Friday, June 26, 2009

Here's the link to the next festival we perform in.
http://www.kaltstart-hamburg.de
Please check it out and be part of it with us!

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Danscentrum Jette Wk2 - solo time

Solos- Listening/Sound: solo for a blind spectator. Experimentation with sounds/text only. No judgement, doing and witnessing.
> Placing the voice in space. Working on the relationship between the spaces established in the beginning and what happens in those spaces later in the piece.
> Talking in 2nd/3rd person - to distance ourselves a bit from the action or emotion. To be freer. To use more general words or concepts so that the public can enter and make their own story, with more scope for imagination. We also did this exercise with the spectator's eyes open. How does it change when you are watched?
> Adding more movement to the stories.

Disassociation of words: squeeze partner's hand, they have to produce a word immediately. Try not to have words in a row that are related to each other- it's difficult!

Solos: throughout the week working 7-12,16mins generally. Not setting a time limit, but the length was fairly regular by itself. Topics: talking "normally", 2nd & 3rd person, awareness & inclusion of audience, varying tones of voice, where is my attention, characters, cohesive stories, chapters, noticing habits...

How to sustain a longer solo?
- repetition of movt/text/sound
-recontextualising movt/text/sound, specifically with space/time/place eg. 1945, summer, the street
- following attention really helps
- drastic change of dynamic/movt quality can shift the piece in a new direction, give energy
- creating characters and/or story

to be continued with Michel tomorrow in Belgica...

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

VEF street performance pictures







35mins slow motion up Ave Jean Volders, with audience participation!

Habits - Susanne leading

The basis for this research was how can we use awareness of our habitual movement/sound/text/performance relationships as a resource, moving into how to go against them, thereby having more possibilities (colours on our palette) to play with.

-We (Boris, Susanne, Barbara, Yoann, Domenico, Hanna) started off with a sensations warm up in couples- 1 giving sensations to move/make sound, 1 receiving/producing. We then worked as a group on timing, speed and duration, noticing which patterns/habits the group fell into in this exercise eg. long duration, medium speed, close proximity.

-we listed any habits we knew of ourselves in movement/sound/text/performance mode/ group relationships, then shared them with the group. After this we listed 1 or 2 habits of each person in the group and shared these too. Sometimes the habits other people noticed were a surprise to hear!

-Habit solo explorations (Susanne, Domenico, Hanna): taking one or more (internal or external, not group related) habits and going deeper into them, exploring how rich or boring the habit can be. Where can it lead me? What feelings/thoughts arise?
We concentrated on play/exploration and the witnessing of that, rather than thinking about "making a piece". This fragile state needed watching without expectation, or a feeling you have to produce. The gaze of the other helped us stay true to ourselves rather than triggering. We found that the more you discover, the more the audience gets (of course)!

-Non-habitual solo explorations: playing with the antithesis of your habit, or something(s) you do not usually do. Challenging yourself to try, and perhaps fail, but try anyway eg. me trying to talk more clearly, directly, and as myself, not a character.

-Change, sustain/develop, comment: Domenico suggested this game to break habitual patterns. The watchers could call out change when they saw a habitual pattern emerging, or develop when they saw something inhabitual. The comment option was to break D's pattern of saying text only when still and facing the audience directly, but would work for other people too.

Part II: Beginning of Danscentrum Jette residency (Susanne,Yoann, Agostina,Boris,Barbara) - I used the same warm up around sensations, then we worked on habit solos. We didn't get to the non-habitual stuff.

It was the start of an exploration that could go a lot further but we ran out of time. I would like to continue at some point with our interactive habits- exploring our habits in performing relationships, going deeper into them, and learning which ones we might want to override or break sometimes to open up other possibilities!