I think I work best with chocolate and caffeine in my system so, over a couple of strong coffees, Nicola and I, in our usual manic but efficient way, downloaded a month’s worth of ideas, concerns, gossip and desires. It feels good to rekindle our shared interests for butoh, image work, improvisation and a need to work creatively.

Tucked away in Toyenbee Studios away from my perceived pressures to conform to orthodox traditionalism in my dancing, I feel suddenly freed. After some discussion it feels right to head up to the studio and do some Authentic Movement. We start by one of us moving for 15 minutes whilst the other observes as “witness” (to use Authentic Movement terminology) and then vice versa.

Neither of us knows very much about Authentic Movement but we’re learning. I’ve done a bit with Jonathan Burrows, Nicola has just done some with Henry Montes and coincidently we’re both reading the same book: Offering from the Conscious Body: The Discipline of Authentic Movement. So we’re not at a total loss; plus, we know each other well so the movement comes easily and without much self-censorship.

Almost immediately, Nicola called my attention to the two large white installation-like boxes in the studio so we made no haste in organising our improvisations around them. Initially, I found it challenging to get out of my “removals-man” mentality when negotiating my body in relationship to the boxes but Nicola seemed to have no problem conjuring up and embodying images of things like water, moss and snails.

Despite my challenges in manifesting images in working with this large prop, Nicola and I discussed how useful they were in forcing us to move differently as we had to pull ourselves up onto the boxes, lever ourselves off of again and find ways of simply manoeuvring ourselves physically around them.

We drew conclusions at the end of our time together about how a simple idea, like, ‘move around some boxes’, was very successful. Perhaps an image does manifest out of such an idea; for instance, the image of a snail. Well then, this image could be filled out with other images; such as: where the snail is crawling, what it is eating, what the texture of its shell is like and so on. As is the case in butoh work, one image is the spark that lights the fire and you are only limited by your own resistance to explore aspects of your own consciousness.

A productive day….

The Start of Something New?

Managed to ferret away into Toyenbee Studios for a few hours with Nicola Gibbons recently. We hadn’t danced together since Fran Barbe’s work in 2003. We’re both working full-time in dance education now and find that our luxurious days of experimenting with movement and reflecting back on it are few and far between. So we started our time together in the studio with the aim of improvising with an image, reflecting back on our improvisations (through discussion) and then improvising again.

Coincidentally, we started out working with the same image, that of being filled with sand. We moved, then chatted. Sand was too heavy on its own so we added air. Sand and air was too dry so we substituted air for water. This was better. Like oil and water the two substances as images could shift around in our bodies and we moved easier. We’d worked with the idea of image a lot together from our days dancing with Fran and in our butoh work with Atsushi Takenouchi. After each of our improvisations when we were meant to be strictly reflecting on the practice we stopped, and instead reflected on our lives.

We agreed that working in dance education had taken us out of our own practice as artists and into a cycle of giving, giving, giving to our students. I realised I’d come to a gradual halt in my own dancing with Living La Pedrera in 2006. Had two years already passed? We vowed to book studio time more frequently in order to work together – maybe with the aim of making a new work? We’ll see where it goes…

Relieved. Finally I have a title for the new work: 'Annie is not bipolar'. For the first time in making work the title has come very late in the process. I was getting worried and somehow not having the title was stifling my making. It is all in a flow now though and will be performed December 5th!

...working with the composition students at University of Bedfordshire, this is the sound that has been put together for their assessment: aprils.mp3 (soundfile © 2007 tucola / the Stranglers).

