Clues on techne

Abstract

Tekhne Sessions is the name of a research practice I developed in 2003 to investigate the area between training and performance. It was one of the tips of an iceberg I had been exploring at the time and that still subtends my research today, albeit manifested differently. Let me explain. I was always intrigued by what I considered – naively from an academic perspective but rather descriptively from a practitioner’s – the ‘performance quality’ of certain instances in training, both as an observer of training and as a doer in training. This is an elusive characteristic that I associated with terms such as aliveness, rawness, electric/energized, engaged, absorbed, even consumed, but also compositional and ‘retrospectively designed’ due to a sense of purpose regardless of the apparent lack of logic during its unfolding. I developed Tekhne Sessions precisely to explore in practice what sounds so abstract and mysterious in words.