One of the best performances I saw last year, and that was only in development while in residence in Uferstudios was Hans Van den Broeck’s Messiah Run. It premieres in a couple of weeks, and it’s unlikely I’ll be there to see it, but …
It premieres on 26th January at Vooruit in Ghent.
Daniel is performing!
Presented as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s inSPACE:development Program, Reassessment examines concepts surrounding Self-Worth, perception and the consequences of being seen as “unworthy”.
WHERE: Rehearsal room 2 – Adelaide Festival Centre (meet 15 minutes prior at the foyer of the Dunstan Playhouse)
WHEN: January 26 at 4pm and 27 at 7pm
COST: Pay what you can donationRSVP: email hidden; JavaScript is required
ARTISTS:
choreography and performance: DANIEL JABER
soundtrack: DJ TR!P
texts: GABRIELLE NANKIVELL
animation: MATTHIAS WALDT
lighting design and production: DANIEL BARBER** CONTAINS NUDITY AND COARSE LANGUAGE
Hope to see you there!
Daniel Jaber
Once more going west, we take the ungodly hour flight from Schönefeld to Brussels. Dasniya and I are having a two-week residency at Bains Connective to work on pretty much everything we’ve ever talked about to do with Shibari and ropes. It’s heading towards something I’ve been slowly working on for some time, which is a return to Guangzhou.
Michael Garza –the principal Bassoon in the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and one of the first people I met when I landed in that city close to ten years ago – and I have been talking about doing something there with a chamber music wind quartet. This led also to thoughts of taking ourselves south-west to Bangkok. So, Dasniya and I will spend two weeks working on some ideas, and making some kind of performance for the last Friday.
We also hope to wander up to Amsterdam to see some of Cinedans next weekend (no Lewis, sadly), and on the final weekend we have a Shibari Bondage workshop in Bains.
In the meantime, here is some text for an idea of what we may be doing.
The anarchy of knots or the n+2 dimensional space for n >1 or the rope was a plant
By Frances d’ Ath and Dasniya Sommer
The two week residency at Bains Connective in Brussels is the first phase to work on raw material based on the following ideas.
The cultural history of ropes goes back to the Mesolithic. It is a tool for binding, tying, restraining, lifting, fixing or lashing. It can lift cargo onto a ship, or a person off the ground. We tie our shoes every day, and bind damaged limbs or bodies with cloth bandages. At whatever level of consideration, our relations towards, and knowledge about this material, exist in thoughts in countless quotidian moments.
In topology knots are mathematicised. There is knot theory and tabulation itself, which leads to braid theory and physical knot theory, relating more practically to the real world. Back in abstract calculations there are ‘unknots’. A string with its ends joined together, creates an un-undoable loop. Or a wild knot, which is not tame, because of its so-called ‘pathological’ behaviour.
Rope is for justice. In tug-of-war games a collective has to act in concert. If they do well, an inch may decide their triumph. In Japan during times of war, prisoners were suspended and tortured with horrifying rope techniques. The status of the prisoner could be signified with the colour of the rope, and the degree of artistic ornament. Medieval rope was used for similar injustices. Ariadne’s thread, in contrast helped Theseus to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.
Neuroanthropological thoughts invite us to perceive the rope as a tool, like a hammer is, or a pair of chopsticks, or a musical instrument. There is a dexterity added to the ability of the hand by it which it is not simply an addition. That is to say, ‘I’ am not merely ‘using’ a tool, but the ‘I’ that gains familiarity with an object, ceases to delineate between ‘me’ and ‘that’. These objects become part of us and in turn we extend ourselves into them.
In this way, the rope is my fingers, or perhaps to say the rope is my tactile organ, somewhat prehensile also. I do not merely feel through the rope, acting as an intermediary, with sensation being communicated along it towards or from me; I feel through the rope as its qualities are to touch what my skin is also.
It is almost as if we do something close to forbidden by taking this object of use and turning it to (sensual) play. Shibari, Japanese rope bondage does that. Because of its origin as a strand in martial arts technique, it needs to decisively dissociate from real methods for punishment. Instead it goes with consenting intensities of BDSM play or contemporary performance.
