TRAFFIC

Date with Stephanie Schober & Dance Co

2011-11-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

What better to do on Valentine's day than to watch TRAFFIC!

14 February 2012
Axis Arts Centre

TRAFFIC next at Déda

2011-09-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

As we are getting ready for our next performance at Déda, we are learning that this exciting venue has been threatened with funding cuts. To support the venue, follow this link

Last week at the ROH

2011-07-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

Thank you to everyone who came to our performances at the Clore Studio at the Royal Opera House last week. Someone in the audience was reminded of Fischli and Weiss photographs. Let us know what you thought of TRAFFIC.

Here are some other comments I caught from the audience:

" I loved the individuality of the performers, we rarely see so much personality"
" I wish I was as free as her to go on stage and make noise like that"
"It is not dance"
" The choreography is distinctive I have never seen anything like it"
"We did something like that in college once just not that weird"
" The noise of chair is painful to the ear, can't you move it further away from the audience?"
"I loved the part where you are pushing the chairs, you should make a whole piece exploring that idea"
"That was interesting"
"I really like the connections between movement and sound, subtle and original"
"Why is she Donald Duck?"
"The part where he is blowing into her face really worked for me"

Some pictures from our rehearsal taken by Nuno Santos:

TRAFFIC next at Royal Opera House

2011-06-30T08:37:00.001-07:00

EXPOSURE FESTIVAL

21 & 22 July, 7pm

Clore Studio Upstairs | Royal Opera House | London

www.roh.org.uk

Works by Alesandra Seutin, Mayuri Boonham, Sarah Dowling, Marc Brew, Cameron McMillan, Deveraij Thimmaiah and Stephanie Schober

greenroom

2011-05-14T06:56:00.001-07:00

Following funding cuts announced earlier this year, greenroom, Manchester’s only dedicated new performance venue for nearly quarter of a century, is closing down. I have been performing and creating work at this very interesting and friendly venue, and am very sad to hear about the news. Their extraordinary legacy is currently being documented on their online archive

Save Performing Arts at London Met

2011-04-21T07:43:00.002-07:00

Since 2006 I have been teaching and creating dance works with the BA Performing Arts students at the London Metropolitan University. And not long ago we did our first work in progress sharing of TRAFFIC there, followed by a talk with the students. A few days ago London Metropolitan University has decided to dissolve the department of Humanites and Arts (HALE) and to close courses such as Performing Arts, History, Philosophy and Carribean Studies. We are all shocked and are campaigning for this decision to be reconsidered.

The Performing Arts Course is a unique course uniting the talents of students from different cultural backgrounds, many of whom would not necessarily have access to the Performing Arts otherwise. The course is shaped by an inclusive approach to teaching and an interdisciplinary curriculum delivered by highly experienced and motivated staff. I am very proud to be a part of this very successful program and saddened by the proposed cut.

If you would like to support us, please sign the petition

You can read the statements written by our many supporters here

Read an article in the Guardian here

New audiences at Laban Theatre

2011-04-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

Laban Theatre has yielded a plan to offer complementary tickets for local residents to see the premier of TRAFFIC on the 17th March. The aim was to increase the awareness of Laban Theatre within the local community. This video contains the views and opinions of some of those who came to that performance.

Premiere at Laban Theatre and first review

2011-03-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

A few days after our premier at Laban Theatre I found our first review here. Thank you everyone for coming to see the performances and we are really looking forwards now to our next shows!

Final Rehearsals

2011-02-08T09:20:00.000-08:00

We are in our final rehearsal stages and I have started to talk to Jackie Shemesh about ideas for the lighting design.

An advocate for independent dance artists

2011-01-27T08:09:00.002-08:00

Gill Clarke is one of my favorite dance artists and I am very happy to hear that she just won the Jane Attenborough Dance UK Industry Award at the Critics' Circle National Dance Awards at Sadler’s Wells. The writing says:

The Jane Attenborough Dance UK Industry Award honours an individual working in dance who has made an outstanding contribution to the art form and who, through their knowledge, skill and generosity, has had a significant effect on dance. The winner is chosen following an open nomination process, making the winner someone who is truly respected and admired by their colleagues.

