Archive for December 2008

 
 

The Settlement project

Belgian choreographer, ex -psychologist, director, and all around good guy Hans Van Den Broeck worked with 22 performers in New Zealand to regenerate a performance piece called ‘Settlement’. By way of preamble here is the press release:

Settlement is a performance created in 2 weeks with a local group of professional performers from different ages/ origins/ backgrounds. From day one they construct a temporary village/ settlement with material found or collected. The area where they work is inside ‘The Print Factory’ which was chosen as it’s a rough looking place that suggests an outside world. The creation process takes place in that environment. They associate around the notion of “settlement”, a concept with many different interpretations and subjective outlooks.The performance(s) are shown for an audience at the end of the workshop-period. It is not a work-in-progress, the aim is for a finished result. They try to perform the constructed outline 3 times in a row in one evening, to create the sensation of duration and a feeling of real life.The first settlement took place in May 2007 in Sydney. The intention of this project is to explore and to create this performance in other cities. Part of the research is to know how other participants in other cultures/settings react on the notion of “settlement”.

I have looked at Van Den Broek’s process through the lens of the compositional nexus between choreographic and improvisational process (yes I am a walking Venn diagram….thanks Simon and shuddup!). Rather than explain what that means at this point I will just talk about how I perceived Settlement worked as a performance composition.

Settlement is a little like a prefabricated building: it has a fundamental design with a degree of flexibility in terms of potential variations in construction. The structure itself is altered according to the site it occupies, it can house one or many participants, and when the occupants move in they create the look, feel, and micro culture of the place. This is influenced by what people bring to site as individuals and as a group collective. Hans himself is an occupant, placing himself within the work. Despite his apparent ‘hands off’ approach to guiding the process of workshopping Van Den Broeck is the key individual who embodies the concept, and is ultimately the design architect of Settlement.

The performance is made up of a series of scenes and images that vary and change according to the location and group involved (this project has been done in around 5 (?) cities / countries…TBC). I suspect however that the degree of variation in performance from group to group is kept on a tight leash. Van Den Broeck has very specific ideas about what Settlement is and how it works. Certain behavioral and artistic demands on the performers become evident and consistent as the workshoppng process unfolds.

The loose weave composition has many pre-installed decisions and conditions within its spacious design. That said however there is a subtly felt democracy within the group which influences the ‘school of fish’ decisions the collective can make. For example in the transitions between scenes, individuals listen to the group, and move in a loose ‘unchoreographed’ fashion onto the next scene. This placed a high demand on individuals to respond as a group at all times. In order for this to work in performance sensory acuity, feeling sensitivity, and non egotistically driven responses had to be part of the intrinsic design of the rehearsal process.

There whole composition could arguably be described as a set of task based improvisations with specific and occasionally unnameable parameters. Certain individuals were designated to act as ‘drivers’ within each scene in order to create some degree of control, (eg:create beginnings and endings) within the overall design of the work.

The simultaneous looseness and strictness created the potential for interesting interpretations of appropriate content within the site of the performance itself. For example when one of the performers displayed a pukana in the middle of the second night of performance, this expression of Maori culture although easily accommodated within the world of Settlement seemed out of step with the actual culture of  the piece. All individual decisions within the site of performance were improvisational within very tight ‘framings’ (Simon uses this word a lot to denote delimiters within improvisations).

Settlement was a theatrical event that 23 people extraordinarily brought together over a mere fortnight.  As a contributor I felt that my practice pragmatically and creatively fed into the demands and conditions of constructing Settlement ie:working on timing as an individual and as a member of an ensemble, ‘reading’ the composition accurately, and diverting my own egoistically driven creative impulses to become author. More importantly understanding how improvisation and choreography reciprocate each other within a composition allows a certain advantageous perspective. Currently that sense of ‘advantage’ is an intuition that is evading direct elaboration. However i can say that having a clear understanding of ensemble work from an improvisational point of view was enabling in terms of supporting the unchoreographed elements within the site of performance.

.me-andering up-date.

Having won a scholarship from NICAI at the University of Auckland I will be embarking on a project both as a dancer for choreographer Hans Van Den Broeck (Les Ballets C de la B, Belgium) and as a researcher for my masters project. My questions for Han’s project and how that will inform my own research are largely unformed. I trust that the right questions will emerge from the practice itself. I will be looking at Han’s ‘Settlement’ project through my inquiries into what is common to both choreography and improvisation. This demands that I develop my own academic perspective and working definitions of these two sites. In  all of the reading I have done so far on dance improvisation I have come across little that describes it satisfactorily, and very little that contextualizes it.

My personal need for context comes out of the recent realization that I have no idea how I came to be a performer of improvisational (contemporary / new / post post modern) dance  in New Zealand. In my mind there has to be a reason that something like me occurred within the artistic / economic / social / political climate of good ol’ Aotearoa. In as much as i was exposed to improvisational practices as a dance student (Alison East’s improv / comp classes and Catherine Chapells CI classes) there was never any precedent out  there in the ‘profession’. No example of any such thing as an improvisational dance artist. There were dancers and there were choreographers and there were also people who did both.

As I set about being one of those people who did both i developed choreographic, performative, and technical skills. When I chose eventually to immerse myself  in improvisation as means of authoring dance performance in real time, I experienced  levels of personal and political agency that the typical power relationships of choreographer and dancer had limited or no access to. There was a greater democracy in co-authored performance.  This ‘agency’ is something I will be looking into further.

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On completely different note I’ve also been intrigued by this question from Shelley’s earlier missive:

“What place does the structured use of time have in improvisation? Do conscious repetitions, variations and time constraints have a place in CI or do they belong to instant composition?”

There’s an implicit holding apart of two improvisational practices in these questions.  One can inform the other but perhaps it’s worthwhile opening up windows on their outcomes. The distinctions between CI and instant or real time composition are there to be picked through and elaborated on. But at this stage I will make the statement that real time composition is designed for performance which is why it takes structured time into account.  It can and frequently does take techniques, skills, dramaturgy, narrative, choreographic mores etc into account also. It has the facility to house tools such as those found in CI within its compositional field also.

Although CI can be performed it seems to me that it was originally formed with a democratic intervention into the elitist practices of modern dance in mind.  CI is designed for access.  Steve Paxton refers to Contact Improvisation as a ‘constant’, saying that it hasn’t changed since it was originally and that he has been looking for ways to explode the practice contact improvisation. If CI is to be performed it may well be useful for it to take time structures ino account in the rehearsal or preparation phases. Otherwise enquiring into structured time may well be irrelevant to its outcomes.

Anyway this is the current ambient thought cloud in my body and brain.