March 13, 2018Catherine Chliaras No Comments

Tuesday, 13 March

The rehearsal:

Today we worked on one of the segments of the choreography where we have a partner work.

The dancers in pairs where pushing each other while reciting the text.

The best thing of all was that after a while they started feeling exhausted. (Yes!) I could see dancers being pushed down, around, on the side, from the back, from the front. I could hear voices from below, from far away, from higher, struggling, deciding, shouting, whispering.

Amazing view!

I am excited because this was the first time that I saw my dancers pushing hard and getting exhausted. What I want them to understand is the “ritual endurance” of the work. I want them to understand that it is okay that their voice is trembling after being pushed and pushing and talking. For a first time, this was exciting. I think we are getting there.

Our next rehearsal will be after Easter and I can’t wait!

The lesson:

It was based on endurance.

Our tutor introduced a task-based private performance for me and my classmate. A very infuriating and enduring one, but also playful and “fun”, as Jamie said.

Before the lesson, I was watching our tutor grabbing bags around, pencils there, “Catherine, help me cut these papers”, then a lipstick, then two oranges and a bag of raisins and “Catherine, do you want to turn on the stage lights?”. And that made me more curious than ever.

With that, we began.

We started sitting on chairs at one corner. In front of us a tweezer, some pencils and the papers I had cut. With the non-dominant hand (!) we grabbed the tweezer (!) with which we grabbed a pencil and papers (!) to write about our experience on endurance pieces. Moving on, with the tweezer, we had to lay down legos on papers that would work as stepping stones. Yes. We stepped on papers with legos (Ouch!). Jamie was fast laying his legos down, but I wanted to have less pain and I had to choose the flatter legos. But this was very time-wasting. After some infuriating minutes, I joined him at the other corner, from where we should return to the middle again to comb each other’s hair and share a lipstick. And then go back again to the other corner, to another table, where the oranges, the raisins and cocktail picks were waiting for us. “Take a cocktail pick, stab a raisin to one end and stab the cocktail pick on the orange on its other end”. Easy? No. With the tweezer. With the non-dominant hand. Jamie was perfect! He did everything really fast and I was struggling. When we finally finished, we had to eat each stabbed raisin (wait for it) , without hands, without teeth, only with the mouth (!) And (!) not chew them, but to just swallow them! I tried to melt them in my mouth as caramels and finished first (yeahy! But no) . I had to help Jamie as well… I thought it would never end.

For our finale we had to go back writing, which means taking the oranges between our two bodies (hands!) with the cocktail picks and step on the legos and arrive at our first seats. There we wrote about our “now” thoughts about endurance, after this experience.

This is a piece of work I would never go and watch or perform or even create. After this experience, I feel that dance choreography is very different from performance art and, well, it needs special talent or not at all to create an interesting performance art work. The repetition can definitely be an element of dance choreography (see Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and more). As Lara Shalson* says: “Repetition is one of the uncomfortable things about theatre”. And she continues by framing it to the “performance of death or pain”. Endurance is another thing. “Practices of endurance are repeatedly key to understanding the relationship between theatre and performance art: endurance is either the limit that distinguishes the two forms or the principal point at which they overlap”. Apparently, no “dance” or “choreography” word was used in this text.

What we did could be a performance of endurance (and I dare say it was). Simultaneously, it was something between theatre and performance art. In practice, I agree with Lara Shalson. The limit at which they overlap cannot be easily distinguished.

Well, this was interesting, though, right?

But that stomach-ache…

*Shalson, L. (2012) On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1) 106-119.

March 12, 2018Catherine Chliaras No Comments

My interview by Dominic Johnson

Dominic Johnson, from the Queen Mary University of London, is interested in work around touch and one-to-one performances. In 2012 he interviewed Adrian Howells, a well-known one-to-one performer. Unfortunately, Adrian Howells died before the publication of his interview*.

In another tone, my classmate and I were asked to answer some of the questions of the interview, as artists (or artists-to-be).