Gill’s nominations for the award cited the importance of her impact as an advocate for independent dance artists. Also, her generosity, offering time and advice to support fellow artists, resulting in her being recognised as a major influence on the careers of many independent dance artists and choreographers.

Gill in her award acceptance letter says: “I would like to accept the award on behalf of Independent Dance Artists – that powerful and under-acknowledged workforce that is made up of all those artists who work in the demanding freedom outside the relative security of institutions. These multi-talented artists are vital to the Dance ecology – they are the performers or choreographers of most of the contemporary work seen around the country, they act as bridge-builders, connecting a public of all ages to the rewards of engaging with dance, they teach and inspire the next generation of artists as well as established company members, and most importantly their investment and passion generates knowledge that will help us to keep re-defining Dance, ideas that will find their way into mainstream theatres such as this – and new choreographic forms in media and contexts that we cannot yet imagine.”

As an independent artist, Gill Clarke has spent her careers as a dancer, choreographer, curator, producer, teacher, mentor, researcher and has influenced many other artists. She is also the co-director of Independent Dance

Out of the studio

2010-12-05T16:11:00.000-08:00

We had a rich and intensive day last Sunday at Northampton University, that gave me many new ideas of how to develop the work. I taught a workshop for Northants Dance and saw a performance of "Counting Piece", a short silent work for 8 dancers that I have created this summer with the student's company Playgrounds, which is directed by Matt Gough. What I really enjoyed about the seeing the students perform was their commitment to the materials and to the spirit of a group piece, which has a quite different feel to the more intimate trio we are making. Then we presented our work in progress followed by a talk. I decided to present a lot more material than before and some of it was still very raw. Vida Midgelow, who is a reader for dance and performance at the university, led the session. What are the most memorable moments after watching the two pieces? How would you describe the works if they were not a dance piece but something else? What is the performance quality of the work? Why did you decide to work with live music? The stillness and movement of the accordion was one thing that was picked up by the audience, how to capture it in a satisfying way?

Photos by Zoe Plummer

More Sharing

2010-11-25T15:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening we performed together for the first time. We showed an extract of the new work to the students at London Metropolitan University, who gave us a very warm response. I knew most of them, because I currently teach the first year students of the Performing Arts Course. It was a nice opportunity for me to share my work with them while I am also mentoring them to develop their solos. To start performing the work at this early stage feels like the right thing to do. Things are still very fresh and the performers are still finding their way through the materials, its an exciting moment for us. I am looking forwards to this Sunday when we will teach a CPD workshop and perform at Northampton University. Photo by Zoe Plummer.

Drawing things together

2010-11-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

Dancer Lise Manavit has joined us for the second phase of rehearsals, so we are finally all together in the studio, Camilla, Keir, Lise and myself (plus three accordions). It is amazing for me to step away from being inside of the work and to see what we have been creating. The atmosphere between the performers is very warm and there is a lot of positive energy in the room, which is a gift. Particularly at this point, when a lot of the material has been created and difficult choices about how to develop the piece as a whole are pressing. And new challenges arise of how to travel through the many complex materials that require a lot of concentration and constant listening to each other. An important conceptual element of the new work is that the performers try out and learn something new, in this instance playing the accordion (to Camilla's expectation). The idea is that this helps to stay alert and open. In reality this is also very challenging, it requires some trust, stamina and curiosity in our own process.

Various sharing and workshop have been coming up and I have invited some people into the studio to see the process. Last week we gave a lecture demonstration for the MA composition students at Trinity College of Music, which was followed by a discussion. This was a great opportunity for us to perform some of our materials, to share our thoughts and to collect responses from an audience that is very familiar with working with formal structures. I was not sure what to expect and started to question my own aspiration of working so intensively with concepts that I am not an expert in. The students were very generous and curious in the way they engaged with us. Some of the questions that came up: What kind of commitment and precision do the minimalist structures, like those we borrowed from Tom Johnson, demand? When reinterpreting scores that were created by another artist is it important to stay true to the spirit of the original work? Can you respond to only one aspect of someone else's work?

