Jerwood Bank 2007

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Duration: 03:40 minutes

Duration: 03:20 minutes

Duration: 02:20 minutes

Duration: 03:41 minutes

Duration: 03:48 minutes

Each portrait is becoming an individual exploration, distinct from all the others.

It’s now the job of each person to try and develop their physical train of thought, and it’s our job to assist in this.

It’s fasinating to watch each portrait become more itself….

We set a few improvisations to deal with certain problems.

eg. In pairs. One person was the point of focus for the other. A stands in the space so B can direct their movement to them. A can choose to stand close or far away. A can also choose to change their position in the space.

This allows B to explore the idea of presentation and being seen, and how this may change their movement material.

Our second showing, I was less nervous. I went second… I usually wait to be the last one to show my material. I really enjoined this sharing. I didn t expect such a rich afternoon. My portrait has changed since I last showed it . The tasks and the feed back Sarah and Deb gave me open up new windows, new possibilities to devop the portrait. I forced myself to use the text as a structure to push myself with speed and to give a different tone and shape to the material I had. The time restriction and the search of an alter ego the expressive legs (as Sue suggested) represented all useful elements to play with. It s still a long way to go and the project it s getting to an end. It would be nice if we could have an extra week to work on it!!!

In our particular portrait investigation, how do we allow our layers of humaness to support the aspects of character we wish to illuminate .If we have these choices at our fingertips we can allow them to flicker and surface revealing a much richer understanding.

We are now encouraging the dancers not to go back to the long piece of material as it was at the first feedback session.

On Friday we asked them to look more closely at the opposite or contrasting material and see if it could develop.

On Monday we suggested finding 2,3,or even 4 smaller chunks of material of 1 or 2 minutes, with different drives.

Could one be an edited version of the existing material?

Could another be an exploration of just one or two movements?

Could there be a study of any underlying rhythm and speed in the material, eg. Can you physically whisper something very quickly?

The second feedback session on Tuesday 4th was much easier and led to good discussion…..

…yes! the sharing today was refreshing and very useful ! I enjoyed watching the evolution of other people’s work, listening to other’s thought process, listening to doubts, questions and suggestions.

Seeing each other during this last week has helped me a lot: I felt inspired and pushed to be braver in my own choices. There is a great sense of willingness to help and support each other’s development! I really felt supported and understood THANK YOU ALL!!! =)

I feel we are all on the same track even though our material seems so different. It is precious to notice and admire differences, allowing them to coexist. It is so enriching! 

Yesterday and today I have been working in the small studio: I needed some space to be loud and messy and … bold!  It felt very liberating to disturb my material, put it in the washing machine, make it turn and twitch and swing and shake. I don’t know how much of it I will keep but it felt like a part of me that has been silent has come out! … and as Rohanna said: it is just about realising that the cage has always been open! how funny is it: we look for freedom of expression but we create our own boundaries…to break! funny humans!!

I’ve really enjoyed the showings.  The last week has been one small step in my material,  but one huge leap in my head. Suddenly I’ve realised the door to the cage has always been open.  The alter ego has really pushed the material and allowed for more range.  Suddenly there are so many possibilities and things I’d like to try, but so little time left! It’s great to see everyone else’s material and how it has changed between the two showings. 

marks the second thingamee/sharing/showing/landmark… what do we call these things? after an alarmingly unclear monday, for various reasons, ranging from ‘just a funny day’ to ‘just a funny knee’ to ‘oh, my sacrum is having an identity crisis’… er – tuesday was remarkably different (for which i am grateful; nothing like a bad day to make the next day brighter). the sharing today was very different also – both in atmosphere and because it wasn’t the first one… maybe also the tube strike, who knows? the material we brought was certainly changed. it is hard to know from your own perspective, i know i would hesitate to say i can see the forest for all the trees, however, i can say that it was really amazing to see the shift in everyone else’s material. so much more real somehow. not that we were imagining what we were doing before; more palpable maybe? was really caught up in these little threads that we brought forward today… i hesitate in front of the cursor… how to put this? i felt much more engaged, in that sort of effortless way, when you get carried by what is unfolding before you. mmph! a very satisfying afternoon.

