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Writings from Taipei

Here are some excerpts from the Artscross blog. To see full context go to:

http://rescen.net/blog2/

August 9th

I walk into the studio and Yen Fang is working with three men. Two men are mirroring each other’s movement, in close contact, facing each other but not touching, perceiving each other with all senses.  The third man is moving on the ground between them, like a Golam figure seeking attention, twisting and turning, arching and falling. Yen Fang observes closely, talking intimately with them, as they improvise.

The women are spread out across the outsides of the space, improvising individually. Yen Fang works with each woman one to one. Each dancer improvises with a particular set of instructions, to embody and embrace Yen Fang’s movement quality. These dancers are fabulous. One woman’s lower back is so expressive, arching and curving from minute to extreme degrees.  Her body is fragmented, wrists broken, shoulders tipped, hips distorted, feet turned inwards, dissolving into soft palpitating muscular ripples, moving in multiple spatial pathways, never fixing, always changing, multi fronted, a body fired with intelligent contradictions. She moves towards a certain direction in space but another movement, another direction, has taken over before the first is completed.  No action is fully performed before the balance is shifted, no limb is extended to complete a conventionally expected shape, change has already happened. The conventions of formal space are displaced, the dancer works in many dimensions, superbly articulating each micro detail. No mushiness here. The improvisation ends and an intimate dialogue begins between the dancer and Yen Fang, who intermittently, throughout the dialogue, demonstrates with her own body — and she is stunning to watch.  (I am aware here that I am talking about ‘dancers’, I do not have the names of the dancers in front of me to equalise the dialogue in written words).

Yen Fang is particular in her search for multiplicity. As she observes one dancer improvising, she notices how he moves his torso from side to side, two dimensionally. She works with him to increase the possibility of multi directional movement, twisting, turning, curving, dipping, and tilting. I am reminded here of how we hold our emotions in our bodies – and yes Donald, the body always lies – we all hold parts of our bodies against the fear of letting go to the unknown.

So – I watch movement language that fills me with the energy of uncertainty, of not knowing, a potency of possibility. There is no truth here, no final statement. This is not about authenticity. This has nothing to do with seeking truth, real or representation. This is a full-embodied practice of undoing all that. I sense in my body this is about embodying the intelligence of constant change, aliveness in the moment of moving here and now.

I am also drawn to the relational practice between Yen Fang and her dancers. She meets them as people, with personalities, with voices; she meets them equally in the space. They are in dialogue; there is an exchange of knowledge. She is not telling them what to do, and they are not waiting to be instructed. Yet both of these are happening. Something is created between them, here is a creative between-ness.

Yes I am writing after the event and I can make connections with forms, codes, styles and histories, Forsythe, Jonathan Burrows, European postmodern dance. I can also contemplate how these individual voices will come together as a group.  But not when I am in the studio. I am observing process, I am engaged, and I am in the moment. And I want this aliveness to continue.

I am wondering about how we might make process as performance – in this context of Artscross. I feel sad that this process must take the shape of product, that this inter-relational, dialogic moment of uncertain knowing must somehow fix itself into a choreographic shape that becomes there and then rather than here and now, where Yen Fang’s presence and dialogue with her dancers is abstracted – to be replaced with a relationship with a fronted, seated, audience. How can this uncertain knowing be maintained through to performance?  For here and now, in the studio, is the unique immediacy of performance process. And this is perhaps a place where the dialogue between observer, writer and choreographer might hover.

August 10th

Bular sits cross-legged on the ground – still. Surrounding him his dancers move with extreme speed and strength. Bular’s presence is grounding, a still point within a whirl of energy. Bular holds the space, contains the energy around him. I sense that if he were to join the dancers in speed and movement, the energy in the room would become chaotic, clashing, confused, and frantic. Concentration would become tension. Or perhaps, like the door of a birdcage that suddenly opens, within seconds the energy would disperse. Bular provides the still core, the boundary, within which the dancers can bound and rebound.

