a video from a walk between 2007

This is a video I made for the performance A Walk Between. Lizzy and I collected texts from many authors, from our own writings and used fragments to bring this dancing text to life, a moving constellation of letters.

back again two years later

Has it been that long?? It certainly does not feel like it. Ok the last attempt did not work out. Now I am back again. Something about june.... it must be.

I have not been here for a while but lots have happened somewhere else: www.underconstructiontheatre.com

I will try again. Words.

acts for acting, words for describing acting

After a long pause, this is an attempt to reactivate this blog, put forward some new ideas and rethink the old ones. This will be again a place for reflecting and hopefully sharing with all the friends that are now so far away.

I have been thinking lately of many ideas that could become performances and ways to push forward the research I started in my MA concerning text and performance. I have been thinking of a dance that takes place only in the mental space, and only through words. How can words replace action? What if there is a whole act where absolutely nothing happens except within each person who is hearing, and then it would happen to each person differently. Can a dance, described with the same words, be a hundred times different?

Words weighing as images determining movement through the rhythm in which they are delivered.

How about if then I keep describing and the movement is something completely different or just the opposite. What would the audience really see?

seeing

We have now been rehearsing with a director for a while. This is someone we looked for to help us with rehearsals, characters and structures. It is funny and wonderful the way these rehearsals and this relationship has developed. At first all ideas were fixed from the scratch, what worked and what had to be transformed and developed, and there was great resistence to any new ideas that Rob brought in. However, (now I see the beauty of it) there is so much in theatre that I had not considered. As we bring the structure together I start realizing where the difference lies between the "theatrical" performance and the "artistic" performance. I start suddenly noticing how the audience differs in each, how the engagement, structure, narrative and need for conducting are completly different. I have not yet defined where my interest lies. May be it is not purely in one side. May be I want to explore the borderline between these two manifestations of the same and not so the same art. For now I am learning theatre, learning through developing structures that will allow it to happen, as theatre. And then.... all to come will shine under a different, entirely new light.

- sprouts of thought in the late hours of the night or early hours of the morning -

enhancing the narrative and drawing attention to the central question

After two weeks break from practice, focusing only in research, I look back upon the scratch with the advantage of time, the illuminating distance from the event.

The immediate days that preceded the scratch were a time of fear. A time of insecurity. The edge of time for exposing ideas, which before inhabited the space of words and existed only in the mind. At this time the work was mine, only mine and Lizzy's. But concepts had to become physical, they had to be seen and to be public, this was the hardest step. At this time there was a fear of not being understood, of speaking and not being heard, of discovering that all the work when put together did not make sense.

But it did. I was pleased with the result. All the parts were put together and the event happened. The actors were present, I felt present and the audience were too. There was a moment of exchange and the presence of all things together justified us being there. I believe we worked with the right amount of elements, many elements to create the dynamic of the piece. It seemed to me visually strong, eventhough, there are many things to be ellaborated and transformed. It was good to see through the scratch those things the worked and those that didn't.

However,there are, in my view, two main important things to be explored further, visually and through spoken text; ideas that inhabited our minds but hardly showed. First thing is the narrative, exposing the stories of the house and developing characters; creating tension. We are working site specific in an ambience rich with ghosts and stories that need to be ressucitated. Second is our central question. We need to find means of questioning the audience's notions of space and time transforming it. We need to hint these questions which are so present in Calvino.

In order to enhance the narrative we have been thinking of using the peripheral actions, the characters that are spread around the garden to make reference to our main character and her story. As if they were pages of a book that one by one give away, but visually, parts of her life and hints of her relationships. The connection between the traveller and the garden character should be implicit in the travellers stories and in the clashing of time.

The concerns with the concepts of outside, inside and transforming experiences should be present through new visual elements and in this cyclic text that fills the garden.

Finally, if this is to be a durational performance we have to think of ways of making it dynamic, repetitive but dynamic. This will also have to be developed for the actions and for the rest. We are thinking of it.....

more to come later!!!

After a warm week in Prague... de volta a labuta.

The garden has changed again. This time we were away for two weeks and the plants already changed, there was hardly any leaves in the ground... it all changes so fast, it is hard to predict what will be alive or dead in September. Hard to know what colours to expect, what smells and noises.

The time spent there today was very productive. We have decided a shape and what will be needed for the scratch. It was interesting to work there after me and Lizzy took some time on our own researches, to think of our own singularities, plans and ideals. The exchange of ideas seemed fresh, we are changing constantly, like the garden, and it seems like we had this time for undserstanding the changes and constructing with them.

For the next two weeks we will not be able to rehearse there... then, the scratch. But today was a good day. Even though there is much hard work ahead, everything seems to be coming together, and not even the Wimbledon Forthnight with Southside vacations will get on our way!!

And the garden will keep transforming.