Found in Translation

2010-11-07T10:01:00.000-08:00

This week I have been traveling to Manchester to work with Sankalpam, a Classical Indian dance company directed by Mira Gokul and Stella Subbiah. Sankalpam have commissioned me to create a short piece alongside choreographers Luca Silvestrini and Stella Subbiah herself in collaboration with theatre director Philip Zarilli. Dancers Lucia Tong, Kamala Devam, Charly Ashwell and Natalia Thorn perform the works. This was another opportunity for me to follow my obsession with counting. I found various patterns of counting in circles and gave them to the dancers to interpret. It was exciting to see the Bharata Natyam application to the numerical concet. Last Friday we premiered the programme entitled "Corporeality" at the greenroom, where Sankalpam have been resident for the last week, rehearsing and teaching open workshops. Looking at the three very different works by the three individaul choreographers, we decided on a journey that gradually strips away layers and leaves us with the physicality of the dancers.
We started with Luca's piece, which draws from the dancers' biographies, followed by Stella and Phillips work, which deals with the psycho-physical process of Abhinaya (internal acting) to end with my piece, which is a minimal and abstract dance piece. We received a very warm response from the audience at the greenroom, which was followed by a question and answer session. Someone asked, what was lost and what was gained in translation. Everyone agreed that they discovered a new ease in their process when opening it up to the performers who brought new responses and new materials with themselves. Moving outside of our familiar comfort zone and searching for new meeting points was a risk worth taking and that seemed to cross over to the audience.

Read a review

"Corporeality" tours in the UK in November to Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (6/11), Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster (9/11) , The Brindley, Runcorn (12/11), Laban Theatre, London (16+17/11), Barbican Theatre, Plymouth (19/11)

Control

2010-10-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

"I must hasten to add that music, which is 'found', is not usually found easily. " Tom Johnson

I "found" these interesting articles and lectures online written by Tom Johnson, in which he talks about his process of composing structural music and his wider observations about composition: http://www.editions75.com/English/articleslecturesenglish.html

Music in Studio 9

2010-10-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

In October we spend the first three weeks of our production process at Laban. We means Camilla, myself and dancer Keir Patrick, who has been joining us for the first time. The support from Laban and funding from the Arts Council allowed us to focus intensively on the process, which is something I have been craving for. We introduced a piece of glass as a new instrument to the two accordions to complement previously created materials and to create new materials. Keir and me have also been playing the small accordion to accompany Camilla. Switching from playing to moving is an interesting new development for me. We are trying to integrate the two within one choreographic pattern, considering the different expressive possibilities each option brings and also the challenges that arise from going from something familiar to something unfamiliar. I am reminded daily about what it means to work in such a structural way that I have committed myself to by introducing mathematical patterns into the process. They require a lot of practice and constant intuitive decision making about how to apply them and where to go with the materials generated. This process is slow and difficult but very satisfying and surprising when it is working.

Funding

2010-09-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

I received a letter from the Arts Council England to offer me funding for this project. Thank you to everyone for their support and encouragement to make this happen! This comes just in perfect time as we will begin with the rehearsals at Laban in a couple of weeks.

Playgrounds

2010-09-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Some more research, this time I am in Northampton to work with "Playgrounds", the universities' company of third year dance students. The output of this residency will be a 15 minutes long silent dance piece to tour dance platforms and schools in the East Midlands from autumn 2010 to summer 2011. The main question in this process is how the patterns created with the abundant numbers can be shared in a larger group. How many different ways are there to share a pattern, what is shared? Rhythm, timing, material, modifiers? What kind of relationships emerge between the performers, when working in this structural way? I introduced another type of pattern into the process, which is also borrowed from Tom Johnson: "Counting in Circles", found in his book "Self-Similar Melodies". When working with these patterns for sound, I am trying to find out how they can work with different movement materials, and I change the patterns, or overlap them in different ways, to find the meeting point between the logical workings of these structures and the qualities in my choreography. Company director Matt Gough is blogging about the process here
'untitled' from matthew gough on Vimeo.

