Jerwood Bank 2007

in trying to decipher my own ideas/meanings of ‘portrait’, and in the midst of re-reading Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics Of Space’ for the millionth time, i have decided that he writes portraits of spaces… one in particular i have to share, it just speaks, says so many things…

“In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes. ‘One’s Paris room, inside its four walls,’ wrote Paul Claudel, ‘is a sort of geometrical site, a conventional hole, which we furnish with pictures, objects and wardrobes within a wardrobe.’ The number of the street and the floor give the location of our ‘conventional hole,’ but our abode has neither space around it nor verticality inside it. ‘The houses are fastened to the ground with asphalt, in order not to sink into the earth.’ They have no roots and, what is qute unthinkable for a dreamer of houses, sky-scrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality.”
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not sure they make a whole yet, not sure that is the point… a portrait, to my sensibilities, seems to speak of, speak to… opens up a potential lifeworld, makes allegations…

so some words of wisdom from Bachelard, who i keep returning to, and should be sick to death of by now, but – i’m not.

‘Inhabited space transcends geometric space’

houses as containers…
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I am flying . I am enjoying this and the pain in my right knee and the right side of my sacrum is the witness of that. I got a bit emotional in Eva’s class and  it somehow helped clear the entry point for the afternoon. Sarah’s suggestion to use the poem as an anchor for movement manipulation gave me a lid off moment and I could see the outline of my making. It’s still rough but I feel I’ve got something I like to work on.

I find really hard to concentrate this afternoon. Eva’s class was intense, full of information. It felt like it was enough for the day! Do we have a sense of measure in dance? Do we recognise when we have danced all the dance we could have danced for the day? Is the body an endless source of movement? Is there a limit?
I feel very grounded but very still. My thought process seems very active. I feel like reading now.

A long journey walking, leaving one’s land to find fortune and love.
Small roads and huge trees behind, water, warmth and a man.

Towards a land – A foreign land

BEHIND
BEING PULLED
STADING
WAITING
DANCING
and
CRYING

Do less feel more sounds like a slogan.

What do I do when I come across something I don’t know/ find challenging? How do I behave? Get frustrated, implode, come to meet the idea, watch, find a new door. Probably all of these at different times.

I found I could notice more today then yesterday. I think it takes me a while to click into a new class, new information and ideas. Each time we have a new teacher in the morning I feel slightly resistant. By the end of the sessions with them I would be happy to carry on that way.

I have come to an impasse with my original idea. I think I need to leave it for a while, try something new and then come back to it.

A woman…said enough.
Everyone was saying “Quicker, Quicker”
she kept going on her way

Between praying, fucking and making bread
the hore and the nun

Daily gestures would remind her where she is.
Daily gestures would remind her that she is seen.
(Constantly…)

She dreams invisible moves.
She is still looking for them.

Some thoughts that have struck me in the last few days:

 Susanna suggesting you could layer the idea with details which don’t take away from the orignial idea: sound, smell, envirmonment etc. 

 Sarah saying that although something can evolve, it wouldn’t have come to that place without the original idea,

 provoking the thought that if you have purple it has still come from red and blue which are still present.

 The improvisation was useful to free the original idea to find a greater palette of colours and textures. 

 How it will feed back into the original, to be continued………

Portrait,
a window into the soul of the person:
beginning to question
who am I?
what do I want to comunicate?
emotions
emotion have a direction, a logic of their own
to early to find an answer
don’t ask yourself to many questions
stuck things up,
moments
leave them resting to eventually go back to them
play with different physicality

……..exciting journey!!!!!

Because objects of art are expressive, they are a language. Rather they are many languages. For each art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue.

 Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken to. The hearer is an indispensable partner. The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it.

There is the speaker, the thing said, and the one spoken to. The external object, the product of art, is the connecting link between artist and audience. Even when the artist works in solitude all three terms are present. The work is there in progress, and the artist has to become vicariously the receiving audience. He can speak only as his work appeals to him as one spoken to through what he perceives. He observes and understands as a third person might note and interpret. Matisse is reported to have said: “When a painting is finished, it is like a new-born child. The artist himself must have time for understanding it.” It must be lived with as a child is lived with, if we are to grasp the meaning of his being.

by John Dewey

 I thought of sharing these words with you. I felt they are relevant in so many ways to what we have been talking about: language, creative process, solitary practice and much more…

Duration: 12 minutes

Audio clip of Susan Hitch talking about language: invention and innovation; Alfred the Great and St Thomas of India.

Duration: 4 minutes

Duration: 3 minutes

Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.
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On Thursday we had a visit from the actress Harriet Walker who shared some thoughts with us about her practice, and started, among other discussions, some interesting speculations on the differences between actors and dancers.

One thing she said in particular was particularly fascinating to me, that at times when she thought she had successfully and fully embodied a character role she felt that she had entirely escaped herself. She even said of her experience playing the character on stage ‘it was not me’.

For me this is an entirely opposite to my practice, which is perhaps something that I had not fully realised until now. Looking back I realise that I have always tried to be myself, or at least keep an element of myself in the work that I have done, both in the studio and on stage.
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“Art does not reproduce the visible. It renders visible” (P. Klee) I am struggling with making things visible! It was helpful to see my self in video yesterday and acknowledge the gap between sensing something and see its manifestation into movement. At the moment I am working on some Gormley’s drawings. I am borrowing his drawings and their forms; maybe the next step would be to leave the two-dimentional images behind, make them alive, find their emotional realm, sense what they suggest me…     any advice is more than welcome!!
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Meeting Jonathan Cole. I was completely engaged and touched by the subject so deep related to what we are doing!
When you realize how extraordinary people can be, you immediately feel incredibly small.