Yesterday in the garden

We walked up the hill, Lizzy, Jordan and me, carrying loads of equipment to test out some of the ideas and to have a tutorial. It was great! It is completely different to talk of a place being there, to talk of a site especific performance in the space where it will be performed. And also, to have a fresh eye onto things, the ideas as well as the place. I feel like I have been absorbed by its green, its bushes and flowers already.

Jordan had some good ideas as to how to make the audience move more freely through the space, or at least ways for them not to feel like they have to follow one thing or another. We talked a lot about actions, small visual performances of repetitive actions happening in the space, dispersing the attention from our circular event that could become a promenade. We also talked of visual interferences in the space, of playing and interacting with the garden elements but in other sittuations creating surprises, not fighting the garden but allowing something that would not normally be there to do so.

We talked a lot about sound interferences in the space. It was something that me and Lizzy had been considering. Among the equipment we carried we had a CD player, for sound testing, which did not work.... no comments. We also took a projector and that worked quite nicely, but not in the bushes as I had expected. Within walls... where we wanted but somewhat different. This, I believe, will be the key to our process, adaptation. Adaptation to the enviroment, to the facilities and to changes, and we have to work with it, not against it.


....


After the garden

Yesterday, as we discussed our ideas, Lizzy asked me a something which she was trying to define herself, in her own work. She asked: if I was to reduce the concerns of my research to one greater question. One that must contain all the other preocupations, what would it be. It is hard for me to find objectivity but it is an important step and a very good exercise. And I did.

Question:
How do text based performances play with verbal language as more than just the medium for creating content but the final creation in itself? In other words, how can they draw awareness to the materiality of text as the formal element which hits, touches or weighs upon the audience, transcending the image that it builds, even when the opposite might, at points, have seem to have happened?

To answer this greater question other questions need to be answered, questions such as: what is the materiality of language? As I work on my dissertation these points are all under construction. But I leave a quote, a thought that inspires me and in a poetic way helps me go forward even when it seems hard, or when I am tired. This came first, the aesthetics came later. This is again by Alfredo Bosi:

"A zen teacher adviced a painter to become the the bamboo he wished to paint. Art should, to the best of its habilities, erase the difference, leap the interval that sepparates body from nature. It is precisely what the hand does: connects to the surface of matter or penetrates it in order to transform it, in order to compress the distance between what nature is and that which men want it to be. The hands abide to a constant impulse of the individual to convert the object to his own and dynamic substance. The hands submit, as best as they can, the world to men’s purposes. And they do it easily, graciously, because they are contiguous to things: solid touching solid, skin against skin, matter juxtaposed to matter.

Voice is not manifested in such ways. It acts frequently at a distance or in the object’s absense. It’s being, that cannot be seen, does not move anything directly, it replaces it, evokes it, induces things into dancing with other things, carries them rapidly from the world of image to that of concept and back, through rhythym and melody, to a state of pure sensation."

(translated to the best of my habilities by me)

second post of the day - yesterday in the garden




Yesterday at the garden I took some time to play with very simple short words. Trying to integrate them into the space. Thinking of different ways to bring written text into the space, creating a dialogue between the inside and the ideas. The attempt was to use the existing garden material in order to create these transitory shapes for a garden that cannot be permanently modified. My main concern now is the constant transformation of the seasons and how much intervention can be planned now. Will the leaves still be on the floor a few months from now? Will the pond still be dense green? How will the garden's inherent narrative change as the colours and foliage change?

what is it that interests me about text - aspirations

It is not the creation of an elaborate complicated text which will demand extreme attention of its listeners. It is not the development of a narrative. It is the game of time, the transformation and encounter of times within the poetic language. It is the rearrangement of the real enabled by discourse. It is the medium of words as tools for expressing the invisible and connecting us to what is absent. It is the parallel world which exists through words, transforming concepts into sensations. It is to create a circular text which exists within itself, like a dance, within its movements; a linear text that articulates with the exterior, that speaks of something outside its boundaries and yet transcends it. An arrangement of sounds, when sounds, or an arrangement of forms, that refers more to itself than to anything else, reminding the espectator of the subtleties of language, of poetry, of images that exist primarily through words. The espectators should feel this existence. I want “sound and all its echos to make the concrete surface of the poem dense.” And to remind the audience that “if in the end of the passage image seems to have exceeded discourse, this overcome was also true in the opposite sense: in order to reach the completion of the image, it was necessary to unfasten a chain of words.” *

I intend to create a performance determined by the deliverance of verbal text and in its creations, however, this should be done in a way that sequence is not important, that fragments overcome the whole. A circular storytelling which escapes from beginings and ends, losing itself in repetitions.

* the quotes are extracts from Alfredo Bosi's O Tempo e o Ser da Poesia, translated from Portuguese to the best of my habilities.