation. Actually, it is radically queer, as we will see."(8) (Barad, 2012)

"The bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.” The its outnumber the mes. In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are “embodied.” We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways?"(9) (Bennett, 2010)

Around a year ago, in Spring 2023, I started having difficulty staying in touch with my environment. I was trying to respond to the delicate invitations of non-humans, but my attention kept falling back and away into my body. As I had less and less strength to stay in the Out, and the Out seemed to be scarier and scarier, and seemingly impossible to change, my primary desire became to world my body. 

I felt disconnected; my loverhood seemed to have left me in my artistic work and my personal life as well. I experienced tension in my relationship with my then-partner, particularly related to my desire to introduce him to my artistic work. It felt sinister that I could not find a way to invite such a significant lover into a practice that is titled lovers. As he is a doctor, our schedules, routines and lifestyles are so different. Our knowledge intersects where the human body is, yet they are so distant from one another. One of the reasons for starting to organ was to erase this distance by attempting to bring forth these organs together. I wanted us to create a process in which our knowledges can align through nurturing these organs into anatomically accurate body parts with imaginative and poetic agencies. 

After a few sessions, we stopped. We failed to let each other into the other’s world every time we tried. In the following months, our relationship slowly ended, and the organs continued to grow in a different direction from the one I once imagined. I became distant from scientific language and kept from naming these organs, as every word felt too sharp and every sentence cut too deep. I also decided to refrain from dealing with them as self-contained parts with vital functions (a description of the word organ I found on the internet that I feel particularly distant from).

The organs of organ-ing are created for, with and through the different materials that constitute them to intra-act(1). They are a cradle of dance, sound, text, and image, cradled by the very same matter they hold. They belong to the space just as much as the body. (Stark, 2016)

The following segment will contain speculations about these organs. I will allow these non-descriptions to be fragmented and uncomprehensive as my goal has never been to make sense of the totality of the body. I do not find the below-mentioned organs, knowledges and correlations more critical than others. I will discuss them because, at some point, they were invited by the work and became part of the practice. I will refer to the organs of organ-ing as the first, the second, and the third organ. This does not feel particularly good, but naming them would feel even worse. The organs all have at least one catalysing agent: an actant situated in the Out that stimulates or accommodates the organ in some way.

Working with the organs introduced by organ-ing generates internal attention and a strong engagement with bodily sensations. This state of being also awakens one’s attention to everything else that already constitutes the human body. As this practice never meant to undermine the agential capacities of human organs or organ systems, I became interested in reaching out towards pre-existing bodily knowledge through the newly discovered organs.
By aiming at simultaneously experiencing these organs and those which pre-exist the organ-ing process, I want to synthesise materiality and fantasy. The moments when simultaneity does occur are vulnerable and fleeting. A pre-existent and an organ-ing organ’s experience meet where the very real and the extraneous hold and tend to one another. 

The first organ feels like an upcycled thymus gland. It might be responsible for producing a particular pheromone, so it is strongly connected to all major skin glands, especially the sweat glands in the armpit and the perineum. Since these body parts often stay hidden or enclosed, working with the first organ creates a highly open, projecting body.
The first organ is placed close to the heart, so close that it might be precisely where the thymus gland is. This proximity to the heart allows the heart to influence one's experiences with the first organ.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Sensing, Feeling, and Action describes the heart as an organ of passion, compassion, openness and closedness, love and hate(2). In organ-ing, its invitation to play with an emotional body gently bleeds into the experience of the first organ’s capacity to spread odourless scents and its invitation to place attention on the armpit and perineum.
The first organ’s leading catalysing agent is anything and anyone that perceives the body, whether a star, a theatre light, a camera lens, a nose, or a pair of eyes. (Cohen, 2008)

