Written on November 19, 2011 by frances

abjection — night 4

Another night. One of the coldest recently. Still, I rehearse with windows open. There’s something intrinsically horrible for me about unmoving air, air that sits and congeals, languishes in a closed room. A window cracked open is enough to return the circulation, to create drafts and eddies.

It’s easy to find oneself lying on the floor, wondering what’s the point of it all. A simple remedy for me is to just keep hacking away slowly at whatever it is I’m working on; even if it’s just repetition for the sake of not stopping, something useful can be found in exhaustion.

I work through my usual-ish warmup, some boot camp, half an hour of a couple of specific movement tasks that leave me slightly nauseous, and during which I am shouting in my head at the music I am listening to, to hurry up and finish. A peculiar ghoulish love and hatred of causing self-suffering, and gradual depleting of endurance. Some more grunt-ish stuff, (though leaving out proper floor work as the first studio I was in I didn’t want to use my clothes to clean the floor), more movement tasks building up and pushing tension and release further in both directions … it’s almost two hours before I’ve even finished this. It does though, serve a purpose. I couldn’t do the movement I’m attempting without this, or rather, it wouldn’t look or feel the same.

It seems though, I need more than four hours to get anything done. I spend half an hour feeling slightly dazed, then begin working through last week’s videos as well as some stuff I’ve been watching. I didn’t want to have another rehearsal like the previous three, where I just improvise repeatedly on the same ideas. It’s only been a month of one day a week, so in a normal rehearsal period, perhaps it’s Wednesday afternoon, but I feel like I can say something like, “ok, I know what I’m doing”, enough to concentrate on one or two things a bit.

So I spent maybe 40 minutes working on a few things that add up to perhaps 15 or so seconds, possibly less. A lot of it is quite dry and technical, recreating what I did in an improvisation, working out why it looks unlike what it feels like, working out how not to throw myself over when swinging arms fast, yet also not slow them down as a solution … does it look better if I’m agape at the ceiling or hair-forward, all metal?

As with last week, it’s the final 10 or 15 minutes that turn out to be the most useful, and also when at last, I don’t want to stop. At least I have a beautiful, cold, night bike ride through the centre of Berlin from Theaterhaus Mitte to Wedding. I dawdle to enjoy the city, then hitch onto the back of two other cyclists cutting the red lights from Mitte to Pankstr.

The next two or three weeks I won’t be rehearsing, as Dasniya and I go to Brussels for a residency at Bains Connective. Mid-December to return to this.

Written on November 12, 2011 by frances

abjection — night 3

Friday night, until the last half hour, was either frustrating or glum. It’s a different thing to push oneself through the hours than it is to be in a studio with other people. Especially a studio that is a former classroom, fluorescent lights, and a closed door. It’s possibly becoming time to be more concerted in what I’m doing.

I arrived early, and spent an hour in the café reading, looking at last week’s videos, realising I didn’t have a pen, so I’d have to write with keyboard and transpose later. Once again, my similar warmup; boot camp strength-work and relearning how to roll on the floor.

Perhaps an indication of my mood, I became deeply frustrated with and tormented by a simple floor roll, from knees to knees via my back, or higher, from squatting or standing. The utter variability in how I could use arms and legs to accomplish this, according to how fast I moved or how close or far apart my feet were at the start … I could easily spend the night working on this, and all I wanted to do was warm up a bit.

Last week, I watched the videos at the end of the rehearsal and made notes on what I thought was working in each, so this week, I started with that. Maybe it’s knowing the camera is on me the whole time is stifling me a little. It’s fraught. On one side, I need to be able to choreograph myself, which when working with others I do by being outside and watching, so the video fulfils the role of this. On the other, I have an awareness of the camera being there, and needing to do something good for it. On top of this, I don’t watch myself as I would another dancer, and have to make sure I don’t confuse choreographing with being self-critical.

Things are starting to repeat though. So I take pauses to work on these; how to throw my arm in a particular way, how to uncollapse … these things I think will evolve later into other things, once their initial paths are known.

It feels sometimes academic, this description of analysing movement, when I’m working on something perhaps poetic in its most tangible and apprehensible sense. And yet it is this academic. I have to stop and spend time working out what the feeling is that is driving a movement, and why the movement doesn’t look like it feels, and then how to move so it both looks the way I imagine it, and feels … well, feels coherent in a sense that it can then be used for other things. That is to say, I spend a lot of time at the moment working singular movements that I imagine can later be combined with others, so that a multiplicity of movements can occur from a single beginning.

