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.