New sketches.

The weekly rehearsal time in a classroom at WCA have been really useful. I've posted 6 clips on my YouTube channel which I encourage you to go take a look at by clicking here. Too many to post here, but I've included 2 in this post.

Questions that were highlighted last week:
1. What is it like to have me tweaking equipment and explaining things to people during the performance?

2. How will I use isadora live? I like the layers (more on this below)

3. What it might look like to have two projections: 1 which is showing "source" material and one which is showing "composite" like this:





4. This clip has some interesting moments where the line between recorded and "live" image gets pretty blurred. Can this effect be achieved when you are actually live in the space, or is it working because of the cropping I chose for this shot? What strategies might achieve this live?




Some responses to above based on what I've done so far:
1. The tweaking looks like anyone else tweaking things onstage. I think it's probably inevitable, but I'm sure I can work on fluid strategies to minimize it or make it an integral "beat" within the performance. Maybe pre-recorded elements that don't require so much attention.

2. I didn't remember that Isadora allows you to layer multiple channels of video on the fly. This is, of course, one of my favorite techniques that has been in my work since I picked up a video camera 8 years ago. But what is it other than a neat technique? Why am I interested in it?

A passage of poetry that has been with me for 15 years from "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz:

"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

After last Thursday, I see the direct link between the transparent video layers, plus the layering of live and recorded presence, and skin. Amelia Jones brings it up over and over again in her writing, but I hadn't really felt how it connected to my work. I've noticed that as I review these sketches and think about Jones' idea of the skin stretching across technology (and in my case: other people, recorded and live presence, and the space we're in, sound, image, light, bodies) - it feels like each layer that I build is actually peeling back a skin as a boundary or border. I think this is what I'm looking for for this performance: the point at which all the layers have built up so much that they start to break down and merge so that we become less aware of the individual components that make up the performance and focus on the experience as a whole.

3. I realized that having the "source" and "composite" material projected simultaneously is similar to what it's like to be in the video editing quite. There's this other strand that I want people to come along through my whole process, warts and all, so having elements in the performance space that echo the behind the scenes structures of the filmmaking process is appealing. It's not all pretty, but another thing I would like to explore is: if I bring people along on my journey through the process, will they be more able to immerse themselves in the final piece?

4. Reviewing this footage has made me think that maybe it's not a bad thing to have some pre-recorded foundation elements. These would be recorded in the space and I could trigger when they get played, but they'd be guaranteed "good" takes that can serve as a foundation for a spontaneous improv. I think this is particularly clear with #4 where it is easy in editing to make yourself look "good" and confident, but there's not a whole lot you can do live if you start to lose your confidence or slip up. That's the beauty of the juxtaposition right there, I think. What if you highlight and loop the "bad" stuff? Does it become beautiful at some point? Does it make the live presence look better? Am I more HUMAN? (ugh, I didn't want to write it, but I thought it, so here it is.)

Other things:
I miss the singing, but still like the incidental noise (paper rustling in this case, the door shutting) I want to reincorporate the "footstep" ambient noise of people moving in the space as a foundation room tone for my pieces.

As is often the case, my brain has started spinning more after writing this. I'll leave it here for now. Looking forward to this week's practice.

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.

Monday Night Improvisation.

Went to an improv class last night hosted by Independent Dance @ Siobhan Davies Studios in Elephant & Castle. Wow! Gorgeous space and I found the workshop incredibly useful and productive. I'm definitely going to make this a regular activity.

The class features a different instructor each week, so I will get exposed to different dancers/movers ideas for improvisational movement. Just what I need!!!! This week the instructor was Marie-Gabrielle Rotie. Her name has popped up a bunch when I was searching for Butoh classes in London, so I was curious to experience a workshop with her.

A little recap of what we did:

The idea was to create movement "scores" from existing visual material to get ideas flowing and a sense of poetry to give us some phrases to keep in mind as we moved.

- instructor passed out postcards of painting to each of us.
- we spent some time looking at them and then performed a 12-15 minute improvisation based on our observations, however abstract that ended up being.
- our partners then performed a 5-6 min improv based on what they observed from ours.
- we then spent about 5 minutes writing down what we saw to create a sort of score
- discussed our scores
- performed a duet based on scores, observations, and the original painting

Here are the scores we wrote for each painting

#1 - surreal painting with 2 girls (one with very weedlike hair standing straight up on end) standing on a landing in a house with a very large sunflower draped on a staircase sorry I didn't mark down the titles of the paintings...