Susanna filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 39 seconds

Roberta filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 38 seconds

Rohanna filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 33 seconds

Hilary filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 33 seconds

Jennifer-Lynn filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 34 seconds

Jia-Yu filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 57 seconds

Since last Thursday we’ve had tasks that take me outside of my frame and it feels really good. These new adventures have also shifted my main focus away from choreographic devices and into awareness in performance craft (don’t know if that’s right way to put it). After all the turning and twisting of one original move, I quite enjoyed editing the material from the last showing this afternoon, though more work’s still needed before tomorrow’s showing.

Today we introduced the idea of using text as a form of code. Similar to the songs, the text can give an external structure to movement, and produces an unexpected drive.

We gave them a piece of Beckett to work with:

‘Enough. Quicker. Quick. See how all in keeping with the chair. Minimally less. No more.’

For this exploration we asked them to use a small amount of their movement material which they had been working on so far. They could apply their own rules to the words, looking at, for example, the punctuation, double letters, syllables, hard or soft sounding words, vowels, and deciding what should happen to the material when these occured in the text.

A text gives more flexibility than a song score: The words can produce the imagery to create the movement; there are infinite ways of making a code; and once the words and movement are put together the quality of the material can change by chosing how say the words in your head.

One or two of the dancers are already using text in their ‘portrait’. We’re hoping that this experiment opens up more avenues of exploration.

A curious week spanning from stresses to silliness…….building up to our first sharing and becoming increasingly precious about material to be shown. Strange how no amount of performance experience seems to take the edge off exposure, especially when there is such personal attachment. But there’s the thing…….there is no expectation other than what we put on ourselves. My moment of realisation post sharing is that silliness and disattachment often prove to be more creatively productive than preciousness – and more fun.

It is overwhelmingly liberating to me to suddenly feel less serious, and I don’t know why it’s taken me this long……..

Everyone has been working pretty much in isolation for over 2 weeks. It’s hard to show your work in progress for the first time and the first feedback session was inevitably difficult.

Each person had quite alot of material to show but, after putting it under the micoscope, it’s now clear that many of the ideas and the resulting movement needs to be challenged and pushed on to another level.

Today we asked them to look at 2 things which were explored through simple improvisations:

1. Detatch the physical movement from the idea or image it originated from
E.g. If the original thought was ‘pushing a ball under water’, the physical exploration would be pushing with resistence and a possible release.

This then, could lead to a freer movement exploration, less tied down by imagery which may now be too restricting.

We then asked if they could improvise, putting the detatched, physical idea into the lower body to encourage a move away from the upper body being the primary vehicle of expression.

2. Identify the physical traits of the material you have, and find the opposite aspect
No character is one dimentional. You can use an opposite to accent or highlight what you want to be seen….

To help with this we asked them to work in pairs. A watches B. A tells B the main physical traits of the material in 2 words. They then find an opposite or contrast. B then improvises with the new physical thought.

Having the showing today was useful.  It now feels like the beginning again. So many times I have felt like I have come back to the beginning.  It was good to really try and do the material to it’s full potential rather then in the corner farting about not really doing it. 

It seems that part of this process is trying to become clearer in your idea/material/internal world, to refine and find it’s essence but at the same time to expand and extend and break the patterns which you’ve set up. 

 I feel the time slipping away, and it seems like we’ve just started. 

Susanna’s clip from the 29th August.
Duration: 33 seconds

Jennifer-Lynn’s clip from the 29th August.
Duration: 34 seconds

Rohanna’s clip from the 29th August.
Duration: 39 seconds

Jia-Yu’s clip from the 29th August.
Duration: 38 seconds

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………