Residency in Cork with dancer Louise Tanoto

2010-08-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

In July we have been resident at Firkin Crane, a theater located in a former butter factory in Cork. Dancer Louise Tanoto joined me for a week. After our previous intensive collaboration with Camilla (and her accordion), we concentrated on what we can do now with just the body, focusing on the different scales of movement and physical rhythms and sounds, and how they can be shared between us. This sparse approach to movement is something I have been developing for many years in many different ways. I wondered how the new process with Camilla had influenced me. I feel I am beginning to find a distinctly different way of thinking about the phrasing of movements, so the performers can "swing" together, like Camilla would say. As part of the residency I taught a class for professional dancers and the public sharing on the last day was attended by about 50 people. This was very informal, I performed some movement material, showed some footage on video (Louise had to go back to London) and talked a bit about how we have been working. I was surprised how interested people were in hearing about our process, some were dance experts but many did not have much experience with contemporary dance. People also contributed a lot of interesting and encouraging thoughts, my favorite comment was from a woman who compared me to Charlie Chaplin. There was also a question whether the Shandon bells would become part of the piece? The sharing was also free to attend demonstrating again that its mostly money that stands between people and the arts. I do hope that we will be able to go back and present the finished work in Cork at some point soon. The stay in Cork was also a great opportunity to meet with the other resident artists, particularly with Aaron Draper and Kimberley Almquist from New York, with whom we shared a house.
Pictures below are by Andy Ferreira

When language fails

2010-06-24T07:43:00.002-07:00

I spent a week in Berlin to develop a new project, and on that occasion got the chance to see American choreographer Meg Stuart's Do Animals Cry at the Volksbühne. The traditional building has recently been refurbished into a more trendy venue and the audience now gets to sit on big floor cushions. What sounds like a nice idea is very unpractical to say the least. Despite sitting uncomfortably for over two hours, Meg Stuart still managed to draw me into her world.
Her piece is about situations that could take place in a dysfunctional family, with her narratives being communicated through the body rather than through verbal language. I became curious about how she works with her performers, who all seem to be developing their own individual stories with a natural presence on stage. Alexander Jenkins was one of my favorite performers. The balance between details and a bigger scene was intriguing and like nothing I have seen before. There was an intimate feeling within a large work, helped by an impressive set created by Doris Dziersk. It includes a tunnel made of small pieces of wood, which made me want to run through a forest.

Sharing in Berlin

2010-06-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

After working for a few days intensively at Jangada Studio, a beautiful space for Capoeira and dance in Mitte, we invited a few friends and colleagues to an informal sharing. What was interesting is that, similar to the first sharing, our visitors all enjoyed the minimalist approach to the material. They liked to be in the same space with us and to see the performance close up. Camilla and I on the contrary are more and more thinking that it would be more interesting to see the work from further away, that this would leave more space for the viewer to create their own associations. We talked about possible sets and lighting, that would help us to create our own "world" that we could draw the viewer into, which is very different to sharing a space. The discussions help me to understand though that the scale of a work is something crucial, but that I would like to decide it along the way by paying attention to the material and the relationships that evolve as a result of the process we set up. I would like to treat this decision (which we haven't made yet) as a logical progression rather than an "ambition". It all seems like common sense, once put in words. But there is so much talk in the dance world about scale that it can be easy to see it as an aspiration rather than the result of a process.

Writing about the Act of Choreography

2010-05-30T11:56:00.002-07:00

One of my favorite choreographers has just published a book entitled "A Choreographer's Handbook". And it really is that, a choreographer's handbook rather than a handbook for choreographers in the sense that it is not a manual for how to make a dance.

While creating and performing his own work, Jonathan Burrows has been leading workshops internationally for a wide range of dance artists. Placing its focus on the later, the books' content is a collection of observations and questions that emerged in these workshops over the past five years.

In the introduction it says: "In dance, we now work with a multiplicity of techniques: physical, improvisational, compositional and performative. The number of approaches to us is unprecedented in the history of the art form. These questions, which have motivated me, are responses to having found myself sometimes overwhelmed. How do we make this field of choice a friend and not an overwhelming burden? How do we come back also sometimes to a position of passionate ignorance, enough to chose something rather than knowing everything?"

