Goat Island: helping me begin.

On Sunday, 18 May, I took a day long workshop with Goat Island at Siobhan Davies Studios in Elephant & Castle. Their work has come up time and again in my research and there was enough said to peak my interest without really being able to put my finger on why. After this workshop, and seeing their performance of their new and "last" performance The Lastmaker this past Saturday, I have a better understanding of why.

Their work is intellectually deep, physically demanding, and pretty abstract. Yet I never lost sight of the 5 people on stage as being anything but "themselves" or, maybe in other words, of how human they were. When they were doing ensemble choreographies, they would often be doing the same movements, but in their own way. There was not a pinch of arrogance or aloofness in anything they did.

This is the pitch I would love to achieve with my work. Watching their performance made me want to run off and join their circus. But for now, obviously, I've got to do my own thing. And use a tool and material that they gave me to begin this final phase of developing a performance for September.

They say it better than I can about their technique:

Goat Island performance work is a series of responses: to the exercises we give ourselves, to our surroundings, to the events of the world, but mostly, to each other. We perform responses for each other back and forth. The conversation goes further than were we just talking. At the end of the conversation we have a piece in front of us and it's ready to show. These conversations take place over a long period of time. As in a chess match, each response is carefully considered. Time, and therefore, dreams and reverie are part of the conversation. These conversations can be two years long. This gives time for a history to grow and for us to interpret it, for distortions to take on their own meaning, their own demands.
(from their website)

This technique of "response" was also brought up in the last workshop I blogged about. I'm finding that I resonate with this way of producing material. I need to constantly "do" and review to understand what is going on with my work. I think this technique also lends itself to performing with my recorded image on video screens. Echoes, layers, sparks...many words to describe the effect. And most importantly, it helps answer that question

WHERE DO I BEGIN?!?!?!

A quote that we were given in the workshop before a 10 minute walk to the Imperial War Museum:

The intricate cooperation of muscle and nerve fibers produce the means by which an organism interacts with its surrounding environment. That cooperation has a name which is movement. When the environment itself enters into fibrillation, it is the whole system (organism/environment) that becomes convulsive. The body absorbs all the shocks only to release them later on, in another time space, as unforeseen motions, reorganizing as much as outlining the distribution of violence in the nervous system. - Andre Lepecki from his book Exhausting Dance

Right now, I'm working with echoes from the Goat Island workshop. As with a natural echo down a canyon, this one goes through phases, not just evenly getting quieter the further away it gets from me in time and space, but occasionally getting louder as it bounces off a particularly well curved canyon wall.

I loved this quote from Andre Lepecki, especially the part about the body absorbing shocks only to release them later. That's exactly what is going on with me as I continue to process that workshop. I decided to use this quote as a literal starting point for my rehearsal time last week. I did a couple of recordings that I'm digitizing and will continue to build off of tomorrow when I go back. I'm going to play with Isadora tomorrow too and see how that goes. Will post the results early next week. or rather, will post the process early next week.