The second organ is a thin, translucent layer, passing through the body somewhere in the universe between the hypodermis and the surface of our muscles. This layer, peculiarly similar to mycelium, embraces the totality of our body. It is not quite responsible for anything, but one of its tendencies is that it starts to pull towards objects and beings outside of the body gently. The closer the external surface, the stronger the pull of the layer. This capacity allows the body to experience the Out on a proprioceptive level. The second organ feels quite inaccurate; sometimes, it starts to navigate towards directions where no visible body can be found.
Dancing with the second organ gently weaves together with a set of experiences that I connect to the fascia, a sheath of connective tissue surrounding the whole body. It highlights the prospects of simultaneity by opening up the idea that information does not necessarily need to travel once information is present in the body. Or that everything is dependent on everything. Working with the fascia allows one to experience the body as singularity and multiplicity all at once. It feels like the second organ invites one to experience something similar on a larger scale by expanding proprioception onto a spatial level. Therefore, it invites the practitioner to relate to the border of the physical body as a membraneous structure.
During the practice, I started to feel that the second organ falls into the body from the external surfaces and pours out of the body onto the floor, the walls, the soil, and the trunks of the trees. It is a continuous connection between the Out and Elsevár.
Inside the dance studio, the walls, the floor, and other surfaces became the main catalysing agents of the second organ. Through the second organ, I started to understand that these organs are not human organs, even though they are parts of my body.

The third organ seems to run behind or alongside the intestines. It is as if it would facilitate a reverse energy flow, in which things enter the body through the anus and burst out through the mouth. This organ confuses ideas around nourishment and waste and makes me burp whenever I dance with it.
Working with the third organ invites me to focus on the authentic and reverse directions of my digestive system and brings a sense of awareness to my respiratory system, which became relevant through a desire to confuse the in and the out. Focusing on the breath appears to be the easiest way to experience a sense of intra-action between a body and its environment. I continued to heighten this experience by fantasising about an extremely thick midline in my body that is filled with air, creating the experience of the Out within an in. Furthermore, I connected the third organ to embryological reveries by experimenting with falling into the in-between of the two initial daughter cells from which an embryo develops(3). 
This organ's catalysing agent is a speaker, which seems to double as a lover, especially when it vibrates. (Cohen, 2008)

Elsevár – a term created by merging the English word elsewhere with the Hungarian word vár (‘castle’), a typical ending to Hungarian settlement names (e.g. Földvár, Székesfehérvár) similar to, e.g. Newcastle – is the place I go to from the here and the now. I do not know much about it and refrain from describing it. Sometimes, when I am there, things feel really sticky, and it is hard to leave. The only thing Elsevár is particularly serious about is the fact that it is precisely not here. The arrival to Elsevár does not happen through the body’s change of location but through the emergence of the state of being away.
In organ-ing, Elsevár is not shaped by our conscious decisions but by what happens to us there. This condition gives Elsevár agency without any decisive creative intervention from my side. I narrow my responsibility down to allocating this area by referring to it. It is not my job to cultivate its land. However, I have a solid and direct connection to it: I am challenged and nourished by it as it is challenged and nourished by me.

I first introduced the term worlding to my work to substitute the term worldbuilding. I did this to clarify that the process I am describing has more in common with labour than with work and demands a certain sense of passivity the term building seems to chase away from my site. Worlding has different readings in new-materialist thought(1), so I will never be entirely sure to what extent I am butchering the term by applying it to my choreographic practice. My understanding of it within this project could be summed up by the idea of facilitating the emergence of a world that takes the place of both the subject and the environment by expanding through the body’s borders. As mentioned in other footnotes, my previous works attempted to challenge this dichotomy by interacting with physical objects. I was always fascinated by the outcomes, but my human body has never ceased to be the main subject of (human) attention. This would be hard to achieve because the more a being reminds us of ourselves, the more empathy we can generate towards it(2). In babes, my graduation piece, created through the practice of organ-ing, my strategy was different. I wanted my body to become a crucial part of this world through the organs. I wanted the spectator to be able to peek into Elsevár through my body. (Harrison, 2010, Hunter, 2018)