The interview

Speaking as an artist and also as an audience member, what do you think makes an effective performance? What do you look in performance?

Both as an artist and as an audience member, I am looking for images. Images can be optical, visual or audiovisual, when considering the colors, the lights, the costumes, the music – with all the factors that will make the performance a spectacle. Spectacle can be different from a simple view of something and certainly it can be different for different point of views. For me a spectacle is always unexpected, it is unique and it always attracts attention or interest. It is images that are, also, transformed easily to experiences, such as memories, messages within the performance and feelings. An effective performance for me is something I will remember. And definitely something that I will want to remember.

Have you yourself been concerned that the departures you have undertaken somehow make the work unreadable or unrecognizable as aesthetic projects?

My background is focused on dance, theatre and music (piano and voice). I feel that all these contribute to an understandable performance. Even if I separate them, I always try to find this element that is going to make the performance readable. At least one element, for the audience to have something to take back home. If I know I can achieve that, I won’t be concerned.

During my MA Choreography semesters I got challenged with choreographical methods I considered unreadable for the audience, such as improvisation-based choreography and performance art. I was always thinking that “the audience will not like it, because they won’t understand it”. One thing I learnt is that the audience doesn’t know what they like, they rarely know what they understand, but they do know that they are there, in the theatre, waiting to watch something that will change their lives and make them think and feel closer to the dancers.

Can you tell me about how you develop and refine the aesthetic aspects of your work?

First of all, I am inspired by things I want to say. For example, my audition videos were dance-related autobiographical stories. Maybe the music will help me in that. Or maybe I will have some criteria, as to re-stage/re-choreograph one of the Seven Easy Pieces of Marina Abramovic. Moreover, I always want my dancers to be good actors. I prefer them not doing a triple pirouette, if they can work with their face and body expression. I always want them to have stamina and never look exhausted. I dedicate a good amount of rehearsals to help them improve their stamina and acting-training. Then, it is also my touch, what I always want to see in a choreography: a story. Maybe a humorous one or a powerful one. And if I see that, I can then create a spectacle, with lights, costumes and beautiful dancers/ story-tellers.

The piece I am currently working on, “Re:patterning” , can be considered unreadable, as we said before. The dancers have understood that the stamina is very important in this piece. They have given their own meaning to their lines and their movement. They have even given different meanings to the different tasks. I don’t consider the work as “dance choreography”, though the dancers are engaged with some. It can be even criticised as simple and “just fine”, but there is something behind it. There is a message I want the audience to grasp. There are characters that I want the audience to find similar to themselves. And I want them to discover that there are some rituals and endurance practices that they, too, go through simply every day.

What is the place of the contract – social or unwritten- in your performance? How do you deal with unwritten agreements or limitations, which all performances potentially entertain?

To be honest, I would never create an environment where the audience would feel uncomfortable. But this is something I cannot always control. I encourage the dancers to feel uncomfortable sometimes, only in the way that they could achieve something for themselves, like climbing on an unstable door (with all the necessary precautions of course), or try some out-of-comfort-zone sensual moves. However, I always respect their limits and always come up with other moves that they will be proudly executing.

As for the audience, I believe in the distance and the comfort. We live in a society where we have to be touched to be liked. I find this important, because, in order to achieve, we have to show our flesh and even remove our boundaries and become something we are not. Do we want to get promoted or famous or land a job? Most of the times, we are to be touched. But, what if we don’t like to be touched? Physically or in social media or by friends or by strangers? Only in distance you can make the decision “do I want to approach or not?”. Approach physically or emotionally or mentally or psychologically. There are performances that on purpose want to test these limits; where people go willingly to pass that test. I want the audience to approach the work in their own way. And it will be a willing decision, I assure you.

*Johnson, D. (2012) The Kindness of Strangers: An Interview with Adrian Howells. Performing Ethos, 3(2) 173-190

March 2, 2018Catherine Chliaras No Comments

Three is a crowd…

One-to-one performances can be difficult. They are rather difficult to set, too. There are the ethical implications and then there are all these elements that have to be connected or else something is missing and the engagement will be lost.