I learn that the dancers have created the movement material – I have yet to hear what the initial tasks or starting points might have been.  Today the dancers are working on a floor sequence. Each dancer is concentrating on his/her own phrase, finding individual space in the studio, coming close but not crashing into other dancers.  The plan is, after each individual phrase has been created and crafted, to combine the material into duets – without losing the individual complexity of each dancer’s material.

(This is also the challenge of Yen Fang’s work today as she begins to bring the individual solo material into group process without losing the separate difference of each solo.  And this is a question of practice  – how to collaborate to create a community that is a meeting of separate differences, rather than a confluence of sameness. How to create and maintain community with risk, uncertainty and difference, rather than (only) safety, similarity and mutual hugs).

Bular’s dancers are superb. Such agility and power, strength and finesse. Staying close to the floor I watch a man swiveling on his hands, spinning, sliding his legs through, folding at hips and knees, bum close to the floor, lifting himself off the ground on his insteps, his pointed feet, crawling, thrusting hips forward, falling back on heels, using his hands to walk, pushing up to head stand, torso sweeping across the ground, giving his legs momentum to fly, flipping his body onto his stomach, arching his back, taking his weight on hands again, shoving his hips backwards, circling his leg  in an arc around his body, spinning on pointed feet, squatting,  jumping parallel to the ground, catching on hands, rolling backwards, flipping onto his chest, rising on one shoulder.. Such contained strength, such ease to work close to the floor, with extreme speed, fast changes, where nothing is predictable.  Power, testosterone and feminine delicacy combined. Flexibility and subtlety, hyperextension and folding, lightness and control, concentration and dedication. It is their responsibility to perfect, with Bular’s feedback and specific likes. He trusts them. They trust him. Occasionally he rises to clarify a move. Mostly, he sits – still — and holds the space.

 

August 12th

I am attempting to enter inclusively into each studio process, noting my response to what is happening. And from this embodied sensation, to describe what I see.

Alexander:

The atmosphere in this studio is cool, gentle, English. I feel the space between my shoulders and my neck. Alexander creates space. And he has a double act to play right now. He has to finish his piece by today and also find time to translate his movement quality to the dancers.

Falling is key to Alexander’s choreography, falling as a metaphor for uncertainty. As I enter the studio he is exploring a fall with a dancer, falling backwards into a partner’s arms, and then coming back to standing.  The dancers partner each other in a fall to recover. Going down to come up. Alexander wants a fall… and then return to standing, not a fall to recover. The recovery is not inevitable.  For dancers trained in classical/modern dance, fall and recovery are inseparable.   In modern dance students learn a stylised fall that has no connection to letting go, but to an onwards connection to more movement. After all, modern dance is about youthful living – and ongoing fight against the dying of the light – right? To fall is a meeting with uncertainty, with loss, with chaos. And this kind of falling – technically — requires a somatic understanding of letting go …  What a paradox for Alexander and this studio process, he has little time left and has to move fast, yet to fall requires a slowing down, a stopping of time.  What a challenge!

Shanshan:

The dancers are grouped together, looking into the far distance. I sense a searching for something more, a longing, anguish and loss. As I watch I feel this in my body.

I have walked into the very end moments of a run of the choreography.

The next half hour is spent reworking details of timing, hand and foot co-ordination, movement dynamics, when to turn energy on or off — the fine tuning of rehearsal process. There is no discussion of feeling, or what to feel. The feedback is technical.  Shanshan is precise, exact and sure with her technical feedback.

Yet their bodies seem full of feeling, their eyes are full, their hands reach to full stretch,  their legs fully extend, they perform a full pause, heavy with feeling.

Is it the theme of belonging that fills them with feeling? Is it the sound score?  Or is it the performance of the movement language itself?  If I move my elbow down sharply I experience a different feeling to when I move my elbow down softly. A feeling emerges with the movement.

I am reminded of something I wrote a while ago  (2006) about full body/empty body, presence and absence.  In choreographic process we can create movement material through fully expressing an emotional connection. It is then possible to empty the body of the emotion, to be left with the movement itself, as an empty shell. In performance we might embody that empty shell of the movement and the feeling re-emerges, without having to emote. Empty body becomes full.

