Before The Sun Practice, I had operated under the educated assumption that professional making defines the process of making material–on demand and by any means necessary–what had previously only ever been imagined, intuited, dreamed. This definition I (still) consider to be something of a professional standard in the context of Eurocentric theatrical dance- and possibly even art-making.

I had always found professional making a wildly elusive practice, one that never made sense to me intuitively. When imagining, intuiting, or dreaming, for example, I tend to find the experience of imagining, intuiting, or dreaming fulfilling in its own right. I find the experience of imagining, intuiting, or dreaming, in other words, to be a complete experience, one that does not warrant “materialising” for it, in itself, is material.

I had also found myself on many an occasion having literally externalised, i.e., expressed, my urges, thoughts, feelings, dreamings and imaginings. The problem here, of course, is in expressing what I had expressed for no reason other than to see something of my experience through to its completion, its satisfaction. Note: this problem emerges where professionalisation ties one’s reason to express to monetisation, and power thereby rendering one’s reason to express for any other sake irrelevant.

It wasn’t until I articulated my first principle that I understood I was struggling with cöordinating between motivation, purpose, context, and experience because I was trying to coördinate according to a standard that I didn’t and couldn’t relate to. And it wasn’t until I had the experience of successfully coördinating between motivation, purpose, context, and experience according to a standard I could relate to that I understood the ethically and politically relevant, i.e., emancipatory potential of principle-based methods, especially when articulated in the professional environment, be that environment academic or artistic. More on that later.

In a principle-based performative practice, which is how I learned to refer to The Sun Practice and the practices that followed in its stead, the principle names the condition under which the engagement in a specifically defined activity will become specifically meaningful in its expressive, i.e., performative capacity. To articulate a principle, in other words, means to describe the purpose and determine the value of the activity engaged under its condition.

Broken down to its simplest form, the principle of The Sun Practice is the following:

CONDITION, standard Western theatrical setting that gives the artist permission to require attention from the public for a limited amount of time;

ACTIVITY, psycho-physical immersion in repetition of sound, the artist commits to repeating the sound that was made previously for as long as possible starting with the sound SEEN (think of the game you played as a child, in which you repeat your own name to yourself until the word momentarily loses meaning, taste, and becomes difficult to identify with);

EXPRESSION, in time and due to committed repetition, the symbolic value of sound (word) is exposed as unstable, negotiable, fragile.

I was about 19 years old, reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble for the first time in my Bruxellois bedroom when something of The Sun Practice first appeared in my imaginary. It was Butler’s accounting for J L Austin’s How To Do Things With Words that lit the way. In particular, the instance in which Austin describes the relationship between signifier and signified as arbitrary. The way I remember it, Austin says there is nothing in the nature of a table (signified) to warrant it be specifically associated with the combination of sounds that form the English word table (signifier). If that were so, the implication goes, every language would have developed the same word for the corresponding object.

This is when I remembered my childhood self repeating my name back to myself until the word lost any semblance of familiarity. I was tempted to test the principle out but using a random word instead of my name, lest I discovered that excitement relating to disintegration of one’s relationship to the word was tied to one’s emotional connection with the word. I was sitting by a table, I thought, why not go with that. Table, table, table, table, table. Lo and behold, a mere minute later, the word table was softening, changing consistency like caramel does, slowly but surely. Like caramel, too, the word’s softening took its time. I couldn’t speed it up, I couldn’t slow it down. I could only keep repeating it until it meant nothing. The spell finally broken by my having started laughing for I couldn’t stand the sense of pleasureful discomfort rushing through my sensory apparatus.

It wasn’t until I leaned back and sighed that my mind was properly blown. This is when, staring at the table, I realised I wasn’t ever staring at a table. I was staring at a desk.