I listened to Gorgoroth again, some Burzum, couldn’t find anything that would give the pace I needed to not try and do everything in the first fifteen seconds, so returned to Sunn O))), with Attila Csihar and Malefic. (Finding the names then just led me on an hour sidetrack romp through the awfulness of obnoxious US black metal.)

I was watching the videos again, and the thought last night, in the last 30 minutes I’d finally got closer to what I’ve been trying to make. Up till then, the whole rehearsal had felt stodgy, really not useful. It feels a little early to show anything, only one rehearsal a week for a few hours means it’s like inviting an audience on the second day. Still … a video: abjection Rehearsal Video 1 7 minutes 41 seconds, around 100mb, shoddy quality, sound is Cused Realms (Of The Winterdemons).

abjection video 1 still

Written on November 4, 2011 by frances

abjection — night 2

A shorter night by one hour. Last week I found four hours almost too long, so decided for only three this week. I was scrabbling to get out the door on time, so next week shall return (on a proper dance floor even) for another four hours.

I’d mentioned to Daniel that I was going to have to find a crash mat to remember how to do all the boot camp stuff from ADT. He wrote back, “honey, crash mats for bootcamp is not so necessary if you don’t have them heres some handys.”, followed by a list of things I can’t really do. So I tried to do some of it tonight.

Mainly I have a feeling that the section I am working on, while being improvised, has a highly coherent structure and progression, and while certain things I have a feeling will happen equally might not happen, the two nights of rehearsals have resulted in some fairly consistent ideas. So I spent some time remembering physically how to roll on the floor, how to slide, how to keep low and move.

After boot camp, I spent a bit of time doing some of the Emio Greco technique I could remember from the Double Skin/Double Mind workshops, thinking about this pushing myself to exhaustion and having a very specific movement dynamic that comes from the flicking and shaking of limbs.

Last week was a bit of exuberance; the unknown as I’d seen it behind my eyes becoming real. This week … well not to repeat myself for one, was more methodical. A good half an hour altogether spent analysing at first very slowly, and then with all the assistance of gravity, what happens when I release from a high relevé, stretching up with tension, dropping to a squat, one let turned in, the inside edge of my foot, shin and knee on the floor, the other standing flat on my foot, bum to heel. And from that, what is the action of undropping? If I can go down so fast with gravity, how can I go up just as fast?

It feels like — and is — years since I did this stuff, but even then, never on my own.

This dropping/undropping, some large flicks of elbow and arm, and something incoherently black metal are small things that seem to be coalescing in this section — which for the moment is all I’m working on. The other parts are churning around me, though they don’t feel so critical to solve just yet. As with last week, I videoed it all, and shall have to find some time to cut things out and find in the unaware instances the pieces that are this piece.

Music was again Gorgoroth — this week I had Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam. I also tried some Burzum and various things Attila Csihar, Tormentor, Mayhem … also Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture (which Daniel will remember). It’s something in the music certainly, but something more in the voice. Gaahl and Attila both have this, as well as a visual terror.

I’m not sure if this section will have music though. To have loud black metal blasting from a set of room-filling speakers, or even Tannhäuser, gives an unavoidable colour to the movement and work. Yet in silence it reads as inscrutable, opaque — that thing I hate most in contemporary dance, where the audience is supposed to believe something really important is going on. I’d sooner kill this part than have it become such a worthless thing as that.

Now to wait another week until I do this again. It’s not enough. I’m thinking about it every day, and the curious thing is I have no idea where or when it might get performed.

Written on October 28, 2011 by frances

abjection — night 1

Usually I say, “[name of work] — day 1“, but it’s reasonably fitting for abjection to say, “night 1“, being a somewhat dark piece. After a little work on some ideas in Madrid, and much, much thinking, reading, researching, going over a couple of years now, whatever this piece is, it’s coalesced into something recognisable in my head. Would that I would simply extract the film from behind my eyes, and use that to learn the whole work. instead …

I am rehearsing in Theaterhaus Mitte, in an old school by Märkisches Museum. Which is to say, I’m rehearsing in a classroom. It is night, so the windows make adequate mirrors when I need, and my laptop records my two-three minute bursts of exuberance (then I sit down for a while). I am rehearsing there because it is cheap. I can afford an evening rehearsal for the cost of lunch. I also somehow like the place. It has a feeling I don’t feel alien from. It’s small though, but of the moment it will suffice.

