Choreographic Lab

Dear all,
I went ( as did Guy so would love to know his views). Came away very alienated. It seemed as if our culture/funding/education has spawned a generation of younger artists who are totally hooked into the idea of process and feedback as a kind of end in itself. I was dismayed by the notion that verbal feedback from eg producers and the public might be the way an artist develops their work for 2 reasons: 1) because I regard this to be patronage under another guise ( ie the moulding of the artist by the producing house a la Royal Court etc etc) and 2) because I heard some pretty weird things being said by artists there with regard to feedback from the audience being really valuable as a way of them understanding what they were making ( I know there lots to be said about this and I would probably contradict myself in discussion with you all and come to the other side also here..). I shuddered at the producer who said that if he didn’t like an artists work, then learning how to feedback better might help the artist to make work he liked more and could therefore support ( see 1 above)….

I may be old and old fashioned but I came away wondering what had happened to working away at your ideas and testing them in front of an audience and the craft of reading that audience from both the onstage and off POV as part of our job. Performing (certainly theatre) is its own feedback system, for without the live feedback we get AS WE DO IT we are surely not communicating via our craft but endless feeding around its byproducts? Then I wondered if all this was to do with the plethora of new work and the lack of funding to support the whole notion of touring and repeating performances to learn this process of audience-reading? I was also concerned at the idea of audience feedback being any kind of constructive guide for the artist. For in our post-modern age (post), I thought there was a consensus that there was no such thing as an audience but only a collection of individuals who make up such an audience. And that therefore to listen to one audience on a given night and be guided by this might - on another night - prove quite different?
So, feedback..hmm. Its our job in HE. Its a critics job in papers.It leaves the big question of how practioners/artists feedback to each other ( and why) and how we listen to our audiences ( or not/ and why). And in the Lab we have begun some really different ways of doing this that I find very stimulating, even if I kick against some of the highly subjective strategies…
I think of the bartering system of feedback adoped by the director Eugenio Barba and Odin theatre
for the past thirty(?)years.Feedback in this instance ( between cultural groups with nothing in common but the performance itself) becomes a kind of quid pro quo - a dance for a song, a performance of theatre for a performance of local dances etc.. At BAC I felt we were a very inbred, white, really quite hermetic group talking around and around work without any discussion (in the groups I worked with) about for example our work’s relevance to other communities who may not have the same language for feeding back according to the systmes we have set, but who might, in their hearts and nerves, be able to feedback simply by being there and witnessing. I think of Brooks African adventure..I think of all the need for bridge building interculturally and how performance might have a role in bringing a quite different kind of feedback into the arena than the type we were discussing at BAC..
In the end, surely each of us really only trust a small handful of close and trusted freinds/mentors/lovers/peers to give us any feedback we might be guided by????
Has the funding tickbox and accountability culture got into our bloodstream? Are we really so dependent on feedback when our metier is to make our work from the drives of our imaginations that , in my view, should remain outside any controllable or controlling system?.I am not interested in satisfying or pleasing my audience. I am driven. I hope to connect, because this is what I want to give. If I fail its sad. If I fail for reasons of technique I want to improve.If I fail because the audience/producer/critic doesn’t like the way my mind works……….well, thats lonely and tough but I cannot change that.
I wonder what Guy thought and would really like an opportunity to continue talking about feedback and what it is for…
still pondering,
hope this jumble of feedback (!) from Feedback makes some sense..
Anna

I wanted to put these things down here, because I am finding that the Lab is a kind of underscoring chord that provides the baseline for so many other thoughts and activities in my teaching and creative work. And the lumps of time and space at Northampton are, for me, laybys on a fast road whose landscape is every changing.
I am currently starting to log and label each exercise we have thus far filmed ( about 200!). And am filming group work in London this Autumn and again in Spring. In the ongoing project studying scenography with Sally Jacobs, new information is arising and in the Spring I shall experiment with some systematic application of the 2D work I am doing with her on space and form, to figurative work in real time/space at Goldsmiths with my MAs. This is a new development in my thinking.
I will be looking for a way to show this in some kind of still or video form, looking for ways to show the relationship between an exercise she sets me and a study of figurative composition….
I am studying Iyengar Yoga with a brilliant teacher to deepen the inner work. My orginal plan was to work a lot on Butoh, but my shoulder has been too traumatised to do any really pushy improv work the past 2 years.
By the end of our research Lab, I aim to have a structured video archive and a map of how to organise this into a possible interactive CDrom, and will probably apply for research funds from Goldsmiths to create this in 2007/8. I have been getting advice on my mapping idea and it involves quite a complicated way of linking and interlinking video materials. Eventually I want this programme to be like a handbook that anyone who has worked with the methodology can take up and customise and develop for themselves.
Just as when you start research, the world seems to be full of clues and connections, I find that everything seems to be feeding back information. Not being a performer any more, I cannot show this with my body as well as I might show it in writing and video and in perfomative example…
More anon, anna

www.athletesoftheheart.org
click on GlassBody to play,
love, anna

During October 2006 I spent a week at Metal in London with Designer/Constructor Phil Eddols. The main focus of our research was to construct a large metal cube out of scaffolding over which we would stretch a web/fan of elastic. We were interested in whether, harnessed to the elastic in some way, I could use it to visually amplify my movement as I worked using the Voicemotion process. If it worked we envisaged that not only would it amplify my movements it would also create a visual amplification of my sounds too, given the synthesis of sound and movement involved in Voicemotion. I was also interested to see how the elastic would function as a screen to project film and cast shadows on. In this I was looking forward at this being one possible way of being able to present/use the physical-music films I’m researching in the LAB in future performances/installations. Beyond this we were also interested in the overall possibilities of the metal cube and elastic as some sort of performative sculpture or feature in its own right, independent of its Voicemtion or physical-music usage.

