Week 09/03-15/03

KEYWORDS OF THE WEEK:

HABITS, TRUST, DOUBTS, REPETITION, COLLABORATION, IMAGINATION, OUTDOOR,

11/03 à I started working on scores; scores that I composed, scores which are generated through/ after the movement and given scores by others.

I tried to find ways to arrive to the ontological existence of the movement, in other words to avoid the representational use of the movement.

12/03

Knowing when to stop working is as important as working. Woke up late, lost my studio hours, had to put some curtains in the school. It took sooo much time. Different small things later on my laptop. No mood. Fuck it.

I will cook something really good and read cool staff around

Mess up the day

13/03

A day for corona virus.

A day for panic.

A day for instability.

14/03

Practices in the Sonsebeek park.

Today I tried out some of my scores with two other dancers. First of all, I wanted to examine if the way that I compose the scores, the language that I use, the directions I give are understandable by another dancer. In a second level, I wanted to examine if the given directions can sustain a balance between openness and accuracy. When the human body starts moving, there are plenty of potential movements, directions, compositions. The composition of scores tries to limit/constraint the possibilities. Through the confinement of the potentialities, I hope that the dancing body can wander into unknown patterns.

Watching the two dancers to activate the scores, I realized that,

·       Some scores were too open. I had to add some restrictions concerning some parameters such as the space, the plane, the quality, the rhythmicity of the movement, the experience of time…

·       In the end, I gave them as a score the ‘Movement Poetics #2’. I asked them to read it alone, find a place in the space, think about a quality in the body. They would make an instant composition for the camera. Having all this information in their mind, they proceeded to the actualization of the poetic score.

You can see one of the videos here:

·       I could see a difference on their dance, concentration and the way they experience the tasks comparing the first scores with the final poetic score. Based on our discussions, we ended up with the sense that the poetic score created a specific sense composing accordingly a specific scene. I would say that the poetic score proposed a quality not only for the movement, but for the context as well.

A small parenthesis

Context/Scene/Condition. There is the dance and there is the context in which the dance is executed. All the previous scores focused on the movement of the dancing body. The poetic score focused on the condition of the dance. Maybe it proposed a mental state to the performer and the way to experience the scene.

Parenthesis closes.

Watching the rehearsals of the instant composition performance ‘Burst’, the choreographer Julyen Hamilton was talking about the notion of the scene or the context and the different ways that it is created in the context of a performance.

Having a discussion with him, I asked him to elaborate more on that:

‘Coming from the theater and music, the subdivision of the composition in the music is divide in sections and phrases. All of these (phrases, sections) formalities taught me the strength of phrasing, the discipline of getting into the phrase and that phrase brings something out to the content and it wouldn’t go out, if it was just an element/ an information. The phrase allows everything to have relation with each other. So, for me phrase has highly importance because it does something that information cannot do. And somehow it is very human. It is a language that human can understand a lot. By asking the performers to sense the scene, I am asking them to feel the phrase.’

All in all, reflecting on the share of my scores with the dancers, I realized that the scores had the role of information. They are important in the context of the performer to feel familiar and embrace with the mental state of the performer of instant composition. However, there is still also another part of the creation; the composition of scores as a partiture for the execution of a performance.

So, there are two categories:

1.       Scores for the preparation of the mental state of the performer

2.       Scores as a partiture for the composition of a performance. And in this point, taking into consideration the condition/scene/phrase/atmosphere of the performance is important.