I’ve been thinking quite a bit about contemplative traditions as a means of articulating various understandings of presence. This morning I was chatting to Gabrielle Eastwood about this. She said:

The importance of listening is so critical to many things. “Listen” is the opening word of the Rule of St Benedict.  It is about listening with the ear of the heart.

Clearly the context is quite different, but the language seems so appropriate …

I was working on a very simple thing whilst dancing this morning.

For some time I’ve been noticing when improvisers are ‘thinking’, or ‘listening’ to new threads in their attention. It is as if they (I) have a tendency to occupy a certain posture (or range of postures), or actions that feel like they are movements to fall back on (or default to) when ‘new listening’ is occurring.

In these stillnesses (even though for the most part there were no stillnesses occurring), I wondered how I might increase my consciousness of the improvisation. To treat the ‘settling’ as an opportunity to be fully still. To fill the stillness with purpose, and not conflate it with what was about to happen (or what the possibilties were). It was a chance to pull back from the future, to dance in stillness with my internal gaze, whilst not ‘loading’ it with importance or meaningfulness.

It seemed to soften my desire for newness whilst propelling me there.

Ugh.

This is not simple.

Nor is it easy to write about.

Need help.

Must not publish …

Every now and again I come across a little piece of writing that adds clarity to navigating the endlessness of the improvisation spectrum.

The challenge for each event is to find the enabling constraints and techniques of relation that tailor the event to whats singular about that piece coming together.

Brian Massumi

What I like about this text is that it seems to match with my experience. The beginning of an improvisational performance is always the hardest for me, I’m better at endings.  At the outset I am self conscious in part because of feeling a responsibility to the challenge stated by Massumi. I don’t agree with the idea of a singularity however. But finding the actions commensurate with the event, clearly attending to the limitations or constraints at hand tends to bring up the ‘right’ responses at the right times.

Simon say something learned and interesting please

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.

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.

“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.

Some writing I did in response to performances at The Little Con on 27 February 2009.

We only ever experience anything once.

Shirley McKechnie (chatting today over tea)