Choreographic Lab

A task: Write a letter to your ‘practice’ as if it were your lover.
by Robert Daniels, offered to participants at Tea and cakes with the Lab
- I thank Robert for the journey this task initiated.

If you were to write a letter to your practice as if it were your lover, what would it say? What sentiments, concepts or emotion’s would it reveal? And, if you’re practice were to speak back to you what might it say?
You might try it – I can recommend it - this taking up of the act of writing dancing.

This mode of writing is also connected to the process of ‘intertextual resonances’ as a feedback system. Here the feedback is intra-subjective rather than from external voices.

After the showing of my experimental piece Intimacies at the Choreographic Lab, we retired to a discussion about the work as a group. Jane Bacon postulated that we use an adaptation of the ‘Focusing’ technique to flesh out various kinds of reaction to the work. Based in my rather out-of-the-ordinary technique for sourcing and structuring performance material, the piece was particularly difficult to discuss. While it engaged with the traditions of contemporary dance and contemporary music, it also existed outside of both of these, yet could not really be constructed as ‘live art’. As many of the sourcing techniques used were somatic and psychosomatic in nature, the work was meant to interact with audience ‘flesh’ and ‘emotional flesh’.

For these reasons, I found the focusing technique very gratifying. A number of elements made this the case.

Firstly, the process was managed by a third party, Jane. Having Jane manage the verbal interventions permitted me to observe them without needing to get involved with ‘personal distance’ - I did not have to be objective; Jane managed the conversational dynamics for me, like an extremely adept panel convenor might do, but with much more sophisticated emotional awareness. The discussion was documented.

Secondly, I got to engage with the visceral reactions of the lab members. As my work addresses itself to the visceral, it was extremely gratifying to actually have a facilitator take the work back to a place where comments emerged from the felt, lived experience of the watchers, and where the technique insisted on observers OWNING remarks - a very, very rare practice in the performance world. This meant that Jane constantly worked to move beyond language that employed value judgment or aesthetic value judgment, and asked witnesses of the piece to actually engage with how they felt about the work and what it made them experience. While this might sound very new age, it was in no way flaky or disincarnated - indeed, Jane allowed the tone to be firey or anxious when necessary. This meant I was ‘face to face’ with a wide range of reactions ranging from what we generally think of as positive to what we generally think of as negative. These existed, however, outside the realm of value judgment: they were more about emotion, which is more of a form of energy than anything else. This gave me a very pure kind of information about audience reaction to my work.

At the time of the focusing exercise, I was ‘high’. When I complete a performance process, I get a kind of adrenaline rush that carries me through for days after a show. I felt this show had been a real achievement in terms of my own professional pathway. This bliss overrode some of the elements of difficulty about the focussing process, and I was not, at the time, aware of how some of the profound nervousness around the piece affected my heart. Jane did her best to ensure that value judgment was re-expressed as owned emotional content, and succeeded. However I think the piece provoked some very strong emotion such as rage and anger, and at the time, I was too blissful to notice that these affected me; I did, however, notice the more ‘positive’ effects. Perhaps I was also in denial. I think I should have asked to be somewhat ‘held’ in my expressive place myself, afterward. I don’t mean held by arms and cuddled - I think I should have been more expressive about my emotional reactions to everyone else’s emotional reactions. Perhaps what I needed was to feed back on these after a time delay. At the time - really until today - I did not identify that need.

That being said, the piece also provoked profound emotional connections with other people that were extremely pleasant and heart-warming.

