Choreographic Lab

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

“Intimacies” - performed by Carine Gori, Dominique Bulgin, Caroline Gill and Yvon Bonenfant. Images by Robert Daniels.
Click to enlarge:

It was interesting witnessing the first pieces of live (Yvon’s) work being put up for scrutiny/enjoyment/response. His work is completely within the territory that I am myself exploring, though the approach is also so different. I realise now how much it reminded me of my own quartet - Theatre Who - some years back, when we used to do our vocal-movement improvisations. We were never so physically adept though and we had no planned structure. Perhaps its linking me to my past is why my formal response to the piece was so emotional. I felt at the time that my feedback to Yvon, using the “felt-sense” technique that Jane had taken us through, was possibly very useful, but in hindsight I now wonder whether it wasn’t more useful for me - in that it allowed me to respond in a different way to the one that I might have expected myself to otherwise. I was suprised at how emotional I became. I wonder whether from Yvon’s point of view such a response might have been better tempered with the Liz Lerman approach that Gill took us through the next day.

Still find those startling images of the face in some of Gill’s films remain with me…..though I think Simon in the midst of his haka is the strongest memory of the weekend….maybe because we spent so little time talking about it compared with the other things we witnessed. Perhaps there is something to not talking about work…..? But I was alarmed at how much we seemed to overlook what had just been presented to us, when we had devoted so much care and attention to how we fedback to Yvon and Gill.

Nice to finally sit down for dinner with everybody - although of course Anna was not there. Perhaps I’ll sit down to dinner with her at some other point.

Guy Dartnell

From the darkness there came cold… cold around us and cold in the air, cold against white costumes. There were hummings and a distant skateboard. There was an ocean of cold air moving inside the enormous studio, and within it our movement and sound echoed and resounded against this backdrop of the far-off sounds of life.

Realising my (our) new piece Intimacies at the lab allowed us several firsts – we exposed our work publicly for the first time; we felt how our bodies felt to be in this particular piece for the first time in front of a group of new others. As maker of this piece I felt a strong sense of concretisation, of the end of the beginning of a process. We were together in this space and this experiment – risky and daring in a very particular way; in other ways, angular and restrained - and I was able to take stock of and feel the energy of us as an ensemble. This piece is so heavily grounded in our experience of self, body, and body in the moment that the piece changed utterly inside this large, dark, black-box hangar where we no longer had access to our studios of wood and converted chapel.

Discussions afterward revealed interesting information on the felt level – and ranged from pleasure and fibrillation and excitation to profound questioning of the ‘whys’ of the piece and the place of the expression of emotion within it. My work often provokes a degree of violent reaction… not violent in terms of ‘attack’ on me or the ensemble, but rather violent passions. It was gratifying to explore the range of reactions to my work in a ‘focusing’ environment, where the sentic and the sentient were privileged, because we began looking at where the personal resonances of the piece really resided in the audience.

To my surprise, the piece was perceived largely as being ‘about’ emotion, though in the score there are only two overtly emotional moments. This revealed much to me about the methodological thrust of my own pre-conscious creative mind. Sourcing material in the body in my ‘way’ (the way I’ve synthesised but by no means invented) seems to elicit automatic associations with the emotional at every stage of the process of performance, even if our own bodies aren’t explicitly seeking these. I like that.

It was stirring to then compare my piece with Gill’s and the methodology used to discuss/communicate about it with that used with regards to hers… each elicited utterly different kinds of information. Gill’s explorations elicited strong aesthetic associations and conceptual excitement, whereas my piece elicited much more of the personal (this was, of course, purposeful, but was interesting nonetheless). I felt jealous of Gill, as I have few persons to consult about the aesthetics of my pieces… however, my pieces are perhaps not art.

In the end I like this idea. I would like, in the grand tradition of the rebel, to make art that is not art and that is something else. Indeed, this piece is an eroticisation of the felt generation of material for voice and gesture, and perhaps that is more like a date or a friendship or an invitation than a piece of art.

How is art what it is? Is this piece I just made sentimental? What does it mean for a piece to be cold, in all senses of this word? How can I take this piece out into the world and show it to wider audiences? It seems to be quite unlike other work happening out there…. These are some of the many questions I am left with, and I am obsessing about my own work here, having undertaken a group project of this particular nature for only the second time.

I am also left feeling like my voice is present. And vibrates. And was surprised how the performers had understood my intentions through doing.

Yvon Bonenfant

The lab is a very particular opportunity – to have junctions of connection with a group of artists over time; to develop an accumulating knowledge of their projects and questions – what will mutate, what remain, what fall away. It is always easier to imagine a clarity in other people’s work than one’s own – so a few first slices:

Guy
Finding a language between movement and voice
How to set material through video – create ‘music’ through video editing process

Robert
Scores
Wanting left-overs

Kerryn
Video projection and live mixing
Haptic visuality

Sara
The spaces in between
How do the choreographer/lecturer/facilitator roles fit together?
‘the splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass’

Anna
Try to step back, ‘absorbed so much I don’t know where it comes from anymore’
Body as a meaning-maker

Vida
Carry physical history as well as intellectual history with you
how is theory embedded in the work?
Relation to audience

Jane
Movement/voice/video with and against each other
I am the field site for the ethnography
‘felt sense’

Gill Clarke, May 2005