– Tornado Solo
-Tornado Duet
-Daniel phrase
-Slippery Duet
-Rachel Phrase
-Fields of people (Daniel)
-Circling imaginary Daniel
-Julie Vanna Lizard
–> S + S granola bench –> increasing apocalyptic fervor
– Outline duet
– I’m feeling apocalypse/ regular
–> shaking hard (S+S) I’m feeling from here
– Music (The road soundtrack, plane flying over/rain, spoken)
– Laugh/ cry w/ power stance forward/back (transition or nah?)
Daniel- replicating choreography – harder
-can replicate intentions
Bebe- what else is inside in that moment (choreographer). Do think about intention.
PLAN 1
-slapping
-slippery duet
-lizard king and marionette solos
-talk
PLAN 2
-eating granola at table scene
Talvin: what made you place these things in that order? Strongest links?
Shannon: These all have a bit of each other in them. Have transitional potential.
Shannon will send info about post-humanism and psychology of conspiracy theories
PAY ATTENTION TO MUSIC – “The Road”
————————————————————————————————————————-
Warm Up:
-directs body by using 0 pressure
Bebe: “what’s there state when they are waiting?”
Sarah: “how about your waiting state doesn’t have to be still..”
-open this up
Shannon: one more layer – “another option is to not respond which may in fact lead to touch”?
Sarah: “no longer an agreement”
–reminds me of vanna tracing
-going back to moment with heads
-Bebe: Rachel’s back rolling up and causing pressure – specificity
-going back to Daniel trying to push Rachel (stepping in place) – Rachel rolls around and then Daniel try to move her with his foot and she moves away
-have 2 pieces of something! – connect them
-stepping looks like something Daniel did in slapping duet
Group:
-zombie walk practice – keep knees bent whole time and don’t let feet leave the ground – sliding
–music: The Journey
-“the bath” into “the family” –> interesting change
–music here for start of Daniel (contrast in sound of stepping) the family
—difference between random stepping and uniform stepping – noise
—uniform stepping – focus of it (internal focus)- “the boy” music –when Daniel was demonstrating!
Shannon: “see the thing and then respond”
Sarah: “drift forward” – breathe forward
-music when everyone stops and rachel starts slapping and goes into solo – ” the road”
After run:
-does their dynamic impact her dynamic
-relationship between the two-even when doing different things
-dancers getting ready – their relationship to it
-what does it mean when they pull apart – why
-music – too dramatic
-Daniel opens mouth during rocks falling – dread
-how long is each thing going on for
-do they ever connect to his lizard tongue?
Granola scene
-adding Rachel to it
Last part of class (with everyone):
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_J-ikCW9g
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFfYHhZDGpE
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIA559LDNUo
–PEFORMING REHEARSAL – Different energy
-beginning of rehearsal seemed like there was more energy going out to the audience/other dancers in the room
-later circles of quieter discussion
-something about Bebe getting up to talk to us
-Talvin turning around to talk to dancers
— divide
-audience can see directors observing and watching
-did music get louder?
-feedback from Rachel after — louder
-seems like dancers attention is distracted and not attentive when we are discussing notes and things — looking away or zoned out –maybe feel like they shouldn’t be watching?
-also–when R and D start dancing – everyone is focused
START TO REHEARSAL
-contact with the floor – Improv
-standing and concentrating on gravity and focus
-walking through old material
-slippery duet and material that followed
-noises and how they correlate with Rachel’s movements + into rolling
-re-Watch Sarah’s video
-not about Daniel but space around Daniel
-similarities to what was made last week
-review last week’s material and starting to work on it
——————————————————————————-
-wildin’ out got more intense
-Daniel is affected by Rachel – more violent
-Shannon: “Maybe don’t fall every time”
-Daniel modulates scale of response
-woahhh–> going past something – real effect
-Bebe – what is intention behind it – physics of it and what is implied
-development of intensity and realness of it – out of control
-Sarah’s intention vs Rachel’s
-blindness!! shapes physicality
-goes back to Maya Deren
-Daniel: “Do I always look this way..or I can change my focus”
-Shannon: “look at her”
-Daniel: “Degree of being knocked off balance?”