The musical accompaniment was Gorgoroth’s Antichrist. I find Gaahl very attractive at the moment, aesthetically as well as visually (yes, he didn’t join till after Antichrist, and only on Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam does he write the music and lyrics, but … I only had Antichrist yesterday), and the tinniness of black metal, sounding like it was playing on a transistor radio suited the ambience.

I’d been wanting to work on the movement parts of abjection in a studio first. Mainly because the other parts I can rehearse elsewhere initially, and the dancing needs both some room to avoid walls as well as the mentality that comes from being in a studio. I’ve taken to videoing myself for each improvisation (managing to get through most of Antichrist in 2 1/2 hours), trying out different ideas, but altogether very much on one path.

There is a definite — and far more apparent than I expected — black metal attitude to it, or maybe to say if some choreographers use jazz or disco as their motivation and the movement of those genres comes across in the performance, then I’ve done the same with meiner Lieblingsmusik. What was also blaringly obvious is that for me to do what I am going to have to, to make this scene function (and the whole piece), I’ll have to spend some intense rehearsal time working out the mechanics of particular movements; training like boot camp at ADT. The thought of what I’m embarking on — and I was stiff and sore this morning, dragging myself to ballet — is like facing a mountain. I mean so literally. When one is close to a behemoth, it becomes self-evident that endurance and a fair number of bruises shall constitute the immediate future.

I spent the last hour working on the text from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which at the moment, along with a Cantonese Opera demon and a cleaver, constitutes the beginning of the work. I’m conflicted with Kristeva. I am deeply suspicious of any philosopher who seriously entertains psychoanalysis as a legitimate field, firstly because it simply is incoherent with regard to scientific understanding of the mind and secondly because my introduction to philosophy was Deleuze and Guattari. Further, her extremely uncritical involvement with China during the cultural revolution should legitimately be a stain on her reputation equal to any collaborationist.

I’m not sure how I would postulate a Deleuzian regard of the idea of abjection, or whether it’s especially necessary. I’m concerned with a particular horror of one’s self’s corporeality, one that is also perhaps a little unreflective, inchoate, and in this, the part of Powers of Horror in Chapter 1, Neither Subject nor Object, has this.

For the moment, I’m rehearsing once a week. Nor much, perhaps additional fooling around on my own, getting things together. I have no idea when it will fall into a proper rehearsal period, even less get performed — particular things such as a large octopus (deceased), are likely to require significant organisation (and refrigerating). Nonetheless, it’s very nice to be making something again.

frances contemplating abjection

Written on October 22, 2011 by frances

pre-rehearsals

Having taken some time to get this far, I spent the last couple of days extracting a couple of year’s of notes from my old abjection notebook and transplanting them into a new one. Some original ideas now seem embarrassing. Others it’s surprising how little they changed, springing fully-formed to life, and merely refining themselves over time.

I sat in a café yesterday before ballet, reading Howard Barker’s Death, the One and the Art of Theatre. At times the bias of the author is plain; the faint discrimination of which he speaks, I try to read it by changing words, to eradicate this irritation, yet quickly the meaning entangles itself into incomprehension, and I see the only option would be to rewrite these parts entirely.

Still, I come across a description of photography that once more causes a scene to spring fully-formed to life. It feels as if it is one of the remaining missing scenes now accounted for. Difficult to say. It is though comprehensively different from anything else in the work, and so without having been there so early, reading and making notes, there is no way it would have otherwise occurred to me.

For the moment then, this leaves one last unidentified scene. Some possibilities exist for it amidst the ideas which have the feeling of failed seeds, but equally, all of them feel somewhat arrangements of convenience; used because none better exist.

It’s new for me to make a work thus. Normally I do have notes and ideas, and dim visions of what they might amount to, but for abjection, I’ve been working on it and thinking over it for so long, it’s coalesced in my thoughts into a nearly complete work. As for what the effects being in a studio and rehearsing might have on it, that I will begin to find out next week.

Yes, finally coerced myself into rehearsals.

Written on September 1, 2011 by frances

Madrid rehearsals day 4

Ballet first with Dasniya. In ropes. A pity no pictures of that. Something in the distraction of being tied up while at the barre gave some new freedom. Maybe also the last two weeks of regular class (along with wobble board and free weights in the studio) is starting to have an effect.

Later … I work on something that I think will go in abjection. Perhaps it won’t but I know at least that whatever it is that it becomes, the start was where I found myself. Namely in fondu cou de pied, with arched back until my view was that of the ceiling and my sternum stretched open while arms, fingers, twitched and fluttered.

