Dancing Geek

Dance4 in Nottingham runs an annual festival in October “to promote the work of artists who don’t classify their work as belonging to one particular art form, but instead challenge the boundaries of dance and performance” to quote Dance4′s new director, Paul Russ.  This year I finally dragged myself the measly 30 minute drive from Derby to get involved in nottdance09, and I’m very glad I did.

I’ll admit that my reasons were selfish, there were two workshops being run this year: one to share ideas and techniques, the other an artistic process.  Given that both these followed a performance by those running the workshop the evening before I could hardly miss them.

My only criticism of the whole affair would be the difficulty in finding the venues – and I’ve been to them before!  Given that it’s going to be dark at 8pm in October none of the entrances from the roads were lit or any signposts, resulting in being late for one performance and missing another entirely!  May I humbly suggest even just a large canvas sign that marks the turning you need to take off the main road – so that those of us driving over don’t miss out.  Both Lakeside Arts and Sandfield Theatre are so hidden from view, that I never even found the latter.  Of course, next time you can bet that I’ll being doing daytime reckie drives and getting full and complete instructions from friends before heading off (I swear Sandfield Theatre has moved!)

My involvement therefore was limited to the two workshops and their performances the night before.  The first, ‘The Swimmer’ by Rachel Krische, I missed the first half of, but thankfully those of us who were late (a fair sized group in the end) were allowed in to enjoy the second half of her piece.  Whilst the piece is improvised each time, there are strict rules, an improvisation score, and a specific improvisation technique used in this piece and it was these interacting layers that Rachel was able to introduce us to in the workshop.

The workshop itself was a wonderful process.  Rachel’s piece derives from choreography by Deborah Hay, and her teaching on awareness in dance.  The joining of these two areas that I have recently thrown myself into was hugely enjoyable and quite moving.  Seeing how these different layers of movement, awareness, internal questioning, and movement score could all interact and be maintained as a loose whole within the mind of the performer was fascinating and personally very inspiring.  I hope that I will be able to impart some of this in the work that I am doing at the moment with Chaos.

I still find it difficult to explain what the workshop involved, without just writing it out in minute detail, but the end result was dance that invited you to watch it, and without necessarily intending to communicate any great meaning or purpose was still captivating and engrossing to watch.  Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes playful, sometimes lost, it didn’t restrict itself to one thing but was open and free – the constraints of the score and movement serving to simply provide a frame in which to express oneself creatively.  A throughly enjoyable process to watch and to participate in, I am very glad I was able to experience this from both points of view.

At the same event as Rachel’s performance was a piece by Robert Hylton called ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’  Worth mentioning for his use of voiceover, and a beautiful piece of body-popping to Iranian drumming.  It involved the audience’s direct feedback and interaction, an interesting idea, but one that generally felt like under-rehearsed improvisation (if that doesn’t sound like too much of an oxymoron).  Those parts where he had clearly had time to develop them on his own were highly enjoyable, but the interaction with the audience felt a little awkward – which to be fair is something you can’t rehearse except in performance and this was the piece’s first outing.

The second evening’s performance I went to see was Oblivia’s ‘Entertainment Island 1′.  The first of three performances the group are developing from 2008 to 2010.  This is not an easy piece to watch, it lasts 50 minutes and seeks not to entertain but to show the core of what popular entertainment is.  There is a lot of repetition, but since their movement is not fixed to one meaning this means the audience has plenty of time to allow different interpretations and understandings of what is being shown to arise.  They describe their process as taking an idea that is too big, i.e. popular culture, and then working on it to produce something tangible and performable.  Given my current fascination with the idea of the new Information Age and its impact on global society, the idea of being able to find a route to dance was very appealing, even though my final style would almost certainly differ wildly from that of Oblivia.

Two of the artists ran the workshop the following morning, and with a group of just 4 attendees it was a wonderfully intimate and immediate environment – feedback was almost instant as we passed work between ourselves.  Given that Oblivia is a group of 3-4 artists themselves it was useful to try their practices in such a small group as well.

Oblivia is not a dance group, though movement is important in their performance, and as such the workshop was not dance focussed, but the framework of a process that we worked through is transferable enough for me to be able to take those parts that appealed and apply them to my current piece with Chaos.  Doing Qi Gong as a warm-up was a fun experience, and the size of the group meant that when we started to do creative warm-ups to connect we were already reading each other well after only 30-40 minutes of meeting most of the people in the room!

For me, the most interesting part of the process was the letting go of ownership of ideas by swapping work between the two pairs.  First we swapped ideas, then the development of those ideas and then we performed what we saw straight after creating a natural process of decay of superfluous parts of the performance, and a sifting of only those memes, concepts or ideas that stayed in your head.  Interestingly enough I managed to completely miss out the fact that the phrase I had just seen had started with the declaration “I’m going to kill myself!” – an impactful lesson in what is and isn’t picked up by the viewer.  This process of repeating what you’ve just seen was a wonderful way to explore ideas that are easily repeated, I’m not sure if it would work with dance that involved lifts or partner work, but as always in Chaos, it is by trying to take on each other’s movement that we learn to push outside of our own known comfort zone, and the results of trying to repeat this in a different context will be illuminating whatever the quality of the result.

I learnt a lot from this year’s festival (not least how to find Lakeside Arts in the dark) and I look forward to more of Dance4′s calendar throughout the year.

And another thing…

Another very important aspect of the workshops, and which applies to both of them, was the opportunity to meet some wonderful people.  Knowing that you have a shared interest to start with someone, and going through these engaging learning experiences together is a wonderful way to make new friends and I’m very pleased to have managed to get an email address or two with a view to making more dance happen in the future.  I don’t want to use the N-word, but the opportunity to make new connections and relationships is of massive value for all involved.