-Sarah likes the fall – but that it was unexpected- keep playing with it
-Sarah to Rachel- “See if you can keep arms going on the floor”
-Talvin: Choreographic vs Directorial (where am I going with this)
-can make Rachel’s, choreographic and Daniel’s, directorial – guiding him to that choice
-when Daniel turns around, mystery is out of the room
-can see him react or no? because when he is turned around, audience doesn’t know why he isn’t reacting to Rachel but know that Daniel knows why
-can feel that there is a story
-REVEAL of one?
-(everyone is now listening closely – in audience)
-tenderness – Rachel had to rest on Daniel once she was beginning to be exhausted
-run from end of wild out – looks like slippery duet
-(softer going into manipulation – coming down from peak) focus here?
-grabbing arms – going into A slippery duet
BIG GROUP
Scale and numbers
-bring people in as Rachel’s landscape
-off stage when Rachel starts
-randomly walk into space
-1. Rachel runs through everyone
-2. Everyone bends over at certain point
-3. when Rachel starts scared run everyone starts closing in – zombies
-1. Daniel rolling with noises – everyone follows him – crowding over him
-2. When he starts to roll, everyone looks forward and makes similar noises
-Zombies again? Ha
-Zombies vs. robots
BACK TO RACHEL’S SOLO:
-1. Shannon: everyone face stage right, bending over occasionally, backing up
-2. can make backing up more person-like
Rachel’s giraffe legs – slippery and out of control – implosions in hips – keep finding new giraffe legs
-1. Everyone with Rachel and Daniel rolling with noises like before
-different takes on giraffe legs from everyone
-what it feels like with more people – too long
-Rachel’s solo could have more variation
-Talvin: duing duet: lots of questions
-now: not many questions
-weight and relationship
-SPACE – this filled the emptiness
THURSDAY:
-Shannon and Sarah: Keep going with group in Rachel’s solo
-Maybe some focus things from Julie’s focus study? – Also, Lizard King and Marionette?
-Daniel – script?
-Shannon: using a big group to do the laughing and crying exercise
Have decided to build one piece together!
Take turns being in and out of the dance.
Own devised theater company–> with the objective “to dig into something.”
Float of possibilities in the room.
What’s been happening (what are we focusing on and seeing):
-turbulence
-windmills
-oil rigs
-scale and numbers
-towering
Themes:
-Decaying
-Energy
-Watch and watching
-Discovery of something, something bad
-Dark
-Apocolypse
Images:
-Vast field
-Something in the distance
-London is in shambles
-Ansel Adams
-Short Story from Shannon–> “Weird Fiction”
Zombie Info:
-Maya Deren- “Divine Horsemen”
–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YIO_dxyJio
-difference in possession and colonial look
-arm swinging in video 26 min in
-dancing with stick and with chickens
Observations:
-can see Daniel watching Rachel if you look from the side (clear focus) –> looks like he is cooperating
-meandering focus for Rachel–directed to find moments to look at Daniel
-Rachel glazing over – due to speed
-Shannon: “keep head on the spine”
-there is a rhythm developing in the slaps
-Rachel’s right hand has more of a grasp on his back
-slap transfers to Rachel
-falling back in stepping backward (similar to sequence from before-Daniel)
-hard for Daniel to keep his balance
-arm swinging
-staying glued to one another even though dynamics and balance is off
-Daniel – sustained flow to transitions
-Daniel and Rachel – difference in focus
-Wild out!
-Rachel – “So on him? Or?” – Sarah: “Where you need to wild out.”
-decision: “On him.”
-differences between Sarah and Rachel
-Sarah: keeps an anchor-point of contact
-Rachel: suspends up a little and also uses Daniel to balance (hold) sometimes
-Sarah: more grounded
-maybe now we can go forward? (so much hitting)
-going away came from falling
-Is Daniel just taking it?
-stopping it seems important – Violent
-Daniel: “What if I hold her arms? –> marionette!
