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.

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?

I have just watched 5 small video pieces by Robert (Daniels) and am going to try and write using instructions from Vida (Midgelow) for this thing we are calling ‘intertextual resonances’. There is a long list of tasks (see Vida’s, Sept 2006 and articulation strategies categories), my choice is this one ‘Imagine a creative task taht you may undertake’. I will focus on the piece ‘Daddy Chips, Chips Daddy’.
find a photograph of a long dead family member,
begin to build fragments of experience for this this unknown and yet known other (the time she went to Senegal, her lover, the time the yellow flowers made her sneeze…)
With each fragmented and imagined experience select a fragment to keep, allowing the creation of the ‘whole experience of her time in Senegal’ to dissipate (and yet it will remain) - a smell from Senegal, the touch of her lover, the yellow of the flowers…
Do something with these fragments - make a video, tell a story, sing a song, dance the feeling, or only a fragment of all of these…
Jane