Discussion in and around Improvisation and artistic process.

A common thread for both an improvising dancer and a dance maker is how to go beyond the familiar and venture into new and unfamiliar territory.

With such a process the potential is that the artistic development will go far in a direction that is uncontrollable for the main decision maker Hooman.  However the potentiality of it would also be that the directions might allow fresh material to be found and so the question as yet unaswered would be to find the appropriate time to lay down some external judgement criteria that bring the material back towards the artistic criteria of Hooman.

In previous productions Hooman has used this method of absence to allow him some kind of distance on the material.  It has also meant that some material may not be to his taste but in so doing has forced him to redefine the contexts in which this material exists in order for it to hold.  An interesting approach not determined by personal preference.

Another idea is the idea of delay.  How long can one postpone the process and psychological need to go into the material and set it.  Can a delay allow another set of choices perhaps further from ones habits appear.

We compared our Paris experience with our sense of performance where the work is more set.
I made the comment that I did not feel myself censoring myself but rather engaged in a set of decision making that were not orientated around quality judgement but rather the various actions of doing.  In this sense I did not feel that different from the performance of a piece.  We are concerned with the manafacture of the piece but any doubts or concerns of the quality of what we do are irrelevant.

Hooman took issue with the use of the word censor and stressed the importance of clarifying language.  Censorship in what sense?  Censorship could mean being external control and representative of repression or it could also mean personal censorship which could be as trivial as the exclusion of material due to any number of selection criteria.  I felt I was not censoring because I was not exluding material on the basis of I thought necessarily it would work in the context.

 We talked about what we were using as decision criteria.   Loan made the comment that she does not like the idea of the unconscious, ie one should always be evaluating consciously what one is doing.
 Hooman distiquished our way of working from others in these terms also but suggesting that some percieve there work to have succeed if they lose themselves in it.

I brought to the discussion what about the unconscious, or the irrational.  Loan presented an idea of waiting, much like the idea of delay, waiting until a conscious choice appears.  However of course everything that comes to mind is in effect conscious.  The question is do we take rational control.  What if we allow a process to really run without consciously analysing what is going on.  This approach may be useful to yield something different and interesting.   Given that we are agents inside and that an external mind is also involved in making links could we not also allow ourselves permision to not drive all choices from our rational mind. 

Revolution Research

Currently we are using an artistic process, that has each dancer on an independent research path.   but all under the topic, revolution.  How each dancer goes about physicalising their research is their own private matter, initially.

After 1 week we opened up a discussion of our own individual processes.  Peder had some group ideas .. corresponding to movements of protest in the Iranian election.  Loan had taken the buddhist protests in Vietnam including a monks self incineration, Rikke had taken ideas of censorship in Arts and I launched into the philosophical theory of Revolution primarily using the ideas of Arentdt and a physical process of movement research more along the lines of personal revolution in the sense of personal change and a break from movment habits.  Martin looked into ideas of the 4th revolution, as well as the online aspect of protest and discussion including a hidden dissenter code named the Ant-Eater.  He also created an Ant-Eater mask from Paper Mache.

We then performed a rehearsal, or research with our own individual material together in the same space as the others.  Questions of how much to allow the collective awareness of the others actions to concern us, was raised.

Hooman presented some ideas for collective action and some of the individual ideas from us were incorporated into the collective ideas also.

We had in Paris 3 days with five hour blocks, in what was once a shop but now an art gallery to use these elements.