Sound - improvisation and composition

I attach for the purposes of some dance composition work that I am doing with the students at University of Bedfordshire three sound files for download below.

one minute
thirty seconds
two minutes
Soundfiles © 2007 tucola

(right click and download linked file to save mp3s)

"internal"
in-in
into
the shoulder
the hip
the spine




"external"
holding
the imagined

Making a new piece of work, a solo for lovely dancer Annie Lok. These are just a few video stills from the current ideas we are exploring.
Annie moves and as she moves she tells me where her attention is –
“Internal” she says, if her awareness is on muscular or skeletal or a proprioceptive focal point.
“External” she says, if her awareness is outside herself… on something visual within the room for example, or on a sound or texture…
This gives me as the onlooker a way into her movement and strangely, after watching for some time I find myself disagreeing with her. “Hum, I think, that movement actually looked internal.”
Or laughing out loud in absolute agreement as Annie works through a feel-good stretch in her hip, “Internal.” Internal.” Internal.” Internal.”

I devised a ‘score’ for Annie to improvise through:
Internal – External improvisation of movement until something external takes your attention strongly.
React, through movement, to this external stimulus.
Wait, in stillness, in a state of being ready, alertness, in a state of what I call “readiness” like a cat before it pounces…..whilst waiting in this state mentally ‘replay’ the movement you made in reaction to the external stimulus.
Repeat this movement (as best as you can remember it) over and over, letting it naturally shift and evolve until you get bored of it and then enter back into improvising around Internal – External and repeat the whole process.

An interesting ebb and flow of movement dynamic was created out of this which let me see glimpses of Annie’s thought processes as she was challenged by both remembering the score and maintaining that sense of moment to moment liveness but also reflecting at the same time. Difficult. But good to watch!

Thinking more about drawing dancing… and met yesterday with artist Veronica Ashcroft to play with some ideas about the relationship between the two mediums. More to the point, I was interested in the spontaneous dialogue between artist and dancer whist each was involved in doing their “thing”. How does our conversation change my movement? How does the conversation change Veronica’s drawing? As we talked, moved and drew it emerged that the artist had to make a decision about what to draw…form or feeling/dynamic energy. We talked about Degas, who had his dancers posing at the ballet bar, holding one position for hours as he drew. How contra-intuitive for the dancer. Victor Van Kooten (an artist and yoga teacher) writes in book 2 of his “Yoga Notebooks” (these notebooks are fantastic by the way, if you have any interest in yoga) – “After holding a posture for a long time, the inner body gets blocked and the energy confused. This state leads to injuries” (Van Kooten, 2000).

If you discount the importance of the form and go for feeling or dynamic energy then what is the importance of the product that is produced? This relates back to the value of process for me and my work. Often in performance work we never see the pathway to the product. The audience that arrives to see a show never knows the collaborative dialogues, the trials and errors, the experience of play… all this is lost when product gets presented as the only thing of value.

So, for this experiment Veronica and I chatted right the way through the process of drawing and dancing. We even tried a role reversal where Veronica moved and I drew. What I think I was successful in finding was a way for someone observing movement to feel (intersubjectively) the movement performed by the dancer. To some degree, the artist has to “get inside” the movement in order to capture it. I’m not sure if this is because of the physicality involved in drawing – and we talked about what it would be like if Veronica were working on a huge canvas where she would really be moving a lot herself in order to draw the movement she was capturing….perhaps this is the next stage of development in my recent little project….

So, recovered from the PhD viva and whilst in the midst of writing up my revisions I’ve been busy with a couple other interesting projects. The first, a workshop I did in collaboration with a fine art teacher at an East London school. I came, danced and taught a short movement phrase to the students. Half of the students then captured the movement in their drawings whilst it was being danced. Below are a couple pictures from the day and a selection of the amazing illustrations of dance movement they produced!

The second little project was a workshop that I gave to a group of teachers and artists (part of the TAP International Symposium held last month) from Spain, Portugal, Italy and the UK on movement, space and place. We worked on the grounds at Roehampton University on a beautiful sunny day. I was interested again in looking at the process of how space becomes place for an individual through movement in the space. I intend to make another piece of site-specific work this summer so the experiences gained on this day will inform that process. Here are some video stills of the day below: