Sat 16th… Took a whistle-stop trip up to Birmingham to visit a friend of mine who’s a bit of a whizz when it comes to electrics: Wanted to put my mind at rest over possible issues with speaker cables, sound quality, frequencies, amp outputs etc.
Rewind… 2nd Meeting with Iris.
Our next meeting was primarily talking. And I needed it! I found that everything we discussed led to further questions.
How can you tell that something is dance? Does a dance need to have music? Do animals dance? What about inanimate objects?
This led us to touch on the idea of framing; that through the presentation or delivery almost anything (I think perhaps it has to involve movement) could be seen as dance.
I was, because of my subject matter perhaps, really intreagued by the idea that there is a scale of movement, from the everyday, through to dance, and that there must be a point on this scale where one becomes the other… At what point does movement become dance?
What I found quite frustrating was that I didn’t have the vocabulary for this art form. I was aiming to choreograph a performance and yet I wasn’t even well enough equipped to be able to express the, ‘aesthetic of movement’* I was hoping to achieve. *(this probably has a dance term, but I don’t know it) I could see from the dance clips Iris and I watched together that, within dance, there are many different styles, but I was finding it wildly difficult to even explain the differences between those I did and didn’t like. We ended up having to use terms like ‘dance-y dance’ and ‘visually engaging movement’. Thankfully, Iris is very patient.
Fastforward…
Heading off to a lecture at the Haywood’s ‘Wide Open School’. It’s called “Coreographies: Reception and Production of the Visual”. -Attempting the ‘all-things-dance-related’ emmersion technique…
I could ceratinly do with a change of scene: I’ve been battling with technology today, trying to get my computer to recognise the camcorder.
On my last day of office observation, Iris and I had arranged to meet up to discuss plans. (Iris is a dancer who has agreed to work with me on this project and who also, very conveniently for me, works in the office at Siobhan Davies Dance.) This first meeting between us, was quite an eye opener. True to form, I wanted to get straight in there and try things out. (I never expect these first acts of the enquiry to be that great, but its through the making that my thinking develops; the making triggers other thoughts, I try something else, the process continues.) This, it became apparent, is not how dancers work. It hadn’t occured to me that there would be such a difference in approach to making: Unlike the solitary decisions and making of visual art, dancers are well rehearsed in the art of collaboration: talking is key!
Office Observations Continued…
During a lull in the office activities, I took a moment to shut my eyes. No longer being able to see the office, I became aware of its sounds. The tap tap click of a keyboard, followed by what seemed to be a reply from a keyboard further off; a call and response, a tapping in unison: Sounds that brought to mind the shuffle-heel-toe of early tap-dancing classes.
Attending to these sounds and movements in the office, I realised it wasn’t just that the office was ripe for a performance, it already was a performance. It felt important to try and share these moments, to try and find a way to capture these everyday dances.
