Archive for April 2009

 
 

So I did not dance

For me watching a good stand up comedian provides inspiration, pleasure, and appreciation of expertise.  Particularly when I see free associative improvisation with known material done beautifully. Right there I recognize presence, memory, skill,  timing and instant feedback by way of laughter.

In approaching a solo performance at a friends fundraiser I did my best to keep a clean slate prior to going on, ie: an empty mind. It’s what I like to think that I do.  In truth I often organize some kind of idea in my mind to take onstage. In this case I had constructed a cardboard sign to wear around my neck. The audience could clearly read the text, on one side it said ‘ONLOOKER’, on the other side it said ‘LIAR’. This was inspired by images from a Tim Etchells book ‘ Certain Fragments’ and was also fueled by a persistent desire to be understood as a performer. I wanted to throw the audience something to grab onto.

As it turned out I ended up doing a stand up comedy routine. There was no dancing.  All the improvised movement I normally do was absent with the exception of a repeated motif consisting of a lean against a wall with rather bizarrely shaped hands . The underlying gag was that yes I was going to dance any moment now. This provided comic tension reminiscent of Victor Borge’s work. I swear I wanted to dance but talking and making sense to a group of people who actually laughed and responded to me directly shaped the interaction. I felt that the abstracted movement I tend to do had no reason to be in the performance. In the words of Bill Bailey “So I did not dance.”

Although it was an appropriate decision to develop the text I still felt (post performance) that there was a problem and the problem itself was cliche’ ie: the perceived chasm between movement and text. There’s a consistent sense – alluded to in my last my last post, of the unresolved. The incomplete.  As if the question driving the performance itself was not quite clear enough to begin with. Although I had wanted to bring dance into that particular performance there seemed to be no available entrance. No way of doing it that could reconcile my desire to perform movement with what was actually happening.

But I talked about dance. I stood in a roomful of people who laughed at me.

The Dunedin Fringe solo’s

“Self Portrait”, a (mostly) dance show organized by Christchurch based Corrupt Productions toured Wellington and Auckland Fringe Festivals at the beginning of the year. The premise was to base a dance work on a self portrait by NZ artist Rita Angus. I was brought in for the Dunedin leg of the tour to replace one of the other choreographers.

The show was a  vehicle for me to create 4 improvised solo compositions over 4 nights ( more accurately solo dancer dueting / improvising with the the lighting woman ).  In responding to the Rita Angus painting which Julia Milsom selected for me at my request I began from a sense of disconnection from the artist and her body of work – ‘ve never really engaged with Angus’s images in the past. So I started from what I knew about line drawing. This resulted in a reflective / contemplative process that took into consideration compositional parallels between the mediums of visual art and dance. Although the relationship to time is different as are the materials used in each medium, composition is still composition (ie; to quote Julyen Hamilton “how things are made and how they might go together” )

I stipulated some specific conditions for the solos. The duration was set at 12 minutes. I used a piece of music by a NZ sound artist who calls himself Birchville Cat Motel. The 9 minute track was prefaced by 3 minutes of recorded silence allowing me to set a tone with the text. As the piece progressed the volume increased drowning me out in the process.

The improvised text drew from musings about the process of drawing, the solipsistic nature of creating a self portrait, and correlations between the creation of line in both visual art and in movement. The text wasn’t used directly to elucidate the meaning of the movement, it was its own composition. It still provided context and meta commentary on the whole work however.

The movement itself drew heavily from Forsythe’s line operations. This has been an integral part of my practice research for the last year or so. These movement operations were pertinent as they involved dealing with internally imagined lines which resulted in repeatable nameable events, phrases and spatial arrangements. The operations helped me to effectively ground the performance in the concept I was working with.

With regards to the light there were a number of pre-existing conditions and limitations. Firstly the rig was designed to light a number of shows on at the same time in that theatre ( Allen Hall ). The theatre itself was a problematic space to work the dance into primarily because of its lack of subtlety – its ugly. .The designer Marty Roberts whom I respect highly has worked with me in the past did a great job of working with the darkness of the space. I asked for a lot of bold colour in the lighting palette in reference to Angus’s abilities as a colourist.  Then Janice the lighting op and I started playing together in the days leading up to the performance. Its a learn on the job process. Although I can generally give a new lighting operator a clear sense of the game and can get a satisfying real time collaboration going,  I still have a lot of trouble explaining at the outset how it might go and what it is we’re going for together.

Performing for a new audience is like a blind date – I hope they’re going to like me and I hope I’m going to like them. I really have to discipline myself into relaxing and not doing too much – running off at the mouth so to speak. Because this set of improvised compositions were grounded in a clear conceptual framework I was strict about excluding gimmickry that can be used as a fall back in improv. I wanted to stay ‘en pointe’ as it were with the ideas I was working on. I also wanted to have a sense of interaction and connection with the audience. I couldn’t see them so this was hard work. Very much a ‘blind’ date in that sense too…

Post performance I’m often left with a feeling that is both complex and vague, as if I’m looking at a city in fog. There’s a sense of what I have just done and a gnawing desire to show that I’m more than that. The practice of performance improvisation is endless and I don’t want to be confined to an external perception of a singular event. This post performance ennui is a constant and I experienced it again in Dunedin. La petit mort perhaps.

At this point in the writing I feel compelled to summarise and conclude. But given the trajectory I’m following in improvisation and the pathways I’ve gone down I have a stronger sense of ‘not really knowing’. As a discipline I know how to end improvisations but those endings are not necessarily conclusions,  they are decisions to end.