Maybe it was my supervisor, artist and musician Aron Birtalan, who first invited my attention to the idea that a strategy to find porosity between the border of in and out is to shift between the in and the out as many times as possible. There is a big chance I misunderstood Aron, but this was my conclusion anyway.
To clarify what this entails within the practice of organ-ing, it is vital to share that working with the organs generates a form of solid internal attention. The facial expression drops or becomes less clear, and so is the focus of the gaze. Changing location becomes more difficult. This state easily creates a sense of disengagement from things that take place outside of the body. I tried to tackle this situation for a while by bringing awareness to the organs inside my body while remaining engaged with the room by focusing on a specific object. These attempts transported me into an in-between space that was peculiar and exciting but did not allow me to nurture the organs or my environment. Once I started to focus on being either Elsevár or in the Out, the two states I eventually wanted to blur, things started to work out. It also felt like I never travelled empty-handed. Something always seems to have stayed with me from one place I could take to the other side: a tiny muscle tension, a changed facial expression, a bunch of fingers grabbing on something invisible. I do not feel the need to concretise this as I am not sure if Elsevár is a place that can hold a lot of language.

Bringing my awareness to the organs of organ-ing creates an engagement with Elsevár. These organs move me, and these movements affect the Out, but where does my attention go once it is in the Out? Moreover, how do I interact with the organs as formations that pour into and out of the body?

I navigate myself in the Out by applying the scores of lovers. Every score has an affinity organ, meaning an organ the score has some form of correspondence with. One way or another, the score and the affinity organ accommodate or stimulate one another. Affinity organs are the scores’ catalysing agents.

A sensual dance that belongs to you as much as to anything else.

affinity organ: the first organ

Offer a sensuous dance to a wall or any other object.

affinity organ: the first organ

A dance that is a small particle of a dance that is super huge.

affinity organ: the first organ and the second organ

In this dance, whatever you do manifests as (a number of) touch(es).

Touch is

Inside your body

On the surface of your skin

Outside of your body (e.g. attention, gaze, currents of energy)

In the air

affinity organ: the second organ

What if every border is a membrane?

affinity organ: the second organ

Focus on the body parts with a lot of nerve endings (e.g. anus, fingertips, armpit etc.)

Attempt to transfer that sensitivity to other regions of the body

See if pleasure finds you

Attempt to transfer pleasure to other parts of the body

affinity organ: the third organ

Most of the artists I invited to collaborate with me on the dance performance babes are from Hungary. This situation birthed long emails, numerous Zoom conversations, and eventful visits to Budapest.
In this early stage of the process, my collaborators worked from notes, wishes and other residues of my organ-ing body. In September 2023 and April 2024, I had the chance to experiment with organ-ing in an open-level workshop format and developed a set of guided experiences that introduced the participants to the organs of the practice. In the future, I would like to involve all my collaborators from various disciplines in similar sessions to turn organ-ing into a collective physical experience.

Composer Marton Csernovszky created the music for the dance piece babes. I approach his material sensuously, and I continue to fall in love with his music over and over again. I try to reciprocate this satiation by giving space to his work on an attentive and—in the case of babes, via using a pair of extra speakers located on the dancefloor or allowing the music to fill an empty stage—on a physical level, too. 
Marton and I worked from the notes I wrote about the organs after my organ-ing sessions and the playlists I gathered for each organ. We also considered the catalysing agents – the audience, the walls, and the extra speakers.

Visual artist and web designer Daniel Kophelyi created this website. Daniel worked relatively freely after receiving poems, virtual objects, music material, and notes about the organs. I asked Daniel to create a virtual body for the work and to enable me to entangle it with hyperlinks. We wanted this website to be able to hold the work without my dancing body being directly present.

Designer Balazs Agoston Kiss created the virtual objects found on the website. Balazs and the organs shaped these objects reciprocally: their dances affected the emerging objects, and the emerging objects affected their dances. In addition to working from the notes of organ-ing sessions, Balazs expanded the research to natural patterns and phenomena.