-Rachel: “What do you want and how do you want to get it?” – from Daniel day!
-Sarah: “What do you both want in this sequence”
-Rachel: wants to be heard
-Daniel: wants love
CLICHÉ
-DARK
-Sarah tries marionette thing: pressing in causes legs to go up
-Sarah: “More side to side?”
-falling backwards for the first time changes the relationship
-Bebe: “Dance from behind?” Different relationships from Tuesday
-“start with arms and then move different parts” – said to Daniel
-Rachel tries to keep body up
-Sarah: “Try to fall more” – to Rachel
-Sarah tries to be Daniel – “How can manipulation change in the body?”
-Rachel waits more this time because she is waiting for the next initiation from Daniel
-“What if its shifts?” Daniel starts to let go of things
-felt like it happened when Rachel grabbed Daniel’s arm
-Shannon and Sarah demonstrate how this can scale down into an idea from Tuesday
-hand holding looks like a moment in Maya Deren’s movie – holding stick and holding chickens?
-looks like they might go into slippery duet
-then turns into manipulation exercise – Daniel puts Rachel in a place – goes into decaying thing?
Discussion Post-Run
-music adds to it – sets the mood
-Rachel and Daniel are both relating to the music in some way
-timing of opening against the music
-Bebe: tongue and directness of the action – signals language
-“Do we leave this or do we come to it?”
-Does Daniel have pockets? Or is he covering something up?
-machines – ponches
-transitions were seamless and made sense
-not the only story here- but it is okay to feel story
-pace of rise and fall in Rachel’s arm swinging
-Bebe: “felt more compressed about getting somewhere”
-how much is set and not set?
-Sarah wants to structurally set
Thanks Sarah for sharing The Method Gun, with us. It was, as you promised, very funny. Also since we are watching our theater and dance vectors collide, it was interesting to watch a theater piece about the theater methodology, the method.
Something from a directorial standpoint that stood out to me from the show, was that a possible choice in making is to announce what you’re about to do, and then do it. Which the actors did before almost every scene and they even followed through with explanation as well as insights into their research/making process. I felt blown away by the simplicity of it. Talk about setting up a contract with the audience. As well as including the process in the product! It happens a lot less in dance. I may prefer the more choreographic or subtle approach, but I like the reminder that this exists as a choice. That it could be that simple.
Also, the acting “exercises” were also interesting to me. Those exercises right away read as ways of making material for the stage, and so I’m glad they did in this production. Especially the square of different emotions. They were shaping emotions in time and space, which made it immediately read as a dance to me.
Thanks again Sarah!
Here is the rehearsal video from last Thursday:
https://youtu.be/5HdcGnr7Bh4
For this rehearsal, we decided to spend more time on a particular moment of interest: the slaps. Sarah asked Bebe at the beginning of class how she chooses to zero in on certain moments over others in process. Bebe responded that by zeroing in on a point of interest, you are interrogating your relationship to that thing. As you try to figure out what the thing is from itself, you are really just figuring out what that thing is to you. So we took that idea into our focus on the slaps and let things breath from there.
Themes Rachel pointed out: Decaying, energy, watched/watching, discovery of something bad that is about to happen.
A title that has been swirling since then: The Big Decay
The tone of the dance to me from this video seems to take place in a field, slightly charred, surrounded by abandoned cities and towns in the distance. There is a helplessness, but gentleness between Daniel and Rachel, like they are all each other have left that is familiar, their last shred of hope. The music contributes to that interpretation a great deal obviously. I wonder how we can push it or twist the tone with different sound or intention, perhaps returning to our initial conspiracy theory ideas. Something more about fear of death, relationship to control, and anxiety about the unknown. But let’s see where the dance takes itself.
I’m looking forward to Talvin’s visit this week!
First day of rehearsal with Shannon and Sarah as directors, Rachel and Daniel as performers, and Julie as dramaturge-at-a-distance.