I tried to create a connecting, interactive dance environment for a term A module and it slightly backfired. I just was not ready yet to construct an environment and a choreography that would be engaging, intimate and maybe touching.

After all the readings, there is a word worth keeping in mind while creating a choreography or a performance: connection. Connection makes the work.[1]

But then, there are some other words that appear in the readings’ vocabulary:

COERCION
INTROJECTION: the unconscious adoption of another’s thoughts and ideas
HUMANITY
INTIMACY

All work their way more or less to the connection, the collaboration between the performer and the participant.

And this is something that happens only in a one-to-one performance, as Adrian Howells says[2] , while he completely disagrees with the theatrical performances of 700 people watching him and connecting with him

Well, I disagree with him.

“Personal insecurities and digressions have the potential to produce
more intimate connections to the “integrity experience”,
through “immediacy”, “relationship”, “awareness” and “attention”1”.

A crowded theatrical or dance performance can create intimate connections because of the integrity experience, through the immediacy, the relationship, the awareness and the attention, and mainly because of the personal insecurities that the audience carries while sitting in front of the stage.

Undoubtedly, crowded performances differ from one-to-one performances in the aspect of the safety and trust among the audience members (higher in crowded performances, when they enjoy a show with friends and relatives) and the self-consciousness of the participants (higher in a one-to-one performance, where they desire to “give a good audience”1).

There is a connection made during a live performance. How intimate it is, is negotiable. However, it would seem inappropriate to flatten so many performers’, dancers’, actors’ work and effort to create emotion, to transmit a message to or to inspire their audience.

Following that, Marina Abramovic appeared to disagree with me by saying: “Theatre is fake (…). The knife is not real, the blood is not real and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real and the emotions are real” (O’Hagan 2010:32)2.

Answering that, Simon Murray and John Keefe in their book “Physical Theatres: critical introduction” (2007) write that “the real never went away and never goes away. Such debates can become facile in their danger of removing the real from discourse, experience from rhetoric; making the lived experience of the body a mere plaything for theoreticians’ ping-pong”.[3]

After that, I’m thinking about the poor Stanislavski and all his theory on “becoming” the character, the training exercises, the methodology and the pain actors have endured when finally reaching the stage of “becoming the character”. I’m thinking about them performing – actually performing– with tears and sweat and blood. How fake and artificial can this be?

I’m wondering, is it because they don’t use the knife for real? Is it because they don’t cut themselves for real? And I’m wondering more, should actors harm themselves every time they go on stage so that the audience see something real? What if their characters get killed? What if their characters lose their virginity or get raped? What if they have to be hung? What if the director is artistically mental and wants to see blood everywhere and the actors suffer from HIV and it is harmful for their personal lives? Then what?

And this leads my thoughts to ancient Greek tragedies where death or blood battles or anything harmful was just narrated and never performed on stage because of the ethics and the ennoblement of the writers’ work.

It is a peculiar era we are living nowadays. An era where nudity, sex and massacres are okay to be watched on TV and cinema and then transferred on stage and books and then becoming a reality, which we have to accept if we want to be part of this society, if we want to be “liked” and accepted (or better approved?) .

So, then, what is real and what is fake? What is truly intimate without being coerced?

Let’s create some more definitions and we can talk about it in a few years.

– – – – – –

[1] Heddon, D., Iball, H. and Zeriham, R. (2012) Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1) 120 – 133.

[2] Johnson, D. (2012) The Kindness of Strangers: An Interview with Adrian Howells. Performing Ethos, 3(2) 173-190.

[3] Murray, S. & Keefe, J. (2007). Physical Theatres: A critical introduction. Routledge: London & New York. p.60

March 1, 2018Catherine Chliaras No Comments

Choreography: “Re:patterning”

Dear reader,

What you are currently reading is always being changing and changing. Here you will find all my ideas on the final choreography in-progress assessment and you will live with me all the changes of ideas I have date by date.

