Choreographic Exploration inspired by Rosemary Lee

Today we explored a task which was inspired by Rosemary Lee's choreographic device which she explored whilst making "The Suchness of Heni and Eddie". The task consisted of our dancers looking at different pictures which were all about relationships. We then asked them to move and explore these relationships with each other. Our dancers experienced difficulties to portray the different relationships at first, we then however slightly changed the tasks to showing one dancer a different photo portraying a different relationship to the other dancers photo. This seemed to help the dancers explore not only a better relationship towards their movement but also towards each others movement. Both dancers quickly emerged into exploring original movement which connected to each other, and often formed a noticeable narrative line.  It was noticeable that this exploration helped the dancers to connect and explore not just their own boundaries but also their partners which gave them a broader understanding of interdependency and the connection and link to human relationships and how this can alter not just from a day to day basis but also from exploration task to exploration task.

Examples of breaking the 4th wall and inspiration for further explorations including inspiration for using gaze to enhance or break boundaries

https://vimeo.com/60845952

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHq9OEj4SvQ

The Suchness of Heni and Eddie by Rosemary Lee

http://www.rescen.net/Rosemary_Lee/suchness_vid.html#.VVKCB7v2uVM

We were greatly influenced and inspired by Rosemary Lee who often explores human relationships and the boundaries between the audience and performer within her performances, this can be seen in her hybrid performance The suchness of Heni and Eddie which explores and exposes the different creative process that is involved when creating a performance.

We felt particular inspired by the intimacy and fruitful accidents which were revealed within this performance. These beautiful moments full of real emotions would have been erased or overlooked in a more traditional performance setting. It was this boundary and the revealing of the interdependency between two performers that we aimed to explore further. We explored a variety of different tasks that would evoke interdependency between two performers and one of the successful explorations we have found was a task were two participants had to attempt to form the same word together whilst also performing the same movement. This gained us a lot of insight into how much a person relies on his/hers partner whilst performing a duet. We also discovered that we would overplay this dependency on the other performer in traditional performance settings. With this task we have also found similar explorations outcomes and interests to Rosemary Lee found within her piece The Suchness of Heni and Eddie. Lee highlighted in an interview with Niki Pollard that she was particularly interested in the struggle which happens when dancers try to achieve a given tasks; she said: “because it is evocative to me of the struggle we experience with partners in our own lives.”

We were lucky to have witnessed moments of this struggle which evoke powerful and beautiful moments that put us on the direct path also discovered by Rosmary Lee, she states in the same interview with Pollard; “I want the dancers to keep working at this edge. My dilemma is to compose work that can also be “raw” and “unpolished”. Do dancers inevitably sometimes fake rawness?” We have found ourselves exploring the exact same questions whilst exploring our research question during our choreographic lab time.

We were able to find some answers to this question within our own explorations, which suggest that a dancer does sometimes intentionally fake rawness for the sole purpose of entertainment and performing. We can also say that the nature of these explorations can never be fully replicated, because after all, these dependent entirely on circumstances which evolved around time, space and different personalities of the participants. However due to the shortness of this project we would like to explore the findings of this exploration further to reach a more structured conclusion.  

Thought Exploration Task

Today we explored an idea inspired by Stanislavski who called tension the"occupational disease" of the actor. We asked our dancers to relax for 1 minute and to only focus on their breath. After this we asked them to "quite their thoughts" and write those down on paper, one after the other. This task was meant to relax and heighten our dancers focus and concentration for further exploration tasks that would follow. Exploring this task myself I found my mind wonder and getting louder and louder, it was almost impossible for me to write down every thought that came to my mind. I improved this by further relaxing and focusing not just on my breathing but also on my different muscles and feeling the tension leave my body. After this my thoughts were a lot more manageable, I was still however surprised with the volume of thought that came into my head. After this we asked our dancers to say their thoughts out loud, with this we aimed to break potential inner boundaries between the performer and the audience. When I explored this task myself I found myself filtering every thought and analysing the importance or necessity of it before I spoke it out loud. This process illuminated the extend of boundaries within a performance for me to a much broader level. Even though my choreographic Lab partner Michelle is a close friend of mine, I physically could not bring my mouth to say some of the things that happen to come into my head. These words were not at all offending Michelle but still my inner performer thought them not appropriate or important enough to be said out loud. I also found myself steering my thoughts away from the true thoughts that were coming up and felt more comfortable by making up pretend thoughts and telling these to my Lab partner. It was interesting that everybody else who explored this task felt similar feelings to myself. 

"Gaze"

We have explored and come to the understand that eye contact enhances and alters a lot of boundaries within a performance setting, because of its intimate nature eye contact can make us feel complex emotions. By creating a participatory platform for our audience we hope that the gaze that we experienced in our previous explorations would come apparent to the chosen audience member. On self-explorations during our choreography lab, we discovered that simple eye contact is powerful enough to evoke and tap into people’s emotions, these emotions varied between all our participants. With this last exploration we aimed to enhance and then brake down the barriers of a performance that we explored in the previous exercises, we aimed to break down the barrier of pretence that often can found on both sides of a performance setting, namely between the audience and the performer. 



By Michelle Morgan and Joanne Schwarz 

 Inter-dependency and Rosemary Lee's "The Suchness of Heni and Eddie"

Rosemary Lee's performance "The suchness of Heni and Eddie"  explores and exposes the different creative process that is involved when creating a performance. We felt particular inspired by the intimacy and fruitful accidents which were revealed within this performance and wanted to explore this aspect further. This interdependency inspired us to explore tasks which would evoke similar outcomes one of the successful explorations we have found was a task were two participants had to attempt to form the same word together whilst also performing the same movement, gained us a lot of insight into how much a person relies on  his/hers partner whilst performing a duet. We also explored tasks which involve clothing which related back to our original area of focus " The sense of belonging and how our clothing resemble our identity". By carry out these task we were able to see the dependency each before had when taking part. For example the photograph below shows  one of the tasks we instructed our dancers to participate in. This was to highlight and to see how much the dancers rely on one another when blindfolded ( and trust one another). 

