greenest green - from bialowieza forest
ancient woodland in poland / belarus
can we go there?
research and development blog for performance project with Nat Cursio and Shannon Bott
Dancer, enthusiastic cook, improviser, choreographer, video maker, former part-time runner, documenter, friend
the ultimate recovery
i've just started reading The World Without Us.
A book that asks how [and how quickly] the world would change... and would it be 'restored' should humans disappear tomorrow.
It has the clever little animation on the website where a house is gradually overtaken by nature. click on 'your house without you'
I love that fact that nature moves in when things die out... hence the text 'the ants around his grave are comforting'....The grass around Tony's grave has actually been incredibly slow to grow. For some reason that was always disappointing. He is buried right on a corner so maybe a lot of people walk across his patch of grass to get to their friends/relatives.
I haven't been to the cemetary for a while. I hope the grass is greener and thicker next time. At least the ants will be there.
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hybridised viewing
I was listening to performance studies academic Jennifer Parker-Starbuck recently, talking about Francis Bacon and French artist ORLAN. She described seeing Bacon's work at the Tate and how she was forced to "squint" and shield her eyes against seeing her own reflection (because of the lighting in the space). She described the experience as being " forced into a position of hybridized viewing".
What might this be like - to light these 'reflective' glass enclosures so that the audience is gently asked to negotiate themselves into or out of the viewing?
Apparently, in an interview, Bacon said:
"the glass helps unify the picture. I also like the distance between what has been done and the onlooker that the glass creates; I like, as it were, the removal of the object as far as possible" (Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 87).
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more on labelling
The below is taken from Gill Clarke's article Mind Is As In Motion. The William James quote is great for this concern or interest in labelling. How might the labelling implode or subvert this 'cutting of days and nights'?
ske
"In part such practices are trying to redress a balance, turning up the volume on the sensing, intuitive ‘self’, to meet the more dominant rational brain. Psychologist William James wrote insightfully, over a hundred years ago, of the limitations of our over-emphasis on conceptualising and labelling the world:
‘Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights’, ‘summers’ and ‘winters’. We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and these abstract ‘whats’ are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.’
So dance can play a valuable role in re-asserting, re-experiencing this perceptual present, the undivided self."
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reblogging myself
http://skellis.posterous.com/fleeting-4
- just for the Darwin quote.
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labelling
Greed eh? I guess I was thinking most about setting up the labelling system, and then of playing with ways in which to undermine the conventions of the label. Perhaps this relates to my earlier comment about the photos of the material from the summer (day of slience) ...
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shared day of silence
In January 2009 Nat and I spent a day in silence in the studio. Vanessa had set the framing for the day. To map the 3mths leading up to and the 6mths prior, the deaths of Nat's brother and my mother. In silence. This is some of the writings recorded by each of us on this day.
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hard labour
We moved and conversed around the idea of committing to some 'hard labour' in a 'pre-show' situation.
I suggested that it need not be skipping (or sporty at all) but that perhaps it is an action based task such as digging a hole.
-digging a hole / lifting and stacking/ pushing something large/ pouring large amounts of water from one bucket to another-
All these things come with baggage ofcourse - loaded with meaning / metaphor.
So Shannon suggested we create a danced sequence that is repeatable, that works as a duo [not in unison] but fits together like a jigsaw.
So we made some dance and we attempted (without a director) to craft our separately made phrases together. I felt that as a structure / pattern it had potential - but the vocabularly didn't make sense. So I suggested we use the structure we have but shift the vocabulary into a more grounded, effortful, dig-a-hole-without-miming style of movement.
At the end of the day we got to a place that could definitely be investigated further. These are some screen shots from the video. [ignore the exclamation marks... just my i-photo telling me they may not be good enough for print... i kind of like them though]
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