Crowded Room
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.
29. May 2009 at 04:47
Tight bit of describing.
Devil’s advocate (someone has to speak on his behalf):
“making me more and more conscious, and more skilled. Which is kind of the point really.”
But so what? I mean, what ends are served by being more skilled and/or more conscious? What is the effect of this? How is it manifest (and for what reason)?
Why not stay unskilled? (There is much to be said for the dilettante).
29. May 2009 at 06:47
Great questions. I’ll start with the bottom comment – I think there’s more to be said for the unpretentious and the innocent than the dilettante. Having experienced plenty of dabblers in so many contexts in dance I’ve simply lost patience with the ones whose self perception is out of whack with their current level of ability…I’m talking about relatively low levels of competence here armored by say, high end marketing or aggressive posturing. I just want to see good work and that usually involves a spectrum of skill and / or honesty.
In pursuing skill (driven by a number of concerns including a deep push to experience more and more possibilities within my ability to do, create, and communicate) I’ve wound up looking into consciousness, perception, mind, self etc. Given that the only guarantee I have in life is that I’ll wind up dead I might as well pursue this until that event occurs! Anyway I’m discovering a direct correlation between skill and awareness…kind of obvious but easy to overlook.
How is it manifest? I’m not sure why but I’m reminded of something I read where Merce Cunningham laughingly answered his own question about how one does or makes choreography…how do we do it? By doing it! Skill becomes manifest in the action, and the action itself should be commensurate with the situation or event at hand. If the action is skillfully executed then timing, degree of effort, expression etc become an effective confluence of intention, awareness, and response within the event itself.
If the unaware or the innocent does this its usually an accident – therefore honest – therefore (for me) pleasurable or satisfying to witness. But maybe that unaware person or thing is unable to reproduce that kind of action with any degree of art or efficacy.
And its in the context reproduction that I am finding the demand for consciousness and skill to be an appropriate and viable pursuit.
Hope this helps Mr Devil
3. August 2009 at 09:20
The durations are minutes, multiples of minutes, but what about the seconds inbetween? Improvisations of 44 seconds, of 23 minutes and 31 seconds for example. How would this affect your durational condition?
I want to know how you work on the work of others directly? Are you taking this material into the studio – the books, dvd roms, writings etc – or are you drawing from references you have extracted? What is the material presence of these influences and does this inflect your dialogues? Examples?
Reading your process makes me think about Foucault and his ‘technologies of the self’, you can read this material in the context of his later work on the ‘care of the self’. There is also something slightly panopticon in your survey of influences which are co-present but through which you ‘watch’ what you are doing perhaps.
4. August 2009 at 11:48
In terms of the length of an exercise, its arbitrary – ‘How long is a piece of string?’ In terms of being alone in a studio by myself working on exercises and training duration (specifically for a 45 minute solo duration) those numbers will do. I decided on time based structures that would work. Spending 44 seconds on a feeling image isn’t enough to experience it in any depth. Spending 23 minutes and 31 seconds on an open format stream of consciousness improvisation may be way too long to understand or contextualise what it is I’m left with by the end of the time period.