Research areas and aims and objectives for overall outcome of project

Research question: How are physical boundaries defined, altered and enhanced within a performance

Our focus of research will stem from the question to how are our physical boundaries 
changed within a performance. We have gathered different areas of research and video evidence of the performers / ourselves reflections on tasks carried out in our sessions. This has therefore allowed us to keep updated throughout our process of research to therefore come to an final conclusion for our choreographic work. The importance of our research question can be found within the understanding that lies in the studies into humanities and social science which explore social rituals and everyday interactions. Because performance brings together a vast diversity in forces and assembles a network of different discussions and practices we decided to focus intensely only on three aspects within performing. These aspects being , "performing not to perform ", twin explorations and gaze. 

Our main aims for this project are :

1.   To outline the key aspects of physical boundaries between a performer and the audience.
2.  To highlight the moment when a performer intentionally shows a false representation of emotions and rawness within their movement when exposed to an audience.

Our main objectives for this project are:

1. To use appreciate choreographic devices influenced by our chosen practitioner Rose Mary Lee which influence and impact the performers boundaries whilst performing.
2.  By fully understanding the emotions and feelings experienced not just as a dancer but also as an audience member, by participating the exploration as a both a spectator and performer.

Our Methodology's used in this project are Qualitative and Phenomenology.

1.   Qualitative with which we aim to understand the experience attitude and relationships of our participants. We chose this method to solve questions of a phenomenon exploring questions and answers regarding “what”, “how” and “why”.
2.   Phenomenological, the understanding of the experience from a participant’s point of view, to provide insights into significant knowledge of human behaviour, human relationships and human experiences. We have additionally decided to count ourselves as participants to further explore the ideas and emotions experienced by our participants. *We chose this method to find crucial aspects of information which will contribute towards answering our Research Question. 

By Michelle Morgan and Joanne Schwarz

Defining our Research through practitioner "Rosemary Lee"

Our main area of research has stemmed from our chosen practitioner "Rosemary Lee" who is a choreographer who often explores human relationships whether it being a live performance on stage or more often as site specific. Our final choreographic work focuses on 3 aspects, performing not to perform , gaze and twin exploration. Rosemary Lee's choreographic work "The Suchness of Heni and Eddie" has specifically inspired some of our exploration tasks which we have carried out in our sessions with our two performers. Her piece has inspired us to highlight human behaviour and experiences when we perform to an audience or alone. This has influenced the idea of " performing not to perform" which is one of our main areas of focus, highlighting the question of at what point do we fake our performance qualities and when do we loose the sense of truth when exposed to an audience. This piece also uses the idea of inter-dependency in physical terms , which is underlined in our twin exploration. Her piece has also inspired us to highlight human behaviour and experiences when we perform in an audience. 

We have recorded how these tasks have made our performers and ourselves feel and we have given them questionnaires that will determine how our instructions have influenced rawness and emotions when performing to an audience or alone. We have been using different types of data collection such as questionnaires, journals, voice recordings and video diary's to gather our dancers reflections on their individual experience and thoughts when carrying out these tasks. Each method of collection is important to our research process and towards our choreographic work as it allows us to evaluate each performers experiences and enables us to develop and improve on what did and didn't work in our sessions.   



"

    

Boundaries 

As a group we were interested in the idea of exploring what happens if we break the boundaries between the performer and the audience. We used a variety of explorations with our dancers and ourselves to identify when boundaries can be broken and a persons emotion and performance can be portrayed as false. We firstly experimented with a task with Tommy which outlined the distance that would usually be created between the performer and audience. The task began with Tommy being asked to enter the space and to act as if he would do normally if he was in the space alone. Whilst observing his performance we were able to evaluate the sense of awkwardness portrayed by he's facial expressions and bodily movement.When he had entered the space he walked into the middle of the room and sat down and avoided eye contact with both Joanne and I. Once the task had been completed we discussed and documented through video and through a dairy of his reflections when participating in the task. He stated that "your body feels exposed to others and you can feel a sense of awkwardness when acting as if no one is watching you". Once this task had been carried out with Tommy I then experimented with the same exploration to measure the similarities and differences and to experience the task for myself. Whilst carrying out the task I automatically felt uncomfortable knowing that Joanne was constantly watching me , I began to notice that I was not allowing my body to act naturally in the space , it was as if in my mind I was choreographing what to do next. I noticed stillness in my body , exposure and hesitation to move to a different area in the space. I also felt myself questioning my right and wrongs, asking myself is this right to act in this way when not performing. This task was interesting as it allowed us to explore further the idea of performing not to perform and also to identify what we would normally do if the space was empty.

For the second task we used the idea of meditation which allowed us to clear our minds and to focus on exposing our own thoughts when being placed in front of an audience. This exploration highlighted the boundaries that were being broken ,whilst expressing our emotions and thoughts out loud in a performance environment. We discovered from completing this task that we were breaking our inner boundaries as our random thoughts were being exposed to others.

We looked into practitioner Rosemary Lee's choreographic devises used in her work which also questions the idea of boundaries being crossed and how people are expected to react when performing in front of an audience. We therefore intend to highlight what would be seen as unusual  and unlikely when carrying out movement in an professional environment.

By Michelle Morgan and Joanne Schwarz