For the premiere of babes, Sigge Ivarsson created a 3x1.5 metres detailed textile work sewn out of pants similar to my costume. Placed in front of the auditorium's entrance, the work became a tactile entity, connecting scenography with costume and the audience with the performer.

Aron Birtalan and Anne Juren supervised me. I invited them because I feel connected to their creative work. I needed conversation partners, and that is what I found within them. I did not want to create strategies to host them in my work. Instead, I wanted them to be able to hold me in my vulnerability. And that is precisely what they did.

It was clear to me that relating to the body as the primary location of Elsevár is a choice nurtured by the continuous experience of being away from home. I carried out this project in Stockholm, and even though I have been around for about five years by the time this practice was created, I have always had difficulties relating to Stockholm as my here. The generalised experience of being away is heavy but rich. It is hard to feel anchored. First, things feel displaced, and then I feel displaced. Like dirt. Matter out of place(1). 

Working with so many Hungary-based Hungarians elevated the Elsevár phenomenon onto the creation process of babes. My colleagues became organs, and the work became a body. (Douglas, 2013)

In the coming months of 2024, the organs of organ-ing will have the chance to facilitate a process leading to a piece scheduled to premiere in December at Trafo House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest. It will be a sharp shift from babes: from a solo to a group work, from an academic environment to the independent performing arts scene, from away to here. The three organs through which these footnotes were written will continue their labour. Perhaps we will encounter some undiscovered ones on the way.

Thank you to my colleagues, friends and lovers who organed this process with me:

Marton Csernovszky, for your music

Balazs Agoston Kiss, for your virtual objects

Sigrid Ivarsson, for your installation

M.Ali Donmez, for your lights

Aron Birtalan and Anne Juren, for your supervision

Daniel Kophelyi, for your web design

Alice Chauchat, for your coaching

Alex Blum, for your proofreading

Jennifer Lacey, for being an artistic director and much more

Marie Fahlin, for managing our department in the last months

Karin Hauptmann, for producing

Veza Fernandez, for being so passionate about organs

Fredrik Heimdahl, Jimmy Svensson, and Petter Wennardt, for technical support

Albin Svedlund, for your knowledge of anatomy and medicine

Claire Lefevre, Levente Lukacs, Julia Vavra, for keeping the broken pieces of a heart in proximity

Andrea Banoczy and Tamas Halasz, for curating a magical hangout session with dance history

MDT Moderna Dansteatern being such an open, curious and welcoming theatre

ugly but useless, for your fonts

Visegrad Fund and Centrum choreografického rozvoje SE.S.TA for the residency support

Ahmed, S. (2014). Cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

p. 30

Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition (2nd ed.). Rob Shepherd.

Badura, J., & Tuma, L. (2015, March 24). It's doing it – the force of passivity by Lucie Tuma. Research Catalogue - an international database for artistic research. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/51120/58822/0/557

Barad, K. (2012). On touching—the inhuman that therefore I am. differences, 23(3), 206-223. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892943

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

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Cohen, B. B. (2008). Sensing, Feeling, and Action (2nd ed.). Contact Editions.

p. 39, p. 161

Cronenberg, D. (Director). (2022). Crimes of the Future.

Douglas, P. M., & Douglas, M. (2013). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge.

Harrison, M. A., & Hall, A. E. (2010). Anthropomorphism, empathy, and perceived communicative ability vary with phylogenetic relatedness to humans. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 4(1), 34-48. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0099303

Hunter, V., & Palmer, H. (2018, March 16). Worlding. New Materialism. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/w/worlding.html

Stark, W. (2016, August 15). Intra-action. New Materialism. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/i/intra-action.html

Taylor, A. C. (2021, January 1). Femme. Keywords. https://keywords.nyupress.org/gender-and-sexuality-studies/essay/femme/