Partner's score:
Reaching, reaching up
Spiral & sway
Pulled off centre
Pieces torn off
Still the impulse to rise

My Score:
1) A plant/human awakening
2) spiraling, the fluid gravity defying plant hair
3) feeling the energy source above as it gets warmer
4) the leaves stretch & spiral out towards the energy source into the space
5) spurts of energy from outside back in
6) always aware of the warmth above and your roots growing down, 2) and 3)
7) human/plant hybrid reveling in the warm silt that you're grown out of
8) pleasing across your leaves/skin as you wallow in it
9) ALWAYS RETURN TO 6) out, 2) and 3)

The Duet
- We ended up becoming this single entity that was growing and spiraling up, out, lots of swirly arm movements! We started with our backs to each other and I really loved how we were able to start moving together because I could feel his shoulder blades on my back as he started to raise his arms and do the spiral gestures with them. Was a great way to cue without having to look at each other. We also realized before the duet that we had had similar experiences of the painting, so it was quite easy to stay cohesive with our movements. Of course, there were times when we crashed into each other unpleasantly, but I felt like those were surprisingly few considering we had never met, let alone danced together before.

Painting #2: a nativity scene from the Uffizi gallery complete with angels, shepherds and the blinding light surrounding the wee baby Jesus & Mary (oh and Joseph too, I guess, kinda...) I walked away from this painting focussing on this tumbling S shape that the angels and shepherd's bodies made down the left side of the painting towards the baby. The all had fairly strong gestures with their left hands, but odd expressions on their faces. Including the baby! All of the characters had very "real" and not terribly "awestruck at the holiness" look on their faces.

My Score:
the angel floating
What am I doing here?

the man gazing down
What am I doing here?

the baby looking up
What are they doing here?

the left hand
surprised
covetous
caressing
blessing

My partner's score:
Changing perspectives
Changes of emotions
Movement between stillness

The Duet
Ended up being a serious of poses/tableau style with mostly gentle movement in between. Not always synchronous, sometimes building on the other person's pose. Facial expressions and hand gestures were the emphasis. As we moved to poses, our relationship to each other shifted. Sometimes we were 2 disconnected characters reacting in our own way to "the baby." Sometimes one of us was the baby and there were strong moments in these phases where the other person's hand was closing in on the baby, sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing. And there were times when we were a unit outside gazing at the baby. Some of these were funny even since there was one guy front and center who had this really amused, jovial "hey guys! check this kid out! Son of a gun!" kind of look on his fave.

Other notes, impressions
I was really skeptical of being able to come up with anything out of my painting because of all the loaded symbolism of the nativity scene, but we were both really satisfied with the final result. And of course, I enjoyed shifting from one character and perspective to another. :) Also useful and interesting to experiment with conveying multiple perspectives in a piece with just my body and my gestures/expressions.

I found it extremely useful to observe the other person's movement and then experience for myself what I had seen. For example, I noticed something I hadn't really considered in my partner: he had this really strong vertical focus to his movement, even when he was moving quite dramatically from side to side. I read in his movement a consciousness of an energy source above and feet/roots growing into the earth. And a spiraling movement. Was really cool to experience what it felt like to have that vertical focus even when moving sideways.

This technique seemed to produce some very workable results quickly. I was thinking of doing something similar with songs in sketches of my own seeing how it would get more abstract and more "my own" the further away from the song I got alternating between sound and movement phases. Now I will definitely play with that.

I loved the implied plant/human hybrid of the first piece since I've been thinking so much about the blurring of borders between machine & human as I related to my video camera in new ways. To play with another hybrid, cyborg idea was great fun and relevant.

While this class was only tangentially related to Butoh, I noticed a thread with the other specifically Butoh class I took: this notion of having an image in mind as you create movement (like the plant/hybrid with crazy weed hair.) It doesn't really matter if the specificity of it comes across, but it is a great way to give some purpose to the performer's movement and stay interested in what you're doing.

I have a crazy vivid imagination that will just go and go and go when I let it. I must must must remember this always when I'm performing!

free association

Eureka?! *gasp*

Could it be???

Is the elephant in the room, in fact, that this whole "dispersed, multiply identified post-modern subject," isn't the core, but merely a light support of my central argument & position?

More to come...

Daily weekly semi-regular performance sketches

After the David Gale workshop, we all realized how nice it is to just get some quick performances together and see what's going on.

Since I'm exploring interacting with myself on video and it's just so easy to post video to the web these days, I am going to endeavor to post some sketches to this blog. At the very least, it will be weekly. Hopefully, it will be much more frequent than that.

I constantly think that what I'm doing is pretty abstract, so I hope that involving some nebulous "net public" at this stage will help to open my practice up to folks and maybe take some of the mystery out of it - for me too!

I can't wait for all the really rude juvenile comments on YouTube...

These 3 videos are me interacting with different layers of video. I wanted to alternate between sound and movement, but it's all kinda static. However, I thought some neat stuff was starting to happen by the last one. Especially giving some context and purpose to what I felt was pretty random weird movement in the second one.

I also know you guys love hearing me singing like I've never had a singing lesson in my life! It's very liberating.

Video half of performance workshop w/ David Gale

Digitized and posted the video portion of the performance I did a couple weeks ago as part of the workshop with David Gale. It was a quick purging performance where I got a little goofy on the video, and was overly wooden with the live component. A sort of overstating what I've been feeling about my work.

Anyway, here is the video.