SCORES, TASKS, VIEWPOINTS & HORIZONTAL COMPOSITION

Scores, Tasks, Viewpoints & Horizontal Composition

Movement question

How can structure generate performance material without completely predetermining its meaning?

This movement shifts composition from author → execution toward conditions → attention → action → emergence. A score is understood as a set of conditions that focuses attention and generates choices; it is not a finished form that performers merely carry out.

Horizontal composition

Horizontal composition allows space, time, body, object, sound, movement, spectator and story to coexist without one automatically dominating all the others. “Horizontal” does not mean absence of structure. It means refusing to make narrative or authorial intention sovereign over every theatrical element.

Primary practical lineages

• Roel Swanenberg & Arjan Gebraad: the CPPM encounter transmits the Mary Overlie / Six Viewpoints lineage. Space, time, shape, movement, story and emotion redistribute compositional attention. The work remains structured, but structure is spread across materials rather than imposed by a single hierarchy.
• Peader Kirk: structure releases content. A sufficiently precise framework can generate material that could not have been planned psychologically in advance, making constraint a condition for surprise rather than the enemy of spontaneity.
• Mart Kangro: context, questioning, memory, simple action and the body–stage / body–spectator relation expose how theatrical meaning is produced. Minimal actions become unstable when context changes.
• Clément Layes: everyday action, object, repetition and micro-variation make ordinary behaviour increasingly strange, precise and socially legible. Repetition also creates behavioural structures among performers in rehearsal, not only aesthetic patterns for spectators.
• Jeremy Nedd: feedback, physiological response, time and relation allow composition to emerge through iterative response rather than execution of a fixed expressive plan.
• Sasha Pepelyaev: études, disruption, illogical material and association interrupt habitual causal logic so that shifting dramaturgical structures can become possible.

Secondary relations

The movement connects conceptually to the Designed Human, spectatorship, repetition and embodied knowledge. Sasha Pepelyaev connects indirectly to Marco Donnarumma around peripheral and non-central thinking, without merging their practices.

The unresolved issue is that every open system still distributes permission, attention and authorship. Emergence is not automatically democratic; its conditions must remain visible and revisable.