We began by having the dancers make material from a series of images, some of which are featured below. The dancers had 10 minutes for the initial assignment, then 5 minutes to make a new phrase from the same images, then 1 minute to do the same thing.
Shannon and I deliberately chose to not watch the dancers work. It’s a choice I haven’t made before as a choreographer. I did listen to the dancers work though, and I wonder what information is present in a different kind of sensing of what is being made. I could hear the weight or lightness of their feet on the floor, hear their breathing and the squeak of their feet sliding, and I started to imagine the effort of the task, of where it happens in space, of whether the body is upright or on the floor.
Here are the solos, performed at the same time:
We watched those solos, then moved on to making more solo material with a partner’s help. In this exercise, one partner closes their eyes, and the other partner creates movement on them by manipulating their limbs and moving them through space. The dancer with his eyes closed tries to catch what they can of the material and set it, accumulating more and more material. Rachel and Daniel then recreated those solos without the help of partner.
I was really drawn to the lilting, weighty-without-being-heavy quality visible in both solos. It seemed as though Rachel and Daniel were lying down in a shallow creek, being pushed about by the current. At times, they’d catch the same current, or drift off erratically. I asked them to improvise off of their set material. We started to assemble their improvisation into a set sequence, with me cueing their improvisations to start and stop. Bebe asked me to clarify what the “that” was that I saw when I asked them to stop and try to repeat that material. Frequently, it was the connecting of timing and energy that drew me to set a section.
Shannon then messed up the timing connections, and encouraged Daniel and Rachel to go back to the sensation of the movement they had when their eyes were closed, and to make visible the outside force that created these movements. I still like the shared connections, but the off-timing was a bit more ominous, which I think suits where we might go.
The most fun was digging into this moment of Rachel being hidden by Daniel. I was interested in the perspective that Daniel standing still in front of Rachel brought, and we decided to stick with this moment, rather than move forward in the choreography. We played with proximity, then we played with having Rachel turn up the volume on the “dead arm” swings she was doing until she started to hit Daniel. We asked Daniel to respond. We kept turning up the volume. This is the moment I’ve been thinking about since rehearsal. What is that? (You can see it at the end of the duet below).
I’m so interested now in what is there when we stop and dig around a bit, and how one moment can totally blow up into something you never saw coming if you stare at it long enough, or change something about it. Bebe has talked about this for a while now in class: how we can see what is there, not what is about to be there next. It feels different to watch dance with this in mind: I think I am thinking less about how this dance moves through time and more about how time might be moving around and through the dance.
This won’t have a lot to do with dance until class tomorrow when Sarah and I can try things, but here are some things swirling around about conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories have a soft spot in my heart. There is something about the logic that leads to truly believing in a conspiracy theory that fascinates me. But how do people get there? What stops or doesn’t stop in the critical thinking process to allow for these systems to take hold? What psychological factors affect adherence to these beliefs?
David Icke, in the article Julie sent, discusses the role fear has in our society and how it affects individual control:
“The fear of what other people think is the state of perception that stops people [from] making a difference… you can only make a difference in a world of uniformity if you operate outside of that uniformity… we either take that on or we don’t, in which case nothing changes. We are now at this place where we can go down one track and experience freedom like we’ve never even understood what freedom is. We go down the other one, the one that the control structure wants, then we’re headed for an Orwellian-fascist global state.” David Icke, The Lion Sleeps no More (3).
It’s an interesting perspective to really consider, living off center and questioning the institutions that shape society, until maybe the classic turn towards Orwellian-fascist global states. The control fear has on how we operate in the world and challenge the institutionalized structures that largely govern our behaviors, implicitly or not, is a familiar issue if you have ever studied identity, art, politics, sociology, psychology, or popular culture. Generations have revisited this often as in the 60s when questioning the status quo and institutions reached a fever pitch and enacted much radical political and societal changes. Conspiracy theorists endeavor to ask these same sorts of questions, just with a few more aliens in the answers.
