To Thursday then. A day for technical sortings out, with Silvano calmly attending to our needs, and the mess we had been accruing getting shifted to one side to be replaced with lights and other equipment. We worked out a couple more sections before, after, around this, and got through most of the list piled up before ‘tech run’.

After six o’clock, on our own, we prepared for our own run, which fell apart right where I begin tying Dasniya. This messy tying breeds uncertainty. Will the ropes hold or slip? Cinch in a bad place or begin sliding apart until all previous efforts are rendered null? It’s so unpredictable for me and the anxiety of it was making it impossible to even consider why I might be doing this, to concentrate on performing and directorial issues.

To make a performance in which the audience sees suffering or experiences it personally is one thing, and a thing which I’ve always had an attraction for. Against that, the last thing I want to do is cause the performers I work with to suffer, for the performance to be an unpleasant endurance. It’s easy enough when one is outside and observing something not working and causing pain to stop it, take a pause, try it in another way. When I’m inside it myself though, this ability vanishes. And so I became quite overwrought because of lengths of recalcitrant rope.

After much experimenting, failing, trying other approaches, we had something that worked, and commenced the run again. Alas what worked for me did not for Dasniya, and sliding the ropes off thwarted her.

Thursday finished around eleven in the evening, and Friday began twelve hours later.

…

Warming up three times, rehearsing some parts, getting through a dress run with Silvano, taking pauses, rummaging through the checklist, it starts, we wait, Jolivet begins, Ligeti, we progress through the scenes (five or seven depending on how you count), and it becomes over.

…

We have the videos, and some time next week photos from Silvano, so these shall make it here and elsewhere in due course. Today and Sunday we are still at Bains with a Yoga and Shibari workshop (which fortuitously has led to some China and South-East Asia connections), and Monday afternoon the flight (would that it were the train) t0 Berlin.

Some thank yous:

Bains Connective have made these two weeks possible and a joy in many ways. Dasniya and I would like to thank both Lilia and Diana for inviting us and our ropes. A particular mention must be for Silvano, for numerous things, not the least for operating sound, lights, filming with two cameras, taking photos, drilling suspension points, and keeping everything running smoothly. Also to Gala, who came in on Tuesday, watched through our first attempt at a run, gave an hour of of very appreciated notes, and cooked us dinner.

A day of running through what we have up till now and making it all slightly more coherent, also finding one more idea come clear just before dinner, and assembling something of an order. So we have around half an hour of stuff at the moment, which will condense once we’ve sorted out how to get through it and added/subtracted things.

Gala came in around 1930 to watch this, us on green dance floor, lit through the glass back door from outside, and we tried to work our way through everything. Fairly obvious what needs attention, but nothing felt from the inside that it needed to be excised. An hour or so pre-dinner conversation between us three after going through the piece scene by scene, has given us plenty to work on.

We have a skeleton now, and what needs to be given attention today and tomorrow in the small time we have is clarifying what we’re doing, and how this shapes differences across each scene.

Dasniya thought the last scene in almost darkness should continue for half an hour or so, which could be beautiful depending on what happens before. Not for this week though, but hopefully we’ll have time to see where that might go once we find our way to Guangzhou.

It’s already morning and past time when we would be warming up.

After some scruffing around it was already midday, so we warmed our ligaments and bones for an hour and were about to begin beating up on some ropes when Silvano arrived. By the time he’d departed most of the day’s first meeting questions had been sorted out, an incomprehensibly rough lighting plan scribbled together (we hope for absence of rain, hail, snow, general wetness on Friday), and it was two o’clock without a single leg having been swung.

The rope beating/flailing idea, which has gone through three iterations now, arriving somewhat back where it started, has possibly become what it will generally resemble on Friday. If I could make a more qualified statement emphasising the complete lack of certainty, I would. Our right hips get quite battered, so we thought we’d warm up next by doing it on the other leg also.

For music, we try André Jolivet’s Pastorales de Noël for Flute, Harp and Bassoon once more, occasionally underlaying Throbbing Gristle to fill it out somewhat. Music has been a peculiar problem for these days; something that deserves more time to attend to, but also keeps getting pushed to one side.

Two hours later, we pause for a late lunch, before I wander off into some self-bondage of an especially disorderly type. Dasniya hangs herself by the neck, and so we move erratically through our day’s list.

I had an idea last night, that I thought could fix, or return to something we’d worked on last week that hadn’t been so successful. We’d been trying to make some kind of movement from knot theory tables, but it looked kind of empty. It seemed to me that if there was a need for movement as movement, it already existed in the tying of someone. Remove the rope and the other person (and either blindfold oneself, or close one’s eyes), and restage the process of tying a Takatekote or Teppo or suspension, and it’s possible there would be the foundations for movement (or to call it dance). This, as with the next project, seemed to have something in it.

Approaching tiredness, the final idea we worked on was something of room installation bondage tying rope-knot mess. I’d also been thinking about untying – possibly one of the rings with all the leftover ropes attached. Our studio has a terrace with a glass door leading to it at the far, southern-ish end. It’s large enough to work on, and so it seems we may be splitting ourselves here; one to tie all the ropes together, the other to untie what was removed.

And so, we now have six or seven small scenes somewhat connected, overlapping each other, certainly unfinished and needing the coming days to make sense of, elaborate upon, find each other in. There are one or two (or three) more we have yet to reach, which may have to wait for the next rehearsals, though it would be good to find time for these also. No pictures again, and words that are mostly descriptive of what we did, missing all the in-betweens, the talking back and forth, worrying at ideas, finding things, breathing rope dust.