It is a generous and encouraging book that treasures the thoughts of a multitude of individual artists and describes experiences and discoveries that are shared by many. Yet the careful selection of quotes from Jonathan Burrows' original notebooks create a thread through the myriad of details and reveal more about the author himself than at first expected.

More R & D

2010-05-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-11T07:46:00.002-07:00

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

2010-05-06T09:27:00.002-07:00

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."

First Development

2010-03-22T10:37:00.000-07:00

Camilla came back to London and we spent another week in the studio at Laban joined by dancers Louise Tanoto, Ankur Bahl and Elisabetta d'Aloia. We held a small informal sharing on 18 March 2010 for our friends and guests, mostly other artists. Our main focus in this week was to set up a process of sharing materials and patterns between all performers. We experimented with other interpretations of Tom Johnson's mathematical method to integrate all the actions. Our materials at present consist of small music, text and movement fragments, they create a very tactile, close up feeling. Working with a bigger group had many implications in terms of the relationships and the space between the performers. We also began to work with two accordions, one is a serious concerto instrument, the other a much smaller folky type of instrument, slightly out of tune. Their sounds don't really fit, which I quite like. We are starting to think about the scales of the movements and of the sounds. What is the work now, what can it be and how can the viewer engage with it? Its all very quiet and slightly dodgy and I wonder whether there can be a big bang or whether we should stay with the casual tone of the work that seems to have established itself.

The arts are a fascinating microcosm of the wider political theatre

2010-03-04T09:15:00.002-08:00

I read this interesting article by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian today, "Cut the arts at your peril", discussing proposed funding cuts for the arts in the UK. It provoked 115 comments from readers.

Meeting Camilla

2010-02-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

Camilla Barratt-Due and I met in autumn 2009, when we were both invited to an interdisciplinary project in Gothenburg called Choreosound, which was directed by Swedish choreographer Marika Hedemyr. For a long time now I wanted to create a work that involves close collaboration between musicians and dancers, so attending this lab was an encouraging experience and made me think how I could realize this aspiration. Camilla is from Norway but she has been living in Berlin for a while. She studied the accordion at the Royal Academy for Classical Music in Copenhagen. Since then she has been working internationally as a freelance musician in the fields of classical contemporary music and multi-media performance. I invited her to come to London for a week to try out how we could work together, Laban and London Metropolitan University kindly gave us a studio. As a starting point we took an idea from Tom Johnson's composition for piano called "Abundant Numbers" and reinterpreted it for movement, voice and accordion.

My decade of dance

2010-01-09T06:02:00.002-08:00

A few of my favourite performances that I have seen in London during the past years and that had an influence on my work:

In 2000 Elisabeth Streb @ The Barbican, Meg Stuart @ Queen Elisabeth Hall, Phillip Gehmacher @ Laban,
In 2001 Jerome Bell- The last performance @ The Place ICA, 2002 Felix Ruckert – Ring @ The Place,
In 2002 Improbable Theatre - Shockheaded Peter @ West End,
In 2003 Jonathan Burrows – Singing @ Laban, Theresa de Keersmaeker – Once @ Sadler’s Wells,
In 2004 Thomas Hauert @ Queen Elisabeth Hall, Rosemary Butcher- Hidden Voices @ The Place Prize, Rick Nodine & Jovair Longo @ Chisenhale Dance Space, Sonja Sabri @ The Purcell Room,
In 2005 Yasmeen Godder - Two Playful Pink @ The Place, Pina Bausch @ Sadler’s Wells, Deborah Hay -The Match@ Purcell Room, William Forsythe @ Sadler’s Wells,
In 2006 Michael Clarke - Mmm @ Dance Umbrella/ The Barbican, Ros Warby @ Dance Umbrella/ The Place,
In 2008 Probe/ New Art Club - This @ The Place, Shobana Jeyasingh – Faultline @ Queen Elisabeth Hall, Simon Ellis - Gertrude @ The Place Prize, Merce Cunningham @ Dance Umbrella/ The Barbican
... and in 2009 Pick & Mix, a dance event at the closed down Woolworths in Leytonstone curated by Fearghus O'Conchuir.

Video links are not always of the work mentioned.