The focusing technique provided an impassioned model for feeding back on artwork. Ultimately, it is a technique I prefer above all others, because I prefer to frame artistic expression as expression that generates communicative élan and reaction. As this was a first experiment with the technique to feed back on a live piece in this way, it was a gripping taster for me. I would be interested in developing the model to perhaps genuinely engage with audiences during and after performance, as part of the performance experience. The experience also, however, helped sharpen my awareness of my own needs when faced with certain kinds of, and energies of, expression. This need is mostly about taking the exchange process to its ultimate end, and completely resolving the content of emotional expression. Focusing could contribute to developing a totally different means of engaging with performance experience for audiences, and is a profound feedback tool for an artist with interests like my own.
Yvon Bonenfant

I’m interested to know more about what you do…

Developing the focusing, Lerman models and creative responses. Using Hincks ‘5 Facets of Creative Process’ model and working with a witness in one area of the model (Delving, Raising, Assaying, Articulating or Outwarding). Hincks’s model is intended to be used to enable the creative process rather than to comment upon it. Therefore we are going to play around in a sort of back and forth (in and out, rocking, returning, undulating, spiralling…) motion, to see what works when we re-enter the studio or the mind-set of a particular idea, movement, etc. and use the model to help focus a process oriented discussion.

The artist should choose an area of their process they are interested in knowing more about and the witness helps them use the focusing process to go more deeply into their bodily experience of that particular aspect of process.

So, for example, I might want to know more about the role of staging in your performance piece so we might decide to go to articulation, which is essentially the creative process of making but on spending time looking at the formal properties of the piece we might discover a need to move to Assaying to see if what has been articulated still has a congruence (in a bodily felt way) to what had a sense of aliveness in Raising.
A good way to imagine this process is the RSVP cycle by Anna Halprin. We will move into a moment of process, begin to articulate something about that moment, then perhaps return to the practice to see if we can play there to improve or change something, then begin to articulate something about it once again. So we are doing something of an overstitching (for those of you who did sewing at school…)

Precisely where we enter this model will be determined by where you are in your creative process. However, the aim is always the same – to use ‘the gap’ created in focusing (or to draw on the ‘implicit’ as a place where we can move into language from the bodily felt experience) in order to speak or move from a language that is grounded in our bodily experiences (of both maker and viewer) of the creative work.

Summary of 5 Facets Model…
Delving the situation is already give and allowed; we enter and play there. We are like a child exploring within givens it would never stop to think about. This is the space, this is the size of paper, these are the colours we have, this is the body I have, this is the situation I am in.

Raising we lift-up what interests us. If in Delving a fish might nibble your line, in Raising you’d lift it up and see if you wanted to cook it. It’s the facet to begin to bring out initial themes, issues, ideas, images, conceits, concepts, movements, etc, that you know you want to work with or explore more.

Assaying there are processes of probing, questioning, detailed exploration of themes, trails, tests, research, studies, attempts. This can be a systematic approach, or it can be a time where there is a lot of drafting, studies for…, all types of iteration. Here one is working to progressively match the sense of what you are creating to the form of the expression you work with.

Articulating we manifest our creation and the work is finalised. It is the facet of the process that produces the creation. The concrete expression of a work is situated in a specific finalised form. It occurs at a precise point of engagement where the felt-sense of what you want to express concretely forms.

Outwarding we engage with the dissemination, reception or performance of completed work. It includes the relationships one has to audiences and situations that the work may appear in.

Focusing process reminder…
Bringing awareness into your body
OR waiting until something comes into my awareness
OR choosing an intentional starting point and waiting to see what of it wants your attention

Taking the time you need to feel it in your body (getting the direct bodily experience of your process/product…This place may be much richer than the words you can give to the experience, this is ‘the implicit’, the thing we do before we can only begin to add interpretations)
OR sensing the lack of clarity or the lack of language to describe this moment, giving this bodily experience time and space to emerge

Now beginning to settle down with this particular bodily experience
OR sensing how it feels from this point of view
OR letting it know I hear it

Taking time to sense any changes
OR thanking my body for revealing all of it
OR sensing if there is something that wants to be known

OR a creative response…
The artist should choose an area of their process they are interested in knowing more about and shows that moment to the witness who creates a response in practice (dance, movement, sound, etc).

Structure of the process…
Work in a dyad/pair but you can also work in three’s with two people watching if agreed. Feedback from the process is taken to the whole group for further debate and discussion.

