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BRITISH-IRISH-POETS  1997

BRITISH-IRISH-POETS 1997

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Subject:

Re: dancers speaking

From:

cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 7 Aug 1997 23:37:11 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (79 lines)

Hi Karlien and Elizabeth,

it's been a truist joke in movement-based performance
communities for years that most dancers should never
ever talk. They work hard (sometimes too hermetically sealed
- all those closets and mirrors!)
on their bodies and have no voice or sense of verbal language,
little by way of vocal presence.

DV8 are no exceptions and have been past their sell by date for
the past three - four years im hop skip and juniper opinions.

One choreographer who got riveting speaking from one or two
dancers who proved exceptions was Pina Bausch in the 1980
series  -  those 3-4 hour pieces that i was lucky to catch in
Amsterdam fifteen years ago.

Another was Mark Tompkins, whose pieces in Paris that followed
the 'Trahisons' trilogy of the early 1990s struck me for an acute
interweaving of filmic, almost graphic novel scenographic construction
with texts by Gerturude Stein.

Finally of course some of the earlier work (1978-84) by Robert Wilson
involved engaging speech.

Unfortunately little of this work came to the UK, if it did it
was on the whole panned (karlien's account of the box office
advisory note from Cambridge is the tip of an iceberg of neglect
- mostly inflicted out of paranoia over category).

I don't know how many saw Welsh's 'Grantham Star Cause' on the
tv a couple of nights back but the imbecility of the rebuttal
on an after midnight chat show that followed, during which it was
asserted that there was no story (when the story is cod obvious and
old  -  cliche sub-faustian pact) and how awful it was to see
middle-aged working class people having anal sex with a dildo and
talking about forced coprophilia in the process (who else witnessed
this peach of puritan protest?) gives some skimpy idea of what
the gulf can be. I remember seeing Diamanda Galas open a concert
in the Royal Festival Hall in 1991, centre stage, naked and dripping
with Kensington Gore (the fake blood used for horror pics), with
'welcome to the capital of denial'.

Anyway, i digress. One aspcet of dance and speech that has intrigued
me is that of the workshop and the devising process. Sianed recently
recorded the spoken instructions used by Paula Hampson, out Sue MacLennan's
sphere (Sue and i once made a piece based on aspects of Allen's 'Place
Book One' btw for which the soundtrack and the lighting was a copy of
the book with its pages being blown by a rotating fan  -  you know, one
of those that goes back and forth, not round and round and i haven't
even been drinking just trying to type fast and spot the drift - and
with a spotlight striking thru both fan and book onto her as a solo
dancer along a diagonal line of salt which she skidded thru, toed,
scuffed, kicked scatterwise, rolled along, blew apart with breath, fingered
and so on until the 'line' was dispersed), and then used those recorded
speech fragments as the basis for the composition that became the music
for the dance they prompted. That's a somewhat oversimplistic description
(as they are unless thick), the recordings manipulated as extreme samples,
compounded by live treatments, mixed with electro-violin and song.

Steve Paxton used to lie workshop participants on the floor and walk
amongst them talking for an hour or so before saying 'i expect you
want to dance now' and proceeding to leave the room himself. People
would dance in the space created by the talking and the silence in
its waking.

Choreographers frequently generate curious terms by which to refer
to particular sections of a piece as it's being devised. 'Let's
take it from Mops Rub Ribbon then'.

love and love
cris





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