27 May 2017_NSCD Workshop Audition
Finally getting back in the studio, revisiting some of the work explored last year with a group of Northern School of Contemporary Dance students. We questioned:
- How different places have different paces. How do we read the pace of a place? How do we relate to it and let it affect us? How are we affecting it?
- Does the work directly or indirectly reflects a particular political philosophical view?
- How is the choreographer's role integrated in the concept of mesh, collaboration and self-organization?
- Are we always establishing order?
- Off balance - Precarious stability: Playing with being off balance and depending on each other to obtain equilibrium, everyone is off balance, everyone is essential to maintaining balance and integrity.
We were curious about how instability could be explored further in different ways during the research.
- Group contact formations: Are our formations always a form of resolution? A way to achieve stability?
- Relating to people and the environment. Being able not to 'perform' and relate to people in the streets as in our everyday life. Noticing how we relate and allow the environment to influence what we are doing. Noticing how what we are doing is reflected and/or already present in the environment.
17 June 2017_ Sheffield Workshop
Sunshine!!
© The Dance Network Sheffield
24 June 2017 _ Leeds Workshop
Self practice:
- Continuous pathways: of attention; pathways of our outer and inner landscape; pathways of movement; pathways inscribed, designed, traced, knitted, imagines through space.
- Noticing what we are interdependent with.
Group practice:
- Journeying and arriving together
- Knitting and weaving your pathway with the other people's pathways
- Various Flocking strategies
- Lines formations
- Combined score outdoors
We questioned the kind of group identity and movement language transpires. How our dance language and particular identity might alienate people in the street even if the group is mixed and inclusive. Are we looking for a specific level and type of engagement from the audience?
Does the group disperse at times or remains always together?
What instigate change?
Clare shared with us how sheep and their non-macho leadership culture; how they pick up subtle signals from each other and without a leader move from place to place together through the course of the day whilst remaining quite sparse and far apart through the field.
"Without hierarchy animals, like researchers, are much freer, more inventive and more sophisticated; they are no longer constrained by repetition – and their scientists, thus liberated as well, can be mobilized by other problems. And in reality sheep are actually mobilized by other problems, and can be mobilized to the extent that the “other” problems will interfere with the behaviors that emerge when the question of domination of space arises." (Sheep do have opinions by Vinciane Despre thttp://www.vincianedespret.be/2010/04/sheep-do-have-opinions/)
01 July 2017_Leeds Workshop
Self practice:
- Tracing continuous pathways
- Observing and following different species of pathways
- Noticing relationships
- Extended Here. How far can my sense of here stretch? can the there be part of my here?
Group practice:
- Supporting each other through contact - tensegrity structures and climbing frames
- Currents
- Line-huddle score
Questioning:
Our modes of invitations and interacting with passers by. Are we looking for a specific mode? and a specific type of engagement?
What and which spaces might facilitate a less fleeting engagement? is fleeting engagement less valid? The value of each type of engagement varies depending on each space we are dancing in. In Briggate we are challenging a A to B, rushed and consumer way of being in the world, which makes even a fleeting joining in the dance or stopping to observe a valuable experience.
How clear and fixed and non-malleable 'edges' and borders that define a group identity doesn't facilitate others to engage or enter your world.
Malleability
Soft edges and borders
How practicing malleability and soft edges for ourselves in our perception and physicality can become a model for a different relational engagement with others and the word.