Between two people the rope allows for a degree of deferral, both for and against communication. Depending on the actions and intentions at either end however, the deferral in itself is somewhat neutral. It causes a possibility of communication that, by its tangible intermediary status, is not what or how one would commonly interact with another. It instigates a pause in thinking, a space for interpretation.
We work into an improvised dismantling of traditional tying rules and the logic behind these. While tying the body and the room, we bring in theories of Taoism, ‘Wabi-Sabi’, ‘Ma’, which allow us to be slightly less perfect, and impermanent. A rather european analysis of bodies, gender identities and role assignments in Shibari culture accompanies our experiment.
Musically, we are collaborating with Michael Garza, principal bassoonist of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. This is for a performance/installation with his wind chamber music group in Guangzhou and Bangkok in 2012.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Third day, the middle of the week, only two remaining and Friday already planned with Shibari in the park and later in the afternoon Gala and I dealing with process/unprocess again.
I taught again this morning, and moved from that directly into working on these ideas I’ve been toying with. I found myself a little unsatisfied, and wonder if this is partly because some of these things I’ve been messing around with since I first started making work, and having had a break from making, this return has left me somewhat disinterested in my previous methods. It feels peculiar to abandon them; they are, after all perfectly adequate for making movement, and I could spend decades on them – but it seems more interesting, more useful to do something unknown, to start again. Perhaps it is the obsession with the result that detracts from the experimenting.
No Michael today, so straight to Gala and ropes. These things have a quietly obsessive quality – once they become a thing of interest, they make a habit of turning up. Michael and Dasniya had a long trial, followed by Gala and I, more on the floor though. Some things worked brilliantly, others didn’t. Often it turns out that what really is captivating is neither attempts at movement, nor attempts at rope work, as if both are extraneous to the task.
Dasniya finished, working more on the duo, and also brought in ropes – many ropes. It made sense of what she was doing somehow. Often I think that sets, lights, costumes and other decoration on top of the movement is a disguise and a deceit, hiding the lack within the choreography. I was happily surprised then to see for once that this isn’t always the case, and that something potentially cheap (it looked very close to Spartacus at times, as we were tying), could instead raise the movement to a completely new place.
I’ve been wondering in all this what I want to do in making theatre, or dance. It feels necessary to start again somehow … maybe to try tomorrow.
From where I stay, it is a walk downhill across the south of the centre of Madrid, westwards to the river – I think. This morning I taught yoga. It’s been some time since I last did any, yet almost every night I’ve berated myself for not doing at least a few sun salutes or something.
So we made our sweaty way through something like my standard routine. I like it for the physicality; it requires after a time some muscle pushing to get through, and the rhythm from one pose to another lends an endurance quality. After, I found some free weights, and so decided to even out the imbalance between left and right arms (surely not a single-day task).
Dasniya started, working on a something ballet / something not duo / pas de deux of Gala and Michael. They fit very well together, height, strength, attitude – it makes for dancing that can be eerily in unison. It’s nice for me also to see Dasniya in a studio working with dancers, choreographing. Quite a new thing for me to see with her.
Lunch in the park. Coffee from the machine in the hall.
Michael started after lunch, working first with some things for us to do, whispered to each, causing amusement for him and us, and then me finding myself inserted into the duo he’d been working on with Gala and Dasniya last week. So, I dance.
Gala and I found we partner together quite well somehow, during process/unprocess, and this is carrying over into the days here. Partnering Dasniya – or even dancing with her in any way other than in ballet class – is new, but it also finds a similarity. Perhaps because we are all tall, and have known each other for years.
Which I was thinking, while watching Gala rehearse the other two with a chair, in this vast studio in Madrid – that working with your friends, making art or theatre or dance or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much the best thing one can do.
We ate soup and drank some wine for dinner in a small café delicatessen on the top of the hill at Anton Martin. Tomorrow, I teach again, and work on some more of my things. Friday we plan for shibari and photos in the Casa de Campo.
Some photos from Monday – three each from my and Dasniya’s rehearsals after ballet in the morning with Michael…
SOIT/Hans Van den Broeck – Messiah Run
Reassessment – Daniel Jaber
tea ceremony shibari
abjection video 1 still
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