Choreographic Lab

In the summer of 2006 I ran a workshop over two days with a number of dance artists (Wendy Houstoun, Pete Shenton, Adam Benjamin, Gill Lyon, Hannah Gilgren) exploring Voic(e)motion and capturing it on film. The filming was done by Paul Redman. Having worked with a singer and musician during Burst at BAC in May I wanted to shift the emphasis more towards movement and felt that using artists whose main focus was movement rather than sound would help bring this about. With this emphasis in mind I also wanted to look again at how people might interact live with edited footage.

The first day I ran a workshop and spent the evening viewing the film footage from it and quickly editing together some loops (similar to the loops already displayed on this website). The next day I continued running a workshop, but then broke off to show people the loops I had made. From this we then began projecting the loops onto a wall (just running them over and over again) and I invited people to interact with them as they liked, only suggesting that at some point I would like them to at least attempt to completely try to copy some of the loops - of themselves and/or others. They could also obviously interact with others in the room not just the footage. I wanted to see for myself what I felt about any and such interactions. Between watching people and discussing the work with them at various points, I discovered what I probably could already have envisaged – that there is some potential for interacting with these types of films in a live sense. I hope to go into this in more detail at some point. Also, I gave footage of the workshop and the film interactions to the Lab and I understand that this is going to be edited into some form that people can get access to at some point.

The joy of the ‘discipline’ to make time to reflect and to do just because I have said I will!
And to observe others.
I feel very privileged.
Gill and her collaborators moving in between, apparently effortlessly, analysis, description, technologies and pragmatics.
And moving in between each other with and through the technologies.

Getting a much clearer sense of Roberts practice and concerns as he articulates to four graduates the role of the lab and his role within it.

“It’s about language. It’s about how I make stuff. How I know it, feel it, understand it”.
Robert

Witnessing Anna in the studio with two collaborators, a performer and a filmmaker, articulating ‘where the energy is in a particular exercise’. Worrying away at the minutiae, describing and re-describing, articulating and re-articulating I watch the body not the monitor. They have to watch the monitor.

“Try and work with irregular beats so you don’t get lulls, so you surprise yourself, let each change be a surprise”. Anna to her performer.

Notes for Film maker Tony Judge as we edit.
29.6 and 30.6

What are we trying to do here?

We are making a series of triptychs that foreground the movement of and in the film images used in Who By Fire. We are focussing on the rhythm, the tempo, of both the movement of ‘non’ dance trained bodies and natural elements AND the interplay, the choreography between and in-between the three screens.

Why?

I am driven to make these triptychs, these vignettes to resolve or find closure on this very particular material. I have not been able to let it go yet. What is it that draws me back?
This film material that both enriched the live performance, gave it depth, provided some kind of hook, invited the viewer in, offered a linear narrative, a channel of expression AND yet was also not used ‘properly’, not to our satisfaction, without resolution. Somehow it was never appropriately woven in or given the space that it should have been and its relationship to the live bodies (performers and spectators) was never quite right. And of course was problematic for some too ‘over sentimental’, ‘too easily readable’!

At one point on Thursday we are all huddled around computers – writing or editing in some way. A week later we talk about the proliferation of documentation, and what did we do before this and where is it all going to reside, and what are we going to DO with it all? Sophia (Lycouris who has joined us as an observer) talked about the need to have documentation if, and only if, it can be used as an agent for change, to move forward. This FEELS right.

My (almost) daily practice, yoga, takes me into the very present felt sensations – physically, emotionally and mentally.
This sets me up, and quite often, becomes a place I write out of, but not always.
How is that difference acknowledged?
How does this link to Vida’s recent paper on writing as ‘embodiment’?

Multiple extracts from de Botton’s “Architecture of Happiness” - a sort of populist start into considering anthropomorphism and architecture.
~ “The creation of beauty, once viewed as the central task of the architect, has evaporated from serious professional discussion and retreated to a confused private imperative”. (p.24).
~ “Le Corbusier arrived … at a simple list of requirements, beyond which all other ambitions were no more than ‘romantic cobwebs’. The function of a house was, he wrote, to provide: ‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.” (p.57).
~ “The advantage of shifting the focus of discussion away from the strictly visual towards the values promoted by buildings is that we become able to handle talk about the appearance of works of architecture rather as we do wider debates about people, ideas and political agendas.” (p.73)
~ “The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by - rather than merely of how we want things to look.”
I am very much, at this stage, trawling or mining for various points of entry into considering the conceptual underpinnings of Crevice. To think around and beyond notions of ‘house’; to consider and (in my own mind) destabilise what I know ‘house’ to be - and to imagine it as something ‘other’.