Then you find a motivation within your sense of failure, a emotional strength that encourages you to keep going.

Five days ago I wrote the above.
Didn’t publish it. Didn’t blog since. It s a perfect time to recover this short “fragment of thought” having had a really bad day!!!
(I was working on text to use it as a structure in relation to one of my movement. It didn’t really work when on the top of the text I was encouraged to add an extra code).

Someone said:”Restriction tend to make for interesting work.”
I deeply believe it ;that ’s one of the reason why I spent the all day struggling with my task.

balloon: a bag made of thin rubber or other light material, usually brightly colored, inflated with air or with some lighter-than-air gas and used as a children’s plaything or as a decoration.

my head… i haven’t digested this afternoon’s content. patience, patience. and also – patience for myself with the tasks we are working on at the moment. i feel so much; maybe this is the magic, that this is so completely holistic, that no part of me is left out. i had a moment of coming-out-the-other-end today, a little like rohanna mentions in her post. that some circuit was tripped after class this morning and i found less the attic of my intellect, more the cellar, where things are maybe fermenting a little bit, the seals on the jars are not quite so tight as i would like them to be… and now i feel more confident in that what i am getting to is more real, more mine – but also more exposed inside of that, a little shaky.

maybe after a night’s sleep…

Ian on physics, everyday balance and swedes. (Duration: 1min)

Ian on sitting up. (Duration: 45 secs)

Ian walking. (Duration: 20 secs – no audio)

Proprioception is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other.

Duration: 14 minutes
Audio clip of Jonathan Cole talking about face, facial expression, Moebius syndrome and emotion.

Duration: 4 minutes
Video clip of Jonathan Cole in conversation - I don’t smile because I’m happy, I’m happy because I smile?

Duration: 4 minutes
Video clip of Jonathan Cole in conversation.

Dr. Jonathan Cole, Neuroscientist
Jonathan Cole’s academic research has focused on the effects of sensory deafferentation (the elimination or interruption of sensory nerve fibers) and motor control, largely with Ian Waterman who has a condition which has left him without touch or movement/position sense below the neck but, nevertheless, has developed ways of moving, even walking, to a unique degree.
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Today was fantastic, listening to Jonathan talk and feeling like so much of what he said applies to what we’re doing. Its great to feel as though what we’re doing can relate to a wider context.

Today felt like a new beginning with the portrait. Yesterday I struggled to find any physical manifestation for the idea that was quite clear in my head but became feeble and self concious in the transition from thought to movement. Something was freed today. I think it was using some of the suggestions from Deb and Sarah about trying to find the extreme ends of the scale and giving yourself parameters in terms of time and trying to give a situation and context around the event.

It was really useful to ask Jennifer to help me try a few things out, and break myself out of my own world.

each colour is a manifestation of a different physicality

follow the signs and you’ll discover a new potentiality!

Today felt heavy with sensorial and intellectual properties in my head and body. In the afternoon, I was reluctant to move as if that would alter the state where images and stories were forming. On the other hand, I was  eager to engage with the words and shapes that I feel connected to. Moments like this always make me panic. Moments when I feel confronted by complete emptyness, a white canvas, with lots of pontential, but blank.

The longer I stay in this process the more there is to discover…..

During the hours we spend with each task the opposite happens to what I expect…..that instead of finding answers/solutions, all I keep finding is more questions.

Perhaps with time I will become more easy going about letting something live in the journey rather that the destination.

Lets hope!

the time of writing has come – finding the way in to things seeming always so delicate (for me, at least at the moment) – and this seems reflected in how i work in the studio as well; there is a story about a potential bride who, upon meeting her bridegroom’s parents, is given a tangled ball of thread to unravel… and thus reveals her sensitivity of touch, resourcefulness, inner grace which slips past and beneath the radar of impatient confrontation, breath that sees through the surface tension of frustration… given – i am not meeting potential in-laws (oh, but there was that trip to norway, hmmm), but i do feel the meaning is not lost in work such as this.
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After a week of investigating the ’song structure’, we introduced the idea of ‘portrait’. This exploration is to last the whole of the rest of this Bank Project.

Each person is to work alone to find a physical expression of a certain character or personality. The songs can be used as a starting point if that exploration has proved fruitfull.We presented the dancers with books of photographs, paintings, drawings and writing. They were also free to find their own sources of inspiration.

We talked about the idea of presenting the movement to the front. That whether expressing public or private ideas, we allow these ideas to be seen; we let an audience in.

Here are some questions for consideration from Sarah & Deb:

What is a portrait?

What do you choose to reveal?

What do you consider public and private?

Are you allowing both to be seen?

Are you allowing the viewer to build up an understanding of who you are or what you are saying?

Can we trust in the clarity of our fragments of movement, without the need for linear narrative, and their ability to resonate with the viewer?

Duration: 2 minutes
Harriet Walter on the interweaving of expression, rhythm and the intention of language.

Duration: 18 minutes
Audio clip from the conversation with actress Harriet Walter, exploring simple intentions behind motion. 

Duration: 4 minutes
Harriet Walter on finding meaning, rhythm and emotion in Shakespeare’s words.

Harriet Walter, Actress
After training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, she gained early experience with the Joint Stock touring theatre company, Paine’s Plough touring, and the Duke’s Playhouse, Lancaster. She has worked many times throughout her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in productions including Nicholas Nickleby (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1981), All’s Well That Ends Well (1981), The Castle (1985), Three Sisters (1988), The Duchess of Malfi (1989), Macbeth (1999), and Much Ado about Nothing (2002).
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