April work outline

Guest: Myriam Van Imschoot

Wednesday evening: Informal introduction to Myriam, overview of her work and some tools for archiving media around performance.

 

Thursday morning – voice exercise

Myriam: To work on the voice, amongst other things through something I developed and that I call ‘silly song’. It takes thinking and talking straight into the action of singing, and as silly as it is, we sing what comes to our minds. Of course the minds get lured into other patterns of thinking and perception, because that’s what melody tends to do; it tricks us into other alleys. The purpose is not to compose a good song (ad lib), because also the song patterns get overruled now and then by the urgency of expressing thought.

Warm-up exercises, throwing/catching a sound, a movement

Noise fountain

Solos, asking and answering questions in song

Solos, incorporating movement, beating rhythm, supporting/joining in, working together and transferring

 

Thursday afternoon – ‘creative feedback’ exercise

Myriam: there are a set of ‘creative feedback’ tools that I have been working with in choreography workshops. We will collectively revisit, expand, reroute and develop work. In this approach the point is that feedback can happen through action, and through entering or exchanging one’s work/material. The tools are called ‘translation’, ‘perverse translation’, and ‘remediation’.

Four ‘seeds’ were offered by the group and were performed to be analysed as the means to produce another set of performances that variously function as migration, interpretations, interventions, illuminations, new works from the seeds considered as material. Reflection on how the various strategies function and their effects, and how we might use this process in the future.

 

Thursday afternoon: Dakar plans.

In addition to the comments already posted on this blog, a conversation starting from the question “what work do you want to make” … to consider what for each of us we want the content of our work to be, reflected through our meetings. That there is a strong connection between form and content, form considered here as content, variously:

– understanding and drawing upon our own strengths and others’

– exploring, making material, the performer/audience relationship

– developing an ‘open’ form

– drawing material from the immediate, local surroundings

– using the practice model that Myriam introduced, working from seeds through a process of ‘migration’ in different ways as the means of generating material from specific individual works and interests into other forms and works

– content might be an ‘act of sharing’ in and of itself, a set of relationships

Each of us should come to Dakar prepared to articulate our own position: what work we want to make, why, what is important for us, individually in this, what’s at stake: to define our own individual positions in relation to the material we’ve been reading and working with, the various exercises and ideas since September. To map our own positions by looking back through the work we’ve done and using this as a process to define a set of co-ordinates that articulate these things.