Saturday, 21st April

It was the fourth sunny day in a row here in Lincoln, and today we had our rehearsal before we go out to enjoy the sun.

The dancers brought some clothes suggestion to be worn as costumes during the performance and we decided that next time, that we are going to rehearse at the theatre, they’ll be wearing them, so that we can have a full image and feeling of themselves.

Next time, I will also time it, so that I see if it is 45 minutes, less or more.

Let’s focus on today’s rehearsal, though.

In case you have been reading the “Re:patterning” blog post, you will understand where the dance choreography goes. It is 1 minute and 10 seconds, but they will repeat it several times. They were learning it fast, like sponges. I think they handled it pretty well. From now on, we are going to be doing the dance coreography together with the rest piece and they will get more accustomed to it.

The dance choreography is somewhat based on the “Body Pressure” text and it contains, I would say, “weird” movements for my dance style. By “weird” I mean, weird legs with easy jumps and then hips movements and hands to shoulders. It is a dance I wanted to make “peculiar” and, thankfully, the dancers felt the same. I didn’t just want to create a ballet or contemporary or even musical and hip-hop that I teach. I wanted it to be unique and to siginfy the “Re:patterning”.

Here you can see a video of the today’s rehearsal:

 

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.

1st 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:
  1. It attracts attention
  2. 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

1.

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.

2.

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.

3.

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

4.

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.

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

Tuesday, 20 February

Rehearsal

In a cold weather, six of my dancers and I, walked past the campus and found a big black industrial wall, ready to accommodate dancers’ “Body pressure”.

Facing and not the camera, the dancers were pushing in their way the wall while reciting the words of the text.

But why?

Marina Abramovic’s “Body pressure” included a glass wall and her body, when behind her there played a recording of her reciting the text.

I wanted to make something similar, but not the same. I wanted a one-sided wall, so that the audience would have to only take in what they see without approaching, going round or focus on the wall. I, also, wanted to give color to my video, so the dancers are wearing colors instead of one-color outfits. However, they all wear red lipstick; a reason for that will be later revealed. Lastly, they are reciting the text without recording but live. It is difficult to see who is reciting which line and that makes it more distant and difficult to connect the bodies to the voice. If we think more about it, this is what Marina Abramovic did: she removed her voice when she was performing, while adding it on her; not with her or in her or out of her.

The video that will be edited, will be projected during the first part of the final choreography in-progress I will make on “Body pressure”.

Find out more about the choreography and my ideas, that I base on Marina Abramovic’s performance and documentation on “Body pressure”,
the readings, the discussions with my tutor and classmate and my ideas by clicking here.

Lesson on performance

How can performance be every action that is being watched by an audience?

My in-the-box mind cannot even think about it.

Please follow this link to read my ideas on this.

Easy guide to follow my train of thoughts

I am adding this blog post for the readers that are curious in finding out how I am choosing what I feel is important or interesting, how I connect everything and why I am writing them on the blog.

The academic readings are mandatory readings for our MA Choreography, but are also mandatory for our careers later as choreographers. We have been being taught of what choreography, choreographic strategies, dance facilitation, research and now performance art is; tools that will be greatly used to expand our horizons and think out of the box we have been into.

You can see that in my definition of choreography and the latest posts I am writing on how I change this definition over time.

In my posts I’ve been using quotes and shapes I find interesting and I add many ideas from our earliest readings that I believe connect to the big debates we are having and studying.

Also, there are other readings, such as about Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces, which are less extended, although the articles were full of information and ideas. The reason for that is that I am not a critic, I don’t want to be any, while I believe we ought to take some elements that may affect our future works or -at least- way of thinking.

Isn’t that what dance does to us?

It enchants us and make our brain think creatively (and maybe emotionally).