a sequence about degrees of touch

Some video stills of Alex and Louise working today on a sequence exploring the depth and intention behind touch.

sturcture of 'grappling' - a description

Alex moves her hands, fingers raking Louise’s abdomen.
I wonder if it is my place to tell Louise the words that should leave her mouth:
“I just want to dance”.
What’s this section about?
It’s about an integral connection between sound and movement,
It’s about an intimate physical relationship,
Its about empathy.
Its about the natural, organic movement that so effortlessly emerges in carrying out a task.
Louise breathes in, speaking;
Breaths out, speaking;
And Alex walks away
Shaking head, arms, legs…
Shaking it out.
She does this to clear herself
Like an etch-a-sketch shaken clean,
Ready to be filled with the next image.
Its about revealing process,
About revealing engagement and disengagement,
Revealing both focussed and diffused attention.

Then Louise says,
“And now Alex will dance”
In actual fact, they both start to dance.
A new section addressing persona.
Alex begins with a strong sense of performance persona,
A 10, on a scale of 1-10.
She’s trained in Flamenco dancing
And her Flamenco dancer persona is one of fearlessness, passion…
And with each repetition of her phrase
Alex attempts to strip a bit of this persona away.
But what is underneath?

Is true self ever revealed?
Does it matter?
Or does it reveal enough of her just to see her struggle in her attempt to strip it away.
Louise also dances a repeated phrase
But with each repetition aiming to strengthen persona.
She hovers around 6, a 6 on a scale from 1-10
Louise confesses to being a “cool body” contemporary dancer.
I confess to adopting a “Ms Mello” persona;
A facility employed to hide my nerves.

As they both dance with crescendo-ing and decrescendo-ing personas
Louise gives Alex suggestions of images to physicalise
spontaneously inserting them into her phrase.
Alex’s phrase is in a constant state of disruption but
She always has the option to refuse Louise’s suggested images.

As Alex strips away her Flamenco persona
And starts to work with image,
A new persona appears.
I recognise it from my own dancing.
The butoh persona:
Eyes closed, quiet body, a patient, slow-moving state, waiting for image to take hold
In both form and feeling, body and mind.

Alex and Louise both danced butoh with me as students.
The butoh persona is a practised one
And as Alex settles into this,
Louise dances heartily
Performing more and more.
The cool body persona strong
And I feel removed from her experience.
She becomes a dancing object for me.
I impressed with her limber body, her stamina, her training.
After Louise exhausts her image suggestions to Alex and the repetition of her phrase,
They begin another version of their solo material.
This material has embedded in it:
Improvised movements of internal/external which emerged out of my studies with Annie last year and
“thinking spaces”
We’ve had lots of discussion about these “thinking spaces”
Both Alex and Louise admitting that they are now pre-occupied with thinking about thinking.,
How are thoughts formulated?
Once reflection on a thought takes place
You’ve lost the moment of thinking that thought.

An now we’ve devised a mechanism for moments of self-judging, a movement for the recognition of self-assessment

Grappling - A new work

I have ceased dancing on boxes for the time being as Nicola and I have both launched back into full-time teaching and embarked upon a new process of making with two recent University of Bedfordshire graduates: Louise Douse and Alex Stains. They are both experienced improvisers and we did 12 weeks of butoh work together last year so when I asked them to make some duet material that contained: moving through spaces, pushing, rolling, following, leading with the head and borrowing material; they went about it with ease. Then we ripped this duet material apart and they created solo material with “thinking spaces” – “thinking spaces” are gaps in the set material where they can stop and think. The decision to insert these gaps came about from the realisation that:

“The most interesting moments are the moments of decision, where nothing is set – where decisions are made about where and when to start the next movement….like when Louise stops and decides to watch Alex. It makes a nice connection between the two of them and its unplanned” (choreographic journal notes 6 Oct 08).

We played with repetition of the movement sequence and the thinking spaces. The movement phrase that each of them had created was fairly short, about two minutes. I had them repeat their phrases together, at the same time for ten minutes and I discovered:

“They’ve opened up a bit, revealing their tiredness, they’re newfound camaraderie…feeling the moments of when to hold, wait, rest, listen – its about creating moments for listening – fabricated in a way that the unexpected or at least structuring a potential unexpectedness. I like the rhythm of watching decisions being made” (choreographic journal notes 6 Oct 08).

And so where do we go from here? To show the body’s response to the thoughts in the “thinking space” perhaps…

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!