Funding

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

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

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

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

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.

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.