Choreographic Lab

Time to reflect upon practice.

To further explore the practice.

To articulate the practice.

In its broadest sense to research and explore the connections & tensions of a number of inter-related strands of academic & professional life.

Rationale:

This research opportunity will afford me time & space within an engaging & challenging environment to focus through ‘action-research’ on the practices of making, re-making & reflection. To dig deeper. To focus on how we can talk about & share our languages. To research and develop new performance material & choreography for specific dances, in particular focussing upon the processes of making choreographies and how these processes may collide or collude with other materials and methodologies. Specifically, through making a new work & new dances for Bodies in Flights’ Secrecy of Saints and reflection upon the processes & concerns of Who By Fire as I re-work & tour with it.

I continue to believe that we (dancers & choreographers) have much to learn from models influenced by action-research and how we can use such methodologies to frame and interrogate our processes. This part of my proposal will attempt to collect thoughts & feelings that will need to be continually shaped, re-shaped and interrogated.

My intention also, at this stage, is to offer a possible framework as to how & why professional practices & research paths & methodologies may influence one another & be shared. To look at what we can learn from the one and the other, the transference of knowledge.

To speak from & through the body.

The Secrecy of Saints was first shown as a work-in-progress at In-Between Time Festival of Live Art & Intrigue from 2-5 on February 2nd in the Light Studio at Arnolfini Gallery.

Outside of words/ alongside life/ up against you/ amidst love

The Secrecy of Saints continues Bodies in Flight’s exploration of the power of the image: Gabriel confronting Mary in the Annunciation, that face-to-face encounter through which all performance and thence all living is articulated. It emerges out of the company’s opera collaboration - Who By Fire – with the band Angel Tech and prefigures its new work with three visual artists – an animator, a painter and a photographer. Using both live camera and music, two performers dwell in the instant of mutual recognition when-where that singular face appears out of the crowd and life is never the same again.

In this work-in-progress, choreographer Sara Giddens and performer Polly Frame re-used the video footage of the inter-generational relationships between three women from Who By Fire. Writer Simon Jones and musician Neil Johnson (from the band Angel Tech) added new text and music to this re-working to make an in-between work especially for this major Live Art festival. Here, we begin The Secrecy of Saints’ exploration of the instant when two strangers’ accidental eye-contact morphs into the mutual gaze of lovers.

Over the next year we will be undertaking a number of laboratories that will develop this work further. We are looking for both gallery spaces & theatre spaces and we are interested in collaborating with existing venues/partners and new ones.

The Secrecy of Saints is supported by the Arts Council England, Arnolfini Associate Artists programme and The Choreographic Lab, The University of Northampton.

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