I decided after yesterday to throw away as many of my habitual ideas as I could as they showed up. Gone for now is years of improvisation technology methods, various other things from other choreographers, theatre directors, others, that I have worked with; gone also any physical habit I see on my body. Gone too for this, is working with other people; it’s just me and solitude. It’s a lot to junk, and of course I’m not possessed with the illusion that some kind of year zero is possible or desirable … necessary, but it seems – if I am starting again – like a good place to start.

It’s curious also, that after all these years of study, choreographing, performing, and my attendant agonies with dancing – as in the regimented physical representation of choreography – I feel I can now dance and it’s for something.

Written on August 13, 2011 by frances

abjection archery photoshoot

Earlier in the week, I met Christian crépes at a Belgian café beside the Spree; a first hello since I returned from Brussels. He has a quite splendid camera, and we’ve been talking about photos for a long time. Though bereft of corpse paint, and decidedly not topless, we still managed to make something this afternoon in the Naturkiez that is the west-end of Uferhallen.

All summer the grasses have been springing upwards, and now flowering riotously, it could be so easily – with the slightest imagination – a garden in a forest somewhere, or the Steppe reaching on endlessly. It’s where I practice archery, which of course I nominally practice for abjection, which I make for my own enjoyment.

There is a routine to preparation: assembling the bow; stringing it; applying the guards to forearm and fingers … sighting the target, aiming, drawing, a pause, releasing. Breathing. Christian also filmed me, so I discover how I align myself, how much I wobble or shake when drawing and finding the last instant. I am quite amateur, even if I bring whatever I might know about a body to this pursuit.

The scene in abjection requires all of this, with the exception of release. It makes good practice then, as Christian photographs in the low sun, to hold this draw, until my shoulders and and upper torso start to burn, and to do this over and over. If I plan to hold this for at least a few minutes, I’ll really need to engage in a process of suffering now.

He takes some 200 images and a couple of videos of me shooting over an hour while the sun passes below the tops of the neighbouring apartment blocks. In all this, I shot perhaps six times. Here are some … something of a sequence.

abjection archery photoshoot – 1

abjection archery photoshoot – 2

abjection archery photoshoot – 3

abjection archery photoshoot – 4

abjection archery photoshoot – 5

abjection archery photoshoot – 6

abjection archery photoshoot – 7

abjection archery photoshoot – 8

abjection archery photoshoot – 9

abjection archery photoshoot – 10

Written on August 7, 2011 by frances

archery

Something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. A while ago – in early June – I bought an archery bow. One of the scenes in abjection I have imagined has a slightly megalomaniacal attempt to take out the sun with an arrow. I can’t say for sure if the scene will make sense, function in some way, or even elucidate what it’s about and it’s place in this performance, but nonetheless I wanted to rehearse it well.

My bow is nothing so special, though it looks pretty. It’s a recurved takedown (a Samick Polaris), which means it looks like a sleek upturned handlebar moustache, and the limbs bolt onto the riser, making it dissembled about a third the length it is when together. And when it’s together it’s almost as tall as me. Stringing it is an exercise in learning to dance also; it has the potential to be quite inelegant – lucky I was taught a fancy step-through method by Lewis.

At the other end of Uferhallen is the vast and empty bus-turning and parking ground. Empty is not so good a word. It is full of life, becoming during the course of summer a wilderness of grasses and shrubs abloom and rich with colour. At its widest, it’s nearly 50m and the length is almost four time that. It’s a beautiful, tranquil oases, unpopulated even when the occasional person wanders through. The entrance is guarded by the vast maws of the Uferhallen rubbish bins and assorted piles of detritus, which perhaps help in keeping people from wandering in.

For me, I have a part not so deep inside, bounded on the western side by the blank faces of apartment blocks where I set up to practice. It is a tense engagement; to miss the improvised target (flattened cardboard boxes over up-ended packing palettes) is to strike concrete and shatter the arrow – an expensive blunder. But otherwise …

It becomes a rhythm, like dancing. I attend to the brush of the wind on my skin, its sound, the light as it shifts, the calmness, my breathing. Like dancing, the position is unimportant; if arriving and departing are taken care of, that is.

My training and learning consists of reading what I can find on the internet, watching some videos, closed-eyes feeling my way to a consensus, relying on that I can dance and have a close relationship with the physicality of myself to perhaps, hopefully take something of that and make it useful to the rhythm of pulling the bow string and releasing it.

