Crit group response: Oct 31, 2014
There were some common references within the feedback from my crit group that will be useful in moving forward with my project.
The general impression of the videos was that they are sketches, and with more development could stand alone as work, but could perhaps be interesting in combination with live performance. This relates to my goal: empathic change through shared kinesthetic engagement, and its implication of the live body in presence/performing for the audience. The majority responded to the close up shots as being more succinct in transmitting the dancer’s perspective and physical reality (as opposed to the shots with the space included). In regard to distorting/ disorienting this reality, using multiple camera angles to capture the same movement was proposed. I tried this in one of the split screen moments in the video, and I’d like to go deeper with this approach.
The audio was difficult to follow, perhaps because of the low sound quality. I’m addressing this by way of binaural mics, and perhaps I can attach them to various parts of the body, capturing the inner soundscape of the dance. Margaret brought up the dancer’s self-talk – there’s something about this idea that interests me. There’s a whole dialogue going on inside my head as I’m moving. It’s a kind of unintelligible dialogue between me and my body that I’d like to try to catapult OUT, and I’ll have to use my imagination to do it, which is the very thing I want to access: the HOW of producing imagination.
Ana brought up use of humour – a quality that emerges subtly in my work, and something she noticed over the residency in Berlin. In relation to disorientation, the disarming potential of humour could be utilized in relationship to my audience. I’ve always been inspired by clown, so perhaps a refresher in clown technique, and explicitly bringing it into the work could be both stimulating and helpful in creating the perceptive interruptions I’m looking for.
The fissures of sound, video image, and movement, are a through line that the group reflected back to me. In the meditation score Exiting/Re-existing, an activity of re-imagining the body plays into these notions of reconstruction, or a re-conceptualized body made of up strange composite parts. I might take this approach in considering how to merge all of these elements, and to address where the work lives. Perhaps it’s a collection of sound, live movement, text, and video. Perhaps they could have some kind of performative interplay that brings the audience into this strange visceral place that I’ve been experiencing in the making of the work.
Marion brought up a question about the Peripheral Conversation score, and how it might play out in a large group context. She asked if it was about telepathy, and it got me thinking about the important distinction between method and result. I’m not interested in what’s on the page, or any kind of accuracy in the content of the conversation that two people in this experiment might share. However, it’s the impossibility of accuracy, the feeling of telepathy but the factual differences, that I find interesting. But why? I think this relates back to projection. In engaging in a silent conversation, another mode of communication between bodies emerges. The signifiers could play into varying differences of meaning, depending on all kinds of factors. What is revealed through the process of ‘doing’ this activity is that one can only respond to an interpretation of what he/she projects ONTO the other person. There is no doubt a shared energy, but its emergence into language is a productive force of the participant onto his/her self. It isn’t accurate by any means, and is a vast territory for misinterpretation, and perhaps the formation of difference and prejudice, or assumptions based on cultural physical signifiers.
Lastly, Amy had some interesting questions in regard to improvisation: Do you consciously prepare? What ritual like elements are present (if any) in the way you enter an improvised moment? Can you tell when it’s working? Does it ever not work? These questions got me thinking about how to collaborate with others, how to specify my process, and how to guide others to access to my process. I don’t ask myself these questions because I’m working intuitively. There’s no need, because I’m accessing something I’m very comfortable accessing. But what are the terms, the words, the language of guiding someone else into these strange perceptual places with me? How can this language be extremely accessible? Maybe I’ll write a list of words/topics to avoid, and then build around that. We can’t ever mention Foucault, that might be at the top of the list. What else?