Shu-fen:

A large space is scattered with mattresses and dancers, talking, falling about, clowning, vying for a laugh, enjoying each other’s  interactive performances with the mattresses. Little scenes unfold, improvised meetings between bodies and mattresses. The dancers are wearing what they normally wear to bed – in some cases quite revealing! At one moment mattresses are placed standing up,  like walls, one behind the other, with a body sandwiched in between each one.  A dancer improvises, climbing up and popping his head over the brow of the mattress, then fainting slowly down again — and the action is so funny. Each dancer plays, joking, finding possible material, appearing above and to the sides of the mattresses and disappearing again.  Shu-fen enjoys their play and keeps a firm hand. She knows what she wants.  A pleasurable release this is – to laugh. My body relaxes into their joyous games.

Xiaomei:

What exuberant passionate energy Xiaomei shares with her dancers. She leads them and they follow. I see such open honesty and commitment to her task, to reconstruct, re-enact a shamanistic ritual from Mongolia – a communication between people and god. The shaman, the healer, draws the spirit. And the spirit draws the performers, through the hand held cluster of bells that are passed from dancer to dancer — breathing life into the group, pressing them onwards, driving them forwards.   As another kind of empty body, the dancers surrender to allow the spirit of the bells to enter their bodies.

This is powerful stuff. I am down on my knees, I am ready to be taken. I am carried away by the power of the group. The sound score is ritualisitic, throbbing with rhythm and gutteral voices, created by Xiaomei. I observe simple ancient spatial patterns, snaking circles and lines, heel first running with bent legs, women bent double at the waist, slapping the backs of their wrists, the men as warriors of yin and yang. I almost lose myself to the spirit of the dance, my body energised with the pulse of the group dynamic, I want to be closer, closer, surrender to the dance –  yet I now I have far too much Western feminist ego to perform something like this!

Wow! what a range of work and a tumble of embodied experiences.

to begin with the facts august 8th 2011

So my website is now an archive.  I am at the  beginning of something new.

How do I begin a blog that could have begun so long ago? Here and now I guess.

I am in Taipei. it is hot, hot, hot, humid hot and raining.  I am at the TNUA, Taipei National University of the Arts. I am working as a writer/observer on the Artscross project, a collaboration between Beijing Dance Academy, TNUA and Rescen. I am observing choregoraphers work and writing what I see/hear on the Artscross blog.  This is also a meeting of academics and choreographers across China, Taiwan and UK. There is a theme of uncertainty and waiting.  We are all writing on the Artscross blog:

http://rescen.net/blog2/

Before this I was at Esalen, on the Big Sur in California, participating in an Embodied Relational Gestalt workshop.  Mountains and ocean and organic vegetables. I was reminded of being a hippie, when i was 19, travelling across Canada, visiting what was the beginning of communes.  here are still some hippies at Esalen.

Before that I was in Auckland  University of Technology – examining Mark Harvey’s PhD, performance and thesis. I also ran a choreographic workshop for independent artists and students and took part in a conference.  It was inspiring to spend time with performer/choreographer/academic Dr. Carol Brown.

So this is busy summer.

Earlier in the year I was working in Beirut and Cyprus. I go to Beirut again in September towork with Omar  Rajeh at Maqamat Dance Theatre

<info@maqamat.org>

So what is happening in my life when I am not travelling the world?

My day job is at University College Falmouth. I am professor of choreography. However this past year I have also set up, directed and led the new courses in dance and choreography, since the merger between Dartington and Falmouth. The sea is close, the light is good, the Performance Centre is impressive – if already too small with the multitude of new students coming to join the courses.  I commute to Cornwall from london on a weekly basis.

Alongside the day job I have almost completed an MSc in Gestalt Psychotherapy.  Just the viva to go in december.  Five year training. Gestalt/existential psychology practice has influenced my teaching and will hopefully bring me back to performance making from a different perspective.  After qualifying, I will be looking to set up a body orientated psychotherapy practice  – to bring my two professions together in different ways.