Jane and I did a wee bit of dancing on Friday (6th Oct). In which we considered muddying the roles between the observer and the doer. The activity was short - 2mins dancing, each, then repeated 5 times. There was no pause inbetween the dances, and transition was marked by a brief alarm. A particular kind of momentum developed — rhythmic — in which strands of previous 2 minute dances particpated in latter ones, and were ‘remembered’ by the other. It seemed to allow (or facilitate?) a greater sense of sharing the space. Was this because of the brevity of each dance? What would it be to have 15min dances x 6 (say)? There is something about the inability to ’settle’ in the observing (in these 2 min versions) which suggests that the dancing thread isn’t deactivated, isn’t given time to disengage. Simiarly, the vestiges of the previous 2 min dance are clear enough to be fluttering and innverating the dancing in the next dance …

But the above is more about my experience … as distinct from my experience of Jane - or participating (as an observer) in her doing. Our ‘plan’ - to muddy the roles - seemed to work! But I wondered about this. Often, in my observing (a much more physically engaged, active pursuit of the watching) meant I began to think simply of my role — and it seemed to lessen the act of ‘giving’ in the observation. But perhaps I am simply admitting to rampant egocentricity? And yet the ‘whole’ became increasingly clear … a collection of roles, and actions … being pushed, and pushing. Being asked to contribute, and frame, in calling my will and passivity on the moving/dancing duo.

And amongst it all, some little gems of dancing … gradually developing an environment in which the failures are supported, and novelty is engaged.

There is a chill in the air today. Autumn. Sun. Will it be cold in the studio? Have they fixed the heating? These are just time passers for my underlying anxiety. Since we last danced together more than a week ago I have thought very little about it. Well, not consciously but I know there is something, somethings, stirring. Not sure what it is yet. Let it take its time. Let it gestate. I am not decided today. Not clear what I want to do in the studio with Simon this morning. His ‘a bit of dancing’ rattles around in my head and I notice that since I last had it rattling in my head that there now seems to be more space for the rattle. That is good. I like that.
‘What do you want to do?’ ‘Dunno, what do you want to do?’ ‘Um, I don’t feel like I have something I want to do’…
Somewhere I am thinking, trying to feel my way in…do I want to go back to where we were a week ago? What is left from that experience? Where to go from here? Where is here? Where was that?
Simon says ‘let’s do 2 minutes dancing and swap with no gaps in between and no talking. Let’s do it 5 times.
And so we do just that.
Dance, play, move, I feel him seeing me. Notice his sitting, my action - jump, jiggle, flit, flop - the space between us in this bit of a dance.
Time.
His go.
Jump. The athlete. Arms and fingers splayed, chest open. Catching himself off guard, almost everything. Feet or hands almost unable to catch up. Centre of gravity? Where is it?
Time.
My go.
I splay my hands, jump, open the chest, arms behind back. Surprise myself by finding him.
Time.
His go.
Time.
My go.
I’m tired. No, I can’t do that. What is my response? Am I following? Where am I? Too many questions. Want to wait until the impulse to move arrives. Stand still. Wait for the impetus. Looking for the impetus. What is operating here? Kinaesthetic. Sensation. Thinking. What is it to be embodied? The atmosphere of the thing. What is it? Just a bit of a dance, Jane.
His go.
He talks to me and moves to move. At the wall still talking. I notice my smile. His muttering. My pleasure. His movement now less energetic, more fluid, time seems to have appeared to him. Time and space seem to be of no concern to him. I am smiling.
Time.
My go.
Time.
His go.
These short sharp burst of moving and watching, seeing and being seen. Shifts in space and place appear as if previously unseen or understated and yet I ‘know’ that we always dance ’somewhere’.
Seek out the potential of blurring these boundaries. Can the seen become more seer, can the seer become more seen. Can my place become his or his space appear in my time.
Can we be both mover and witness in a continuum of time. We agreed to find a way to take out the ‘gaps’ that are created by the resetting of the timer and of ‘changing places’. The changing places becoming a part of the moving exchange. The meditative quality of the witness/observer becoming a part of the moving exchange.
Later in the day: So it was important not to know where to begin. In the tension of our previous beginnings, in the tension of finding ourselves, we have found that what we are looking for is to try and find ourselves and each other. Only before we forgot that we both can see and are seen. And seeing is so very much more than looking.
Jane