When in the whole group everyone should attempt to work with focusing. We will ask the artist what they would like to speak about and in what area they would like feedback.

A suggested approach to group feedback…

The artist drives the questions and focus of the discussion not the group. Key to this is ‘what are we wanting to know here?’ This way we are sure to focus on what is of concern to the artist rather than foreground our own interest, judgments, opinions (these should be kept at bay).

Questions and responses from the group should be framed as positive and open-ended.

After this process we might move into subject matter and opinion if the artist would like to – here we reveal our own agenda before speaking (I have an opinion about…would you like to hear it; this piece made me think about the architectural folds in the space and the fleshy folds of the body, is that something you are interested in?)

Artist may choose not to respond at any time and to stop at any time.

Everyone should try and acknowledge that the responses come from a bodily felt experience of the work and the experience of listening to a discussion about the work. The job is to tease out, or at least acknowledge, the relationship between our own judgments and value-systems and those of the artist.

The final stage is to state some of the mis-givings, misconnections, etc between the artist’s intention and the audience perception of the work (for example, we have talked about the use of blurred images in the video but not about how this work fits into the larger genre of video dance). These should be offered in as positive way as possible and not explored but stated for later development.

If we can articulate these ‘misfits’ then we might begin to find a way to move into an interactive process that incorporates both sides rather than just the intention of the artist. When we can do this it might be possible to move to a position, collectively, where we can evaluate, critique or review the work.

Bibliography
Bacon, Jane (2005) ‘Psyche Moving: Focusing and Active Imagination in movement based performance making and psychotherapy’ in Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, London: Palgrave
Hincks, Josiah (2003) ‘5 Facets Model of Creative Process, a model’, unpublished article available through the author via www.focusing.org

Worth, Libby and Helen Poyner (2005) Anna Halprin, London: Routledge

Task 1: Responding quickly to note images, resonances etc:

I don’t wanted to rush… but the task is to be quick. ….
Child, Old woman … Seasons passing — and as I write this I not that the seasons stand in opposition to the ageing process.
Struggle and sadness but a lightness touches me…. perhaps it is the tender voices that are singing - real voices - the summer sky that fills the far right screen.
Three screens — three stages of ageing.
The old womens voice tingles as the words grey on white appear on the screen.
Feet — in sand, making stepping patterns on stage, in snow, in water, in a summer meadow or garden…
Stepping and falling through life.
The middle screen… shifts in context.. layering images… what is it about three?
Life and death - a circle.

Task 2: Respond in a haiku (are your version of!)

White steps fade, summer - sand.
Looking out over water - blue sky, a child plays
Gentle tussle with life, birth

(Vida)

voice speech old frail loss, white hair, wash away, frament remains, softness of the body young, podgy, soft, old tired loose, snow muffled fire water air, fingers and arm crosses across the camera, relationship between the 3 images - creating a narrative connection, table carriying body - a body dragging itself across the floor pulling the tired body draining the strength away. red material floating in and out of the cameras eye. black white surround - symbols, hiding hide and seek, resting standing arm swings down. body hangs off the raised arm. pulling the body down water overlapping the shoulders then what? the face head summerged, sinking swallowed by the vastness of the ocean the vastness of life swamped by it all, a yearning for something that is invisible, a big sigh, lulled by the music voices sending me off someplace else, some otherness, other place, a place that is muffled and padded with cotton wool. squeeky.

haiku

a body dragging
sunk - swallowed by the vastness
let the breath go out

Sara’s Triptych

• First task: As soon as you have experienced the work, and as quickly as you, can write as many key words, images, ideas, fragments, connections as you can …
• Make a response in a haiku (or your own version of!)