Physical Expressions

2010-01-08T13:28:00.002-08:00

During the last term I taught a movement skills course to the first year students of the BA Performing Arts at the London Metropolitan University. It was a very inspiring experience for me to work with them and to be part of their process. I found much in common with many of them, who entered the course with very little knowledge of dance and a very vague picture of what their future profession might be, just following an intensely subjective feeling that this is a good thing to do. Their assignment was to chose a character from a book or film and to create a short movement study based on their personal responses to and observations of the character. During the classes the students frequently created short solos and presented them to the group. The creative work was accompanied by an introduction of elements of Laban Movement Analysis, a method that was outside their expectation and outside their experience. Most students started from a very fragile point and end up using only a small amount of the learnt knowledge. Yet there was a clear progression towards finding “a voice”. How did they process information and analyse their experiences? Is there a personal method for developing a vocabulary, for gaining objectivity about how movement can be read and for how to scrutinise ones choices? And does good work become less good when its creator fails to present a convincing case? Many questions came out of this very rewarding experience that relate to and enrich my own practice.

Choreosound

2009-11-20T05:47:00.000-08:00

This autumn I was one of the lucky choreographers, who were invited to participate in Choreosound a pilot project in Göteburg conceived by Swedish choreographer Marika Hedemyr. During this lab choreographers and composers, dancers and musicians from all over the world met and explored new ideas for collaborations without any predetermined agendas. The invitation came at a perfect time for me. My dance company was touring a programme of short pieces entitled between sound and silence, which had been created with composers John-Marc Gowans and Matteo Fargion. Choreosound was an opportunity for me to question, where my passion for music collaborations had come from and where they could go next. It was also a chance to meet new artists and to work with musicians, something I wanted to do for a long time.

My desire to choreograph always originated from a personal place, without wanting to be narrative or autobiographical. Seeing the works of choreographers like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rosemary Butcher, Deborah Hay and Jonathan Burrows left a lasting impression on me. Their performances were not concerned with displays of skill but with the movement material itself. They made me see movement through the eyes of an individual artist. Working with chosen limits, they seemed to find expressive potential of movement within its internal details. As a young dance maker I had a hard time though to analyse the methodologies of other artists. I didn’t really believe in borrowing toolboxes. To create my first pieces, I just used all the movements I liked and left out everything I didn’t like. Relying on intuition, the materials were then mapped out in space and time. The choreographies were created with a group of dancers I brought together for each project. We performed in silence, with the intention to reveal a personal type of musicality interwoven with the physical language and to maintain a simplicity and directness.

I took a break from performing, because I wanted to sit with the audience and watch. I felt the need to improve the composition and one way was to introduce an exterior logic. I found inspiration in Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, whose music is developed from folk songs. I choreographed a duet entitled Newly based on Veljo Tormis’ choral composition Estonian Wedding Songs. In this process I interpreted the music as a set of patterns and drawings, which were then given to the dancers. They responded with movements and vocal sounds. The musical structure created a framework, in which the dancers could reinvent their relationship in surprising ways. I came to Choreosound with ideas and questions about how to work with structures and about how to engage the performers and the viewer within them.

My first session was with composer Yong Nan Park, accordion player Anti Leinonen and marimba player Elin Sander, and dancers Katja Schia and Karin Hedin. We borrowed an idea from composer Tom Johnson's piece Abundant Numbers, in which he divides the number 12 into 2, 3, 4, and 6, which are then combined to create a pattern.

-2-2 -2-2-2 - 2
--3- -3--3- - 3
---4 ---4-- - 4
---- -6---- - 6

Each performer’s task was to create 4 materials, which could be performed at the same time and in all possible combinations on certain counts. The structure determined a fragmented type of movement. Without having thought about sound or rhythm, there was a “musical logic”, which tied together everyone’s actions. What I liked about this experiment was the concentrated effort between the 4 performers to stay together. An interesting discovery was how the combinations of sounds seemed to work better. Each time they build up to something new and the repetition was enjoyable to witness, while the combinations of movements and their repetitions didn’t always produce the same effect. The experience raised questions about the difference between hearing sound and seeing movement and what this meant for music and dance collaborations based on rigorous compositional ideas. If we had the chance to work on this sketch again, I would experiment more with the translation from pattern to movement.

