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.

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."

First Development

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.