I feel I’m not just ‘looking’ (watching, observing, seeing, sensing, feeling) the work and then – afterwards – trying to remember something, but that I’m looking at the work knowing I have to remember. It changes the way I ‘look’ (etc.) – I am looking for things…

Goo goo ga gaa
Baby in the snow
Baby in the field
Baby at the beach
Grey hair
Sea
Sand
A long table in the middle – a high angle
Inside and outside are coloured differently; inside feels black and white (the nostalgic aesthetic, outside is warm, and “glowy” feels softer.
Synchronicity: walking, shifting, lift the arm, scoop it down together
Spread yourself out on the floor, the table,
Walk in the grass, let the water rush round your feet
Sing a song o’ something
Slow motion, reflecting, nostalgia, remembering
Fleeting hazy sunshine, soon overcast
Words are friends and they sometimes leave you like friends do. But some come back, and you feel they were never gone.

1.
Sing goo-goo-ga-gaa
Raise arm slowly. Scoop it down
Words leave you like friends

2.
Feet walk slowly through:
Snow. Grass. Water. Sand. Inside. Out…
Sometimes happy, sometimes sad

Performative Writing and Intertextual Resonances

evocative, subjective, self-reflexive, nervous, citational, consequential
critical, theoretical, analytical, descriptive

Intertextuality:
‘The inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text’ (Barthes 1976: 36)

‘The concept of intertextuality requires that we understand the concept of text not as a self-contained structure but as differential and historical’ (Frow 1990: 45)

‘the idea of a text as a series of traces, which endlessly multiply and for which there can be no consensus of interpretation. In this area the reader’s [the reader here is understood to be the viewer, choreographer, critic etc.] activity becomes one of unraveling threads, rather than deciphering fixed meanings, choosing which colour in the tapestry to follow, where and when to start, change direction and conclude.’ (Adshead - Lansdale, 1999, p.8)

‘What is produced at the moment of reading is due to the cross-fertilisation of the packed textual material… by all the texts that the reader brings to it. A delicate allusion to a work unknown to the reader, which therefore goes unnoticed, will have a dormant existence in that reading. On the other hand, the reader’s experience of some practice or theory unknown to the author may lead to a fresh interpretation.’ (Worton and Still, 1990, p.1-2)

‘intertextual readings ‘move between numerous discourses in order to liberate us and the works they consider from the tyranny of singular concepts of telling, showing, explaining’ (Worton, in Lansdale 1999: xi)

The intertextual resonance enters into allusions to the worldly, to history and to the bodily thereby contesting boundaries between the ‘world’ and art, acknowledging the personal and the past

Performative writing:
Performative writing is a form of academic writing and it emerges from linguistic ideas around performative utterances. It usually takes as its subject a work of visual art or performance art. It is often loosely semi-autobiographical, free-flowing in a form of a stream-of-consciousness. It often weaves together a bricolage of other writing styles; since performative writing sees the form as being as important as the content.

Performative writing enacts the death of the “we” that we think we are before we begin to write. A statement of allegiance to the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming, this writing pushes against the ideology of knowledge as a progressive movement forever approaching a completed end-point. (Peggy Phelan 1997: 17)

writing as doing displaces writing as meaning; writing becomes meaningful in the material, dis/continuous act of writing (Della Pollock 1998: 75)

Performative writing and the body:
Performance and writing are connected by the body and by their shared, though different, relationships to temporality, positionality, experience, presence and disappearance

The Pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas I do.
(Barthes 1990: 17)

Responding with Intertextual resonances / Performative writing:

Tasks:
A few things to try – except for the very last and first tasks these are in no particular order and you can do some or all (and several are different ways of getting at similar concerns):

First task: As soon as you have experienced the work, and as quickly as you, can write as many key words, images, ideas, fragments, connections as you can …

Describe your experience of the work… how were you sitting / standing?, was it comfortable? Where you alert, tired etc etc? were you warm? were you distracted / focused etc…. the idea is not to relate this to the performance but just to note these sensations, emotion and conditions (to own them perhaps)?

Write down movements you remember … describe in as much detail as you can
Write down sounds you remember…describe
Write down images you remember….
Write down spatial elements…
Write down…
Write…

Take a moment to let the performance to resonate as a whole and allow yourself to imagine the performance as ‘something else’ (a ship, a building, a painting, a news paper, a person, a landscape etc etc… , describe the detail of this ‘something else’.