It is muscular also. Like dancing, climbing, yoga … the other things I do that I call training. I thought perhaps I should have a category for this here too, and write about these things which I make my life with.

How will this archery, Bogenschießen make itself into abjection? I have no idea. I did decide that if nothing else I had to show unequivocally through my handling of the equipment that this was not just something I’d spent half a day or so with prior to a performance; that it must become part of myself or self extended to.

Perhaps later this week I shall be having some photos arranged of this.

Written on March 8, 2011 by frances

goat snake witch dance theatre blackness

The last couple of days I’ve been working on a side-project, cleaning up my dance/performance/choreography website, francesdath.info. I decided a while ago I wanted to move it into WordPress, change the font to Anonymous Pro, and try and make everything I would do by hand-coding possible through the WordPress browser editor.

Success! (Mostly). The design hasn’t changed, except it’s been cleaned up a bit, and a more structured layout used. The video took the longest and was a rather intense learning process, which is going to fall over into some other projects I’m working on at the moment. The words I edited a bit, but mostly left alone. Some time I’ll clean that up also.

As for ‘goat snake witch dance theatre blackness’, I couldn’t decide which word I liked the least and somehow they all sit together quite nicely, like an excess of baroque.

Written on May 9, 2010 by frances

art sunday

Some rather nice art has fallen my way recently, falling around something that might become abjection. Of course it induces controversy, squeamishness and nervous laughter, the kind that says, ‘I don’t understand this and maybe I don’t want to.”

I wasn’t sure how to write about all this. At first I thought I’d make a separate post for each one, then thought the two exhibitions with trans* people in them should go together, though awkward because of the dogmatic and shrill noise from a couple of trans* blogs. One of the pieces – Buck and Allanah – I discovered on the blog of a trans porn star, which in a roundabout way comes over to alien tentacle rape. To avoid more confusion, I decided to throw it all here.

Emile and I sit somewhere in Berlin talking about art (well, mostly making noises, and sometimes talking about art). Tentacle porn comes up, thinking of Hokusai and my wondering where this might exist now. Emile sends me some links. Genki Genki. I wonder how nice this might be to do while suspended upside down.

I’m not sure when I started reading Danielle Foxx’s blog, but I enjoy rather a lot. A long time ago I wrote about Buck Angel and Allanah Starr making porn. A trans man and a trans woman, both quite huge in the porn world getting it on for the cameras. I thought it was beautiful at the time and still do. Reading Danielle, I find they have been cast in bronze.

Then I discover – same day even – an exhibition by artist Andrea Cano and photographer Manuel Antonio Velandia turning Barbie and Ken into trans* women and men. (The whole thing is more interesting in Spanish, because it got hijacked by a bunch of english-speaking, right-on trans-activists who started out by calling the work a product of straight, cis- fetishists until it turned out Andrea is a trans* woman, so then without missing a beat went on to loudly decry her for stereotyping trans*women as hookers whores and streetwalkers with a plastic surgery obsession. Blah. No wonder I prefer trans* porn to trans* (pseudo) academics.)

I like the statues of Buck and Allanah, part of an exhibition by Marc Quinn. I don’t find his attention to particular bodies so easy to reconcile though, and the gallery statement is a bit awful also. It smacks of sensationalism and gawping idiots, “Looka tha freeeks mama!!!”. But equally, the strident victim speech from some trans* blogs on the Andrea Cano exhibition, the current heavy obsession with trans* guys in the queer scene, along with a not unproblematic indulgence into femme play make it all a bit heavy and burdensome.

Aaahh… problems all around. So.

I think the Genki Genki porn is brilliant, bringing to the world of internet porn a lineage in Japanese and asian art that goes back at least to Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Buck and Allanah is poignant on its own, but a little empty in a post-Jeff Koons Cicciolina when seen in the milieu of exhibition and gallery. Barbie and Ken, part of Invisibles: Natures transgressive it likewise so. I smile, it makes me happy to see such things at all, but its worth comes more from the weight of theory loaded on to interpret it. And mostly that theory is decidedly lacking, asinine.

In and of itself, the latter two are not especially interesting. What causes such a work like Buck and Allanah to exist in the first place is the profile of their lives as both porn actors and trans*, and how these interact. I was thinking of Jenny Saville’s painting, Passage here. For me also, I find them more interesting as people, and what they publicly say about their identities. Perhaps then this work is something of a public service announcement, or political art in the vein of Jenny Holzer? Hmmm… no.

If they would do a film with Genki Genki, the universe would be perfect.

buck and allanah