day one. week three. moving this morning – first through yoga (some deep deep early morning backbends – regroup, try again, maybe tomorrow. Too much dance training – helping as it gets in the way!) followed up by some responding and initiating with david – considering what this means as a ‘solo’ dancer and in a duet.
David danced first and I responded. 5 minute interchanges – repeated- no discussion between each swap. The thing I find most compelling when improvising and the ‘thing’ I find hardest to find by myself – is a sense of ‘newness’. Simon and I have discussed this before. ‘Newness’ is different to what I imagine ‘authentic movement’ to be. It feels more investigative than ‘raw’. It resides in a purely physical state – in that I do not have any emotional repercussion or resonance. It is as though my pathways are being re – reouted, or, as David said, ‘re – purposed’. This ‘re – purposing’ happening beacuse of the information/history/fact of the other.
I recognise newness at once as I feel excited about information that feels like it is being fed into me from ‘another place’ – and i am aware of another kind of freedom in my body. In this case this was possible when entering a task that required a response to another (body) as the primary aim. Instead of getting in my own way (as is often the case), I am able to let my methods of idiosyncratic and habitual moving add a richness to my physical/visceral/structural experience and response toward my dancing partner.
The coversation is alive and interactive. I like that. It is rich territory for a beginning.
On another note – I am reading about Forsythe and Vera Mantero. An odd couple – but I get the sense that there are similar structural concerns, different but present incorporations of memory and emotion (I use ‘emotion’ very broadly here) and a cultivation of the democratic as works are made. I agree that there is a need for foundations based in research that includes histories – of bodies/cultures/and aesthetics – and an inquisition into how the research may bleed into and inform, support and carry the choreography. They are both proposing – on some level I think – what Andre Lepecki calls “A body ‘yet to be heard’, a body ‘yet to be thought out’….an unheard of body”.
A further thought on what part history plays through our bodies. dancing…or not?
“ to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” – – Walter Benjamin ‘Thesis on the philosophy of history’
With this idea of history in mind I wonder how far can we go (back – informed by ourselves), what are we limited by? and can or does our history both inform and reduce us to stoppages and brick walls. How can we open up a potential that encompasses anatomical, spatial, imaginative and emotional spaces. A healthy and considered portion of each? Enough to be enough. Not so much that the task latches onto one point of investigation. How necessary is it (this may be applicable for or originally derived from living itself) that we shift between modalities or potentials to offer oursleves what James Gibson calls affordance? (I use this in a different context but am interested in how we affford ourselves potential).
Departing and resonating quotes from the week before…
“(Or) we’re trying to understand the how the body thinks about its own presence, how it reacts to the situations it can put itself in. And so what happens is really not so much the result of a conscious aesthetic attempt but really a proposal; if left to its own devices and rigorously trained enough then the thinking body is capable of quite a number of amazing things”. Forsythe : interview ABC Radio National
http://www.abc.net.au/arts/performance/stories/s439792.htm
“What makes me afraid of a space is fearing what can happen in it. In fact, this space of action is my affordance, my potential for movement. This is often limited by all I’ve spoken of before. But in fact what is also limited is my potential for action and imagination”. Bernard Hubbard – Contact Quarterly – Summer/fall 2006, Vol 31 number 2. p34.
OK. Things are shifting. How will this feed back into my dancing? Time. Distilling and patience will tell.
