March work outline

Wed 21/03 – evening

Screening of video recording of last month’s exercise & discussion.

Screening of Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger, 1981.

 

Thu 22/03

Ian, Emma & Tanja met everyone at the hostel, in costume.

Discussion of Dakar plans: group decision to leave Ecole de Sables early morning of 11/05.

Announcement of De Appel curatorial programme invitation & proposed DAI framework for contribution.

‘Costume’ exercise

Discussion of Notes on Camp, Paris is Burning, Hail the New Puritan in relation to ideas about transgression and/or assimilation, relation between appropriation & mass culture, commitment, mobilisation. What are our co-ordinates for transgression? Is transgression an idea rooted in/derived from the period during which we were teenagers? Do we cling onto it as a form of nostalgia?

Costume/prop as facilitating a kind of freedom to act. The submission to something like a costume, what that opens-up. The difference between costume & uniform. Carnival.

Group walked from the hostel through Sonsbeek park and held the first part of the practical workshop in the amphitheater clearing in the middle of the forest.

Divided into 3 groups, each group was ‘taught’ the work that Jimmy’s group performed last month, in whichever way and according to whatever process of interpretation or transmission those teaching the performance decided upon or felt comfortable with.

Groups then used this learnt work as material that was subject to change in various ways, becoming new ‘performances’, in part informed by our choice of costumes, what this made possible, or suggested.

The group walked through Arnhem town centre, back to DAI.

lunch

Workshop continued outdoors with the three groups practicing in the public space of the pavement along the river, amidst its various other kinds of traffic.

New performances were shown to each other and discussed.

Developments:

Works developed in different ways. Significantly (inevitably) having to be open to or to encounter/be seen amongst the chance happenings of the public place in which we worked.

The structure of the original taught work was transformed in different ways. Incorporating new material taken directly from the public space, both words and actions; developing a varied rhythm, experimenting with simultaneous different paces for actions as opposed to the model of ‘copying’ movement etc; humour entered into the new performances to a much greater extent than in previous workshops, sometimes flirting with the ridiculous and ludicrous – all of which were noted as interesting things to welcome into our practice and to keep in mind in the future. Humour facilitated the incorporation of ‘personalities’, moved away from the fixed blank face, to allow for responses to/in the performance situation that were less formal than previously, a mode perhaps of communication. A decision to laugh during the work if we wanted to, to allow that, rather than when thinking about it at a later date. Not all movements were formalised. We could step in and out of the formal aspects of the works.

The desire to move away from a staccato effect where individual words are connected to individual movements etc.

To think about:

We need to establish a framework to determine how we go on to work with the formal ‘tools’ we’ve been developing, roles we’ve been occupying and experiences we’ve been accumulating.

What might be the theatre/s that we want to establish? What is the ‘why’? What is its/their content? Might we find broad consensus around groupings of our different interests?

Agreed to start collecting a list of such ‘whats’, ‘whys’ and ‘content’ in relation to our plans for the work we’ll do in Dakar, along with any other responses in the comments section on this blog under the proposed outline. Everyone should contribute to this with what’s at stake and what’s of interest to them.