More R & D

Camilla and me will spend a week in Berlin between 9 - 15 June to reflect on what we have been doing so far and to develop some of our materials. To undertake some of our research in Berlin is also exciting for me, because I lived in Berlin many years ago, and since then the city has gone through a massive transformation, while the performance scene there has been thriving, so I can't wait to go back for a visit. The previous research and sharing with three dancers in London had brought a new energy into our process. It has  shown me that widening the creative process to an interdisciplinary group increases communication between the performers and has real potential to produce work that communicates to an audience. The question now is how to keep it going, how to find the depth in this process. Which is difficult because we work and live in different places, and dance pieces have to be produced so fast these days. I hope to find a balance of working intensively with the individual performers and of bringing everyone together often enough to nurture the bond between the performers that has already began to evolve.

International Performance Art in Mainz

Last weekend we performed Newly and The Accompanists at PAD Mainz. Its directors Nic Schmidt and Peter Schulz have a real talent and dedication to establish the small -scale venue as an inviting place within the local community. For me as a maker it is always  invaluable, if the opportunity presents itself to receive feedback from the audience, to not always entirely rely on my subjective feeling of how it might have been received.  But how do you prompt a conversation that encourages spontaneous and honest responses? The experience at PAD Mainz showed that the atmosphere created in the venue can really help. They have build
up a group of regular audience and there is a sense that the audience owns the programme. The presenters introduced our work with a short speech in the foyer and afterwards were approachable and interested.

The venue is also maintaining its close links to Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in the neighboring city Frankfurt, who had commissioned some of the other artist's works, including Martha & Lucy's Fine Bone China, both based in Bristol, and London based Mamoru Iriguchi's Into the skirt. Unfortunately we missed their performances, which were shown earlier in the festival, but I hope to catch up on their work very soon. However they stayed on to see our performance and there was plenty of opportunity to talk (while eating the delicious diner that had been cooked backstage). I think nobody wanted to leave this very warm and welcoming place.

5 Days in May at the SBC

5 Days in May is a short festival for contemporary dance at the Southbank Centre. Its the first season curated by Nicky Molloy and Eva Martinez, who previously programmed nottdance in Nottingham. Introducing international choreographers to London for the first time, it promises to be an incredible opportunity to see what is currently happening in contemporary dance around the world. And the platform's first performance lived up to the expectation.

Portuguese choreographer Miguel Pereira opened his work Doo by
playing a nostalgic piece of music from a record player that he casually dragged to the front of the stage. Later we returned to the same spot for an explosive and emotionally charged percussion solo by his Mozambican collaborator Bernardo Fernando. In between these two symbolic moments of "back then" and "now", middle aged Pereira revisits his childhood memories.
He was born in Mozambique and left the country as a young boy, when it became independent from Portugal in 1975. His personal stories subtly hint at the different experiences of life in Mozambique for white and black people under the oppressive power of the Portuguese colonisation and the growing resistance from the black indigenous majority. The spot at the front of the stage gains a second meaning as a place where the two men address their personal struggles that arise from the political violence and their desire to find something in common.

The following performance was a solo entitled Loin by French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane.

Sanjoy Roy wrote the following interesting review in The Guardian

"The recent European avant-garde performances at the Southbank Centre are the kind of works that tend to veer between the excruciating and the revelatory; Loin, a solo by the French performer Rachid Ouramdane, leans towards the latter. More an installation than a dance piece, Loin is based on Ouramdane's memories of his Algerian parents, and on his travels in south-east Asia. A documentary seam runs through it: voiceovers of his mother recalling the torture of her husband by the French; the brutality he encountered and practised in the French army in Indochina; video footage of war veterans scarred by the knowledge that they had killed in order to survive.

Words define the field, but it is unspeakability that powers the piece; one woman, having recounted her story, says: "That is why we don't talk about it." Ouramdane first appears as a hooded youth, mutely facing the image of his mother; later, he patrols the stage perimeter like an impatient guard. In the few dance passages, he is stunning, transfiguring body-popping moves into convulsive spasms of electrocution, or undulating with a shirt wrapped around his head in a queasy intimation of faceless, sexualised bondage. When he does speak, it is in a barely intelligible rush, like scrambled poetry.
For all its bleakness, it has an ineffable beauty, especially when the human presence disappears. Loudspeakers are left rotating on stage; faces depart from the screens, leaving images of empty roads, waterfalls, fish, fields – a peaceful world in which people are absent."