1^st March

On my hands I have the second score I made for my choreography with a title (“I pushed you and I pushed you”) that at the time seemed good but now is not *just* it.

The choreography is about all the pushing we do in our life:

We push to open the door

There are doors that need to be pushed

We push our feet to the ground to move, to ascend and descend

We push ourselves inside boxes and get caged

We push ourselves out of them

We push ourselves on people

We push them out of us

We push ourselves to dance

We are pushed to imitate

To get attached

To fight

To become members of a team

We are pushed to an order we were forced to follow

To talk and not being heard

We are pushed to do everything all over again

Important facts:

It is based on “Body Pressure” – the text that Marina Abramovic re-performed as the first of her Seven Easy Pieces.
I decided to re-stage this piece of work, because I thought I could give another aspect on the text choreographing more dancers, than just a soloist.
Few of the most important concepts the performers have to experience are the repetition, the ritual endurance, exhaustion, a possible (creative) boredom and the femininity of their bodies in the process.
Repetition, although boring, can create powerful messages and artistic images of bodies. It is then when the audience can take the full image in, can grasp details and can think more about what they see. (Take a look on Pina Bausch’s work, too).
The colors used in the choreography will be white (the door and a dancer’s tutu), black (stage, boxes as stairs and costumes) and red (lights, chalk and lipstick).
Red is here again a symbol
- Of women’s emancipation
- Of blood and fight (see Marina Abramovic in Lips of Thomas (1975))
- Of seduction and sexuality
I chose red lipstick for two more reasons:

It attracts attention
I want to make a signature as an emerging choreography, meaning that from now on, all my dance teams will wear a red lipstick on stage.

How could the choreography be described?

The audience is seated near or very far away from the performers. On the right side of the stage there is a door. On the left side of the stage there are box-made stairs on top of which three performers are seated. Closer to the audience seats there are four performers inside a four-wall box they made in their minds. While the projection is playing, the audience can focus on the video or the performers pushing themselves down the stairs or out of the box they made. The video eventually comes to a pause and the audience can hear the dancers reciting some lines of the “Body pressure” text.

A dancer with a tutu comes on stage using the door. She tries to open it by pushing with several ways and after a while, she finally makes it and enters the stage with the rest of the performers. The three performers that climbed down the stairs are now pushing the ground full with red chalk reciting the text. The four dancers inside the box made it out of it by pushing and pushing and have now approached the dancer that has started dancing on their pauses. The audience watches the performers’ non-stop movement till they reach the ground and become a mass of pairs pushing each other.

This mass is becoming red-der when the performers remove their gloves covered in red chalk and dusting it everywhere. Their sweat and breathing becomes one with the air, the ground, their clothes, their exhaustion.

A new video is being projected when they reach the point of no more pushing on each other and understand that it’s time to reach the end of the piece. The audience can see them trying to push the door, while reciting, and leave the stage.

There is a performer staying on stage. A performer that can’t leave. The performers emerge again like shadows and continue reciting their lines.

And everything starts again.

6th March

Serra told “To move the work is to destroy the work. To move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else”.

I decided that my space will be the auditorium of the LPAC theatre with the first four seats of rows down, in order to create more stage space.

No door. Unfortunately, the technical team cannot stabilize the door as I wanted it: stable to hold my dancers’ bodies while climbing on and pushing it. However, I can create another way of “climbing” in case I feel it necessary for the piece, as creating small crowds that raise high one dancer at a time.

The soloist will also finish the piece, not leaving the stage.

Possible names for the work in progress:

Re:cital
Re:cover
Re:gress
Re:partee
Re:ply

12th March

I found the best title for the choreography. I am very happy. I have also changed the title of the post, so you can see it better.

Re:pattern

13th March

Follow the link

19th April

One of our last rehearsal today. Unfortunately, two of the dancers had to quit the piece because of their studies. That means that I had to change several things for the choreography without affecting the concept and the work that the rest of the dancers had already made. So, let’s make a revision and add the new elements.

