Jerwood Bank 2007

Duration: 03:40 minutes

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

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……..

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.
Read more >

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!

So the blogging can be put off no longer and I am determined to at least write something before this first weekend is over. It is a daunting task and while we all seem ready and willing to be open and vulnerable in the studio, it is an entirely different matter in the permanent and scarily literal world of words. Sometimes I think that this is one of the reasons why we choose dance as our expressive medium, because it can be abstract and open to interpretation, mysterious and transient.  Writings hang around forever, dammit.
Read more >