I let go of the new piece of work today, the triptych, out of Who By Fire.
Kerryn (Wise) was my first witness and responder outside of my immediate family.

I asked Kerryn if she would watch the film first and then write how she felt.
After that she was free to watch again and write when she wanted.

Kerryn talked later in the in-between seminar of how her first responses were more real, emotional, from the felt-sensation and her second much more descriptive – even though she had to use great restraint not to write as she watched the first time.

“I was really tempted to write as I first watched but I was glad I didn’t. I wrote afterwards and for me that was really good because I was able to write what I was feeling not just a description of what I was seeing. The second time I described what I saw”. Kerryn Wise

I start to see the body as a cloud/clouds. It reminds me of how I experience my body with my eyes closed - as areas of density rather than solidity, not seperate from the atmosphere around it, the surface between skin and air being blurred and frayed rather than solid against gas.

Somehow seeing what appears to be merging bands of colour, I am reassured almost immediately to realise that the colours are actually a body or bodies moving across and within the frame. Somehow I am able to appreciate the notion of watching abstract random bands of colour moving around, because I can also see the solidity of the bodies within them. I appreciate the body (defined by clothes) as colour. At the same time I appreciate colour as clothes.

The films remind me what its like to see without my glasses and how I nowadays don’t give value to that experience, because I associate the blurredness of vision with “not seeing” rather than that I am still “seeing”, but through a blurred rather than sharp filter. When I was younger I gave this experience more value, choosing not to wear my glasses. And this isn’t because my eyesight ahs become worse, it ahsn’t really altered with the years. The films ask the question its eems if there isn’t value in blurred vision.

I am reminded of auras - the films seem to be bodies as auras. I think of the story of the healer, formerly a catholic priest, who was drawn towards healing because he felt his religion didn’t have adequate answers/responses to the problems of the people who approached him. At the same time he was beginning to go blind and was told by the doctors that they could do nothing for him. And so as his eyesight failed, he trained himself to see (or appreciate) what he could still see and this process gradually lead to him seing people’s auras. Within those auras he could see people’s problems and illnesses and this lead him into healing from that perspective. He also found that he could see auras best with the light off. So there’s something in the films about “seeing”. How we see? What emphasis we give to the way we see? What is real seeing? What is the body? Are all the ways that we perceive things - sight, hearing, touch, feeling etc - just different filters? The films seem to visually embody the experience of the body as feeling.

Guy.

Reading Richard Siegal’s article in latest (Vol 31 Issue 2) Contact Quarterly - titled “Open Sourcing If/Then”. In it he describes a choreographic methodology (for performance work, “If/Then”) designed to evoke or foreground notions of authorship during performative activity. Ideas and concerns surrounding “networks” are almost painful in their current omnipresence and yet Siegal talks to a kind of logic-based flow chart of performative decision making that also integrates texts from filial relationships (and clearly, notions of relating and relationships are central to his thinking and doing). It is stimulating stuff.

Aside from being a provocative account of a choreographer articulating his/her practice, the writing also intiated a personal line of thinking associated with the development of “Crevice”.

Networks (such a broad word): Siegal expresses the desire for “systemic complexity” and in dissolving individual control so that the “more qualified organizational abilities of communities” might shift and expand and improve his “If/Then” methodology. How might the relinquishment of individual control, and (subsequent) enabling of “systemic complexity” via networked communities, impact on a (soloing) lonely man?

Pushing this idea further, what is it to not be able to assume or choose loneliness?

I was thinking about the world’s last lonely man or the final lonely man - where the viruses and organisms of community and network prevent or denature (the option of) loneliness.

A big jump I know. And yet an interplay between the solo/grouped, the (semi)porous membrane, virus/host systems, audience/performer understandings, and perceptual de/stability is forming the early skeleton of “Crevice”.

I am here a little this week and next, July 10th ,11th and 12th. I will be spending 3 days in studio working on the training methodology for the individual - as opposed to ensemble and inter-active work for another time - with a performer Barbara Kukovec from Ljublajana (graduating on my MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths this year) and another ex-MA, video maker/performer Lynette Moran. Barbara is an example of a total theatre artist. Trained in the classical academy ( a conservatoire training that all Slovene actors must go through) she has subsequently broken free, studied Butoh and physical theatre and is a very courageous and in-extremis physical performer. On Wednesday evening we will have the Post Pavis seminar, using the Questionnaire I have developed for students as a point of discussion for how we might use Performance Analysis models in our own articulation. I also look forward to speaking with Jane tonight on our respective analysis/responding models and to observe some of Gill’s work here.
Anna

Link to blog for residency at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (Australia) - involving David Corbet, Paea Leach and Simon Ellis:
http://davidandjacob.com/still-live/