In a little hall off K Road I’ve been working by myself on practice led stuff for my masters research. In order to break any given session up, I set tasks and work on those tasks for specific durations. (I love duration in improvisation)  So I do this thing for 5 minutes or work on that for 20 minutes etc.

In the studio not only am I very cognizant of the influences I am drawing on. I tend to work on them directly – usually from some form of media ie; dvd roms, cd roms and books.  Also from memory I draw on other practitioners exercises and scores. I’m using Peter Ralstons Body Being principles from Cheng Hsin (also learning his tai chi set), William Forsythe’s ‘Improvisation Technologies’, Al Wunder’s vocal scores, Julyen Hamilton’s exercises that work on duration and time(ing), Steve Paxton’s ‘Material for the Spine’, image work from an improvisational class that the Batsheva company practices, Katie Duck’s eye / focal exercises, Min Tanaka’s stimulation and imagery work, and I am playing around with my own kinetic movement chains (read; dance phrases!) in order to see how they might be a part of the improvisational nexus I’m in.  So there’s a lot of people in the room when I’m working solo and I haven’t even talked about whats going on historically in my own movement techniques / aesthetics etc.

Probably the biggest ongoing challenge for me is attention and concentration. This is where I’m placing the highest demand and precision. I tend to bring together several components at once into a ‘single’ exercise. For example I might work on Ralston’s principle of being whole and total which requires placing your feeling attention on the entire body at once whilst engaging with Forsythe’s ‘Point Point Line’ movement operations. This requires detailed internal and external awareness as well as clear intentionality.  The task can be further complicated by incorporating Hamilton’s feeling duration exercises – trying to feel one minute whilst dancing and working on the other components. Another example might be taking Al Wunder’s aspirant sounds score and working on a feeling image simultaneously such as ‘body as water drop’ which is designed to create sensations of moving ones weight under the floor.  This I find hard to do.

Then outside the studio I keep working on different ideas so that there’s an interstitial dynamic going on with the practice that generally has the affect of making me more and more conscious, and more skilled.  Which is kind of the point really.

My everyday dancing has taken on a bit of a shift. The first thing is that I’ve been dancing in my lounge at home. This has been for practical reasons – of cost, travel, etc – and also to ensure that I am definitely dancing everyday. It reminds me of those dancing in your lounge/bedroom days pre training (pre-puberty?). Yes, I can still do the splits.

I’ve settled into a good rhythm and have been approaching the work with two main (but very contrasting) concerns. The first is ‘starting with nothing’. This is in part inspired by Goat Island’s “Small Acts of Repair”, but also by wanting to ‘soften’ my thinking and ambition before each dance. I find it brings a clarity and a warmth to how I am experiencing the actions. I am not (of course) pretending that nothing is there, or that nothing has gone before, it is more adopting a quietness to the body-mind state before and during the work/play.

The second is I have been dancing directly to music. If I am going to dance in a lounge, best I put headphones on. The absurd novelty of dancing directly to rhythmic and melodic content is fantastic fun, and it seems to collide with ‘dancing from nothing’ or ‘no-place’. I’ve been working on dancing between different melodic/rhythmic parts with different parts of my body, complicating my attention, and making quite severe co-ordination challenges.

And then there is the environment. Apart from being a little worried about what my neighbours across the street (who can look directly into the lounge) are thinking, I am also a bit concerned about how much noise I am making for the people in the two flats beneath mine. As a result, much of the work has adopted a kind of shuffle, or a delicacy in the placement of my feet. I tread carefully, and the silence seems to be magnified by the headphones, the music and the nothingness.