In a study on the functionality of conspiracy beliefs, major reasons for prescribing to conspiracy theories had to do with existential threats, such as death-related anxieties, a sense of meaninglessness, and lack of control. Essentially, conspiracy theories are a belief system to cope with the uncertainties of the world around you. Conspiracy theories provide a framework for blaming, explaining, and questioning, just like other belief systems like religion, philosophy, and culture. It feeds the need for us to find meaning and control in an often senseless world. They are a way to deal with how awful everything is. You just believe in a reptilean race of shapshifters occupying the upper echealons of society or that there is a unifying bloodline that dictates who stays in power and influence .
There are complicated structures and connections that make up a lot of these theories, but with an intriguing sort of interconnectedness. The New World Order being formed by the Illuminati which is made up of reptiles who are also martians that use us as a gold mining colony by using manipulation of politics, media, and corporations to render us less conscious and docile. With a little critical thinking, you can talk yourself out of these things, because reality, but at the same time, what if some of it is true? What real evidence is there? Is it so far fetched to think a secret society engineers all of these crazy, awful, unexplainable things that happen, like 9/11, JFK’s assasination, and the Boston Marathon bombing?
This is a jump (but that is sort of the name of the game isn’t it): How can you take those structures and make a new theory, but in dance form? What strategies can get at or build some new logics in the same way conspiracy theories do? What would a dance conspiracy theory look like?
Here is a song I made last semester to enjoy as you think about the reptilean overlords who rule us:
Here also is a short documentary about David Icke by Vice (some of the text in my song is from this video):
Tarkovsky writes in Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema: “The cinema image comes into being during shooting, and exists within the frame. During shooting, therefore, I concentrate on the course of time in the frame in order to reproduce it and record it. Editing brings together shots which are already filled with time, and organizes the unified, living structure inherent in the film; and the time that pulsates through the blood vessels of the film, making it alive, is of varying rhythmic pressure.” (114)
I read this, and then stopped to think about the kind of work I’ve made, and whether or not I attend to time in my processes. I tend to think more about the phrasing of particular sequences rather than time…perhaps phrasing draws a viewers attention to how time is passing. Time is present whether or not we attend to it, but it made me wonder when (and if) the passage of time registers to an audience, and how we shape this passage of time into something present in the work, whether or not its consciously noted by an audience.
Because time’s motion is constant, choreographic variation emerges from how we engage with its consistency. I found this article through a quick internet search on “time perception” that provides a framework for looking at time. Ernst Poppel’s “elementary time experiences” include: duration, non-simulataneity, order, past and present, change.
As makers of performance, we are arranging bodies and events in time and space, directly appealing to our audience’s and dancer’s experiences of time, which, although not exactly the same, do follow certain principles regarding what is perceived as “present.” In fact, there is a short window for what we call present (subjective present), and that window is 2-3 seconds:
…In a study assessing temporal constraints in poetry, experiments were conducted using poems in different languages that were spoken out aloud. Independent of the language, it took the speakers ca. 3 seconds to recite the individual verse lines (Turner and Poppel, 1988). Different languages employ various grammatical rules and have such a variety of cultural standards and traditions that it would only be too natural to assume a great variability in the length of verse lines. Why not imagine poetic lines that exceed this 3 seconds limitation? From the theoretical view presented here, one would answer that a 3 second segmentation in poetry is due to the temporal organization of the brain which integrates information inside the limits of our conscious awareness and determines what is perceived at one moment. Of course, the poets writing poems over the last centuries did have not any explicit knowledge of a time structure that had to be created. Their aesthetic feeling– in terms of the temporal boundaries– implicitly led to verse lines that could be recited during the critical time window (Wittman and Poppel 20).
Music, dance, poetry, movies–all of these time-based forms are perceived as present for three seconds, before they begin accumulating as past. This accumulation of intervals is the performance.
This raises lots of questions for me, then, about choreographic tools that can attempt to elongate an audience’s experience of the present, or shorten it. Does the experience of a continual present result in boredom or absorption? How do choreographic tools and editing change an audience’s experience of time by playing to or against three-second intervals? What ways of working and inherent understandings of time (like the length of poetic verses) are already at play in our performance-making?