Close your eyes, focus on your breathing, allow your attention to be drawn to a particular moment / image in the performance…. How does it feel? What is its texture / temparature / colour / atmosphere etc etc….? Open your eyes and allow yourself to start to write, let the writing follow, try not to worry about its form or sense… but emerge from your experience of the work.

Take some time .. as long as you need… to let the intertextual traces you sense emerging out of, or going into, the performance to surface, to become clear. These allusions may be personal memories and experiences, previously seen performances, films, sounds, sculptures, landscapes, critical or theoretical discourses etc… These traces may, (or may not), be located in particular moments – if they are - note this connection.

Make a response in a haiku (or your own version of!)

List the questions you have…
real or imagined as evoked by the performance…

Imagine a creative tasks that the work gives rise to
(not answers or solutions .. just activities)

List resources you feel resonate with this work
… critical, theoretical, fictional, filmic, danced, etc …

I often think of intertextual responses as being like unravelling a weaving… in the process of unravelling the underside of the weaving becomes visible and the previously hidden ‘concerns’ become evident. There may be numerous threads … pull at one thread… see what comes out, follow the tangents twists and curves, knots… stay with this one thread until you have exhausted it for yourself….

End task: look over your responses… we all tend to have tendencies in our ways of looking, things that appeal to us…. Can you see any recurring themes, ideas, modes….? What do the responses ‘say’ about you? What may you have missed or not considered?

Performance responses:

Task:
Creative response (from Goat Island):

Individually or in small groups create a performance response to the work you have experienced as a way of giving feed back. This may take whatever form you choose – a painting, a performance, a song…

Focus on a moment – miraculous, interesting, moving – that you have an association with… echo it, multiply it, work out from it. Your response might be a flight of fancy, a dream of possibilities, a relocating, a fragmenting, a play anew, ….allow yourself to be creative and imaginative whilst remembering to engage with the ‘moment’ and be stimulated by the work you are responding to. Remember… as Goat Island tell us: ‘think of a creative response as your own work that would not have existed without the work you are responding to’
(Goat Island (c.2000) School Book 2, Goat Island: 25-26)

Critical Response Format

This process was developed by Liz Lerman from The Dance Exchange in Washington, D.C.

The responsibilities of the responders are twofold: 1) not to bring their own agenda to work they are responding to and 2) have a desire for the artist to do her/his best work. Responders are attempting to help the artist create her/his piece, not to create their own. It is important for responders, as hard as this may be, to no bring their own bias and expectations to the process.

The responsibility of the artist is to be honest and open. The artist needs to be in a place where they can question their own work in a somewhat public environment. Also, it is the motivation and meaning of the creator that is the basis on which feedback is given, so the artist should be very clear about her/his intent.

Process Steps:

1. Affirmation and Observation

Responders give the artist either positive feedback about the work or moments that affected them. People want to hear that what they have just completed has meaning. The artist must work to really hear the comments. Responders need to try to make the palette of responses as wide as possible. Be specific and expansive in the use of vocabulary about the work.

2. Artist Questions Responders

Artist has the time to ask the viewers questions about the work. Be specific; nothing is too insignificant. The more the artist clarifies what s/he is working on, the more meaningful becomes the dialogue.

3. Responders Question Artist

Responders ask neutral questions of the artist about the work. It is very important not to be judgmental in the phrasing of the questions. This is a chance for the responders to help the artist step back and analyze the work. If given the chance, most criticisms can be stated or explored in this step in a neutral fashion.

4. Criticisms and Opinions

If there is a criticism that can’t be stated in the form of a neutral question, responders can express opinions about the work to the artist after they have asked permission of the artist. The artist is allowed to refuse at any time. The opinions should be positive criticism, based on problem-solving techniques. It may seem redundant to ask permission for every single criticism, but it is very important. This gives the artist control of this very sensitive step and creates a dialogue, albeit a very basic one.