Huge stage. A video-wall projection. Lights on the sides. A video is being played and played until the end of the piece, with sound only its first and last time.

Five dancers are pushing to different directions trying to reach further the space. They are only allowed to go straight-forward by pushing and pushing. They are whispering.

After a while (when the dancers have reached their potential), a dancer comes in, wearing a tutu and starts dancing while reciting loudly the lines of the text.

The rest of the dancers perform with her: talking and dancing. They are looking at her and they imitate her. Until the end. After the end they perform together in silence and they immediately fall down to find their partners.

In couples now they push and push each other to become again ” a body of bodies”, a mass, of colors and sweat and sounds and breaths. Together, they have to stand up and raise each other.

And run away. The stage is empty for a moment and the five dancers come back again to their original places, pushing and pushing.

The dancer in the tutu comes again with a piece of paper and hold a microphone. She starts reading:

I’m not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one will love you as you are

When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I’m meant to be, this is me
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me

Another round of bullets hits my skin
Well, fire away ’cause today, I won’t let the shame sink in
We are bursting through the barricades
And reaching for the sun (we are warriors)
Yeah, that’s what we’ve become

Won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious

23rd April

Today the LPAC technical team told me that the use of chalk is not allowed, because there were some problems the previous time someone else used it.

For that reason, I decided to use red aluminium wrapping foils, that I will lay down all over the stage , so that it makes noise and it can be destroyed along with the forms that the dancers are going to take.

I like this idea, as well, as it is going to give more color to the stage and it will create another optical essence of the piece.

For that reason, I will remove the gloves from the dancers costume, as they will not need it.

24th April

After a meeting with my module tutor, Kayla Bowtell, I decided to make some changes on things she advised me.

For example, it would be good, if I loose the narrative , in order to not limit the piece in meanings and messages. So for that reason I am removing the tutu and I will be changing the formations and positions.

For that, I thought, to change the ritual I had (the pauses on the change of costumes) and use the dance sequence as ritual everytime a person comes on stage. That would be interesting.

Also, no chalk or aluminum foils use. I think I will just use the dancers bodies, the projection behind them and the lights to focus on the pushing and pushing.

March 1, 2018Catherine Chliaras No Comments

About definitions…

Performance is said to be, nowadays, any action that is watched by an audience.[1]

Choreography is said to be, nowadays, any order of things.[2]

Doesn’t it look very general?

Doesn’t it look very easy?

What I am thinking is that we live in a small chaos that we made when we wanted to start our revolution to the tradition of the classical performing arts.
We thought: “Why can’t choreography be this and this and this?”

and then

“Why can’t performance be this and this and this?”

And we tried to make something new and something old-new and we are now choreographers/ performers/ visual artists/ critics/ sculptors.
We are everything that an artist can be. And we live in 2018! Well done us!

There is really no problem there.

But I have a question.

What happened to the idols? What happened to the people that made history? Where are they?

Where is the next Michael Jackson? The next Balanchine? The next Martha Graham?

We are here now, on this planet, doing everything, mixing our skills with our identity and we become the same as everyone in this small chaos we created. We rarely create something significant. Something identifiable. Something that has only our name on. We rarely do.

And the lucky ones who managed to create their signature on their choreographic pieces, nowadays, are now being part of this chaos.

But maybe this chaos is a phase that choreography and performance are going through.

Maybe we have to get out of the action, observe it and then define it again.

Maybe we would only then need to give a characteristic to them:

Dance-based choreography, theatrical choreography, cooking-based choreography, traffic choreography…

High-art performance, non-art performance…

So, maybe then, I don’t need to create a definition I should use for choreography.

Maybe I should just give a definition on dance and introduce this dance-based definition to my small manifesto of do’s and don’ts in dance choreography.

Or maybe we should not have definitions, but only boards of restricted areas, or circles that connect to each other. But then we won’t be in the small chaos we created anymore.

[1] Elin Diamond, ed, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge 1996), 5

[2] Merriam-Webster