My following session was with composer Daniel Skoglund, double bas player Benjamin Quigley and Elin Sander and dancers Ari Kauppila and Andrius Katinas. We worked with structures and chance elements. Each performer acted as a dancer and musician by creating a sequence of tasks, which involved movement and playing instruments. It was important that the materials were clear rather than skillful. The sequences were then looped, and because they were of a different length, different combinations of actions between the performers were created each time. We then introduced more options for the performers to ad new materials, to copy each other, stillness and so on. Sometimes this sketch produced a totally unexpected theatricality, and sometimes it fell flat. We realized that we needed to be careful about how many elements could change at once, so that the structure was still there, but that it remained unpredictable for the performers as well as for the viewer, what would happen next. It was a very fragile balance, but that was also, what really excited me about this experiment.

My last session was with composer Amanda Cole, guitar player Barney Strachan and Elin Sander, and dancers Gilda Stillbäck, Lisa Fahlén and Alice Martucci. We interpreted a piece of music Amanda had written. This piece had a minimal rigor and the musicians’ interpretation brought real beauty to it. It was a peaceful experience to be in the studio with them, and I was looking for something the choreography could do to meet the music half way. Although this session took place in the most conventional set up with clear role divisions and a need for virtuosity from both dancers and musicians, I still felt I was on an experimental pathway. The dance part was based on very limited material. Each dancer had a set score of steps and pauses, and the combination of 3 dancers’ patterns created a strange “start and pause” effect. What interested me was how the dance could have its own rhythm.

Back in London, I realize that I have taken so many new inspirations and ideas with me from Choreosound. What will stay with me is the experience of everyone’s generosity and I really hope that we will find a way to develop the begun collaborations.

Listed to Amada Cole's music
Listed to Daniel Skoglund's music
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Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers

2009-11-01T14:58:00.002-08:00

Yesterday I visited Sophie Calle's exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, entitled "Talking to Strangers". Its the English version of "Prenez Soin de Vous", which premiered in 2007 in France. Sophie Calle takes events in her life as a trigger to create exhibitions that combine ideas, words, sound, visual art and performance. In "Prenez Soin de Vous" she invited 107 women to help her to come to grips with an email she received from her boyfriend, dumping her. The group of women include dancers, singers, a young girl, a children's book writer, a cartoonist, a psychotherapist, a translator, a criminologist, a tarot card reader, a news editor and many more. Each of them interprets, performs or analyzes the text, calling on their personal and professional resources. The heaviness of the message disappears as the individual responses grow into a jigsaw held together by the collective effort to make sense of it.
Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers

Pick & Mix

2009-10-27T08:20:00.002-07:00

Last Saturday we performed Catch at Pick & Mix at Woolworths in Leytonstone. This is a a duet I created with Katsura Isobe in 2005. We have been performing it many times since then but this was the first time it was shown outside a conventional theatre setting. I was worried about how this very abstract work would communicate in a less formal space and from a close up viewpoint. There was a moment of fear in the morning brought about by the technical challenges of the venue (for example electricity...) and a sense of unpredictability of how people would interact with the space, with each other and with us. But the warm and welcoming reception of the audience, which ranged from toddlers to pensioners, calmed me down and allowed me to enjoy the physicality of the piece. I never performed with so many people smiling at me. I loved all the other performances, which ranged from committed Hip Hop choreographed by Tashan Muir and performed by Unity Youth to a classical work beautifully choreographed by Kim Brandstrup for two dancers of Rambert Dance Company. There was a delightfully entertaining solo by Elisabetta d'Aloia, choreographed by Bettina Strickler, and many more treats, including duets by Dean James and Seeta Patel and an intriguing solo performance by Shala Tarrant of a new work choreographed by Fearghus O'Conchuir around the Woolworths' letters. Fearghus was also the curator of the event. He says: "I was happy too to have helped create a space where these choreographers could work side by side, generously, creatively and in that spirit, share their work with the audience." I feel that the success of the event had a lot to do with his gentle and attentive approach and I was happy that about 300 people attended the performances on that day!

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