Time: Friday, December 9 – 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Bains Connective
Address: Bondgenotenstraat 54 rue des Alliés
Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest (Brussels, Belgium)
Google Map

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 for a performance/installation collaboration with Michael Garza, principal bassoonist of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra.

In this project, we are regarding the history and culture of ropes and knots.

We use rope as a tool for binding, tying, restraining, lifting. Knots can also be mathematicised, as in knot theory. In Japanese rope bondage, it is as if we do something forbidden by taking this object of use and turning it to play.

We work into a dismantling of traditional ropework 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 less perfect; impermanent. A rather european analysis of bodies, gender identities and role assignments in Shibari culture accompanies our experiment.

the n+2 dimensional space for n>1

Dasniya and I have spent much of the last two days working on the repetitive, exhausting leg rope ideas. These ideas are a little like the tide, it comes in, pauses, retreats; sometimes they seem like they’re really making sense, other times wondering if they will also be assigned to the list of ideas that went nowhere.

Last night, after we’d finished and while angling towards bed, Dasniya played the video of us working through this section, into and out of the humiliation stuff, along with some music Michael in Guangzhou had sent — André Jolivet’s Pastorales de Noël for Flute, Harp, and Bassoon.

Trying to find the singular discussion in an idea, also without distilling so much it becomes reduced and tends to wards nothing, finding how it fits together with itself and with other ideas (here I mean the above-mentioned presenting the representations of humiliation), and finding where the air leaves the room in this, where the idea is empty or has an overwhelming lack.

This music, on its own I would not have expected to be something I’d use, but seeing the video with this overlaid, somehow it worked. Perhaps it won’t work when we try it again … nonetheless … It’s not a case of the contradictory and opposing creating a complimentary milieu.

The first week is finished. We have some ideas, hopefully they will evolve in the coming week, as well as be met by some other things we haven’t worked on. Having a pause, even for a day, is a welcome occurrence. We’d planned to rehearse every day, but Bains is closed on Sunday, and towards the end of last night I was feeling decidedly unable to coerce myself to be inspired or creative.

plant arm bondage

unshibari and unsuspension

whale skeleton

We have some stuff now. End of day four. We worked on the unshibari messy tableau, kind of a still life, or corpse-tying for some time; lso on the Japanese Kyudo/tea ceremony walking, forward and back – better in socks; and on the leg battery/repetitions. A short time on my self-bondage. There is enough now to say we’ve made a start, and to say there’s a lot missing. It’s a delicate thing, only two weeks and to wish to have something concrete by the end, though of course not finished, and yet what is lost by rushing through everything in a matter of days when months would be more suited?

What is this work then? We talked about post-modern feminism. I wasn’t sure of what a definition of this would be, though my guesses were more-or-less in accord with what I later read; I simply never described it that way. It feels slightly odd, though also it makes sense. (I remember a lecturer hawking along about Habermas and the others, Lyotard and Modernism, Late-Modernism, Post-Modern versus Postmodernism …)

We are obviously saying something about something here. If it were a performance I was making on my own, I’d likely have a text I’d be working from, whatever philosopher I was currently in bed with. Once I made only dance; I choreographed. Then came theatre until it was more-or-less performance art that I made. Lately I can only seem to do the former if I have the latter in mind. Maybe to read some theatre or a play?

dasniya un-suspended

We had a long discussion about what we are doing before the lunch-ish break – no dinner break it was already 17h – which resulted in a final couple of tasks where things started to coagulate.

On Saturday we talked with Ivo for a while about dramaturgy, or the perceived necessity of having an external dramaturge. I had been trying various things from Dasniya, and finished with an un-shibari experiment that had something worth repeating, yet was also empty. I think the issue is neither one of dramaturgy, as we are both well-versed in the milieu within which shibari, bdsm, and all the other facets of rope resides, nor is it one of direction – as in stage direction. What isn’t clear is what this work is about.

We have a lot of ideas, topics of research, small things that have become entire processes for working with rope; we’ve discussed from feminism and identity theory to physics and knot theory along the way, and obviously these things somehow fit into the work, along with the specific Japanese aesthetics of traditional shibari and so on, which we also play with. The question of what the work is about is perhaps better understood if this was a theatre work, if there was some text to work from and characters who must arrive in the room. Coming from working with Daniel Schlusser on Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, also with shibari, possibly my thoughts are a little this way.

It’s also for me the need to have something to hang on to, that helps in pushing a work along; that I can use as a reference point to criticise and justify my decisions. Obviously working in a collaboration changes this and might even make it the not-possible way to continue. So, we talk, maybe for me to be able to make sense through words what is allowable so I can do things with conviction.

There are some almost formal things – flicking to uncoil ropes, the sliding walk of the tea ceremony or kyudo archery … – that will probably recur throughout, and cause a rupture in the mess of ropes. Other things – at least in what might be construed in my head as the section we’re working on at the moment – need a day or two refinement before I suspect they can be deemed coherent enough to make a remark on.

It pulls between an abstract, close to formal dance or movement and another that is perhaps a metonymy or representation, and yet another, lurking beneath, that is … neither of these. Maybe corporeal, sensorial, coming from rendering a character as much as an own internal emotion …

It seems likely we’ll be working all weekend. After all, it’s only two weeks, so twelve days instead of ten counts for something.

Daniel Schlusser’s new performance, a co-production with Chamber Made Opera and Bell Shakespeare’s Mind’s Eye, for which I somehow contributed Japanese rope bondage, is premiering as I write this, half a world away. Really wish I was there.

You can see it over the next three days …

Sounds of an army massing, or is it trumpets…or thunder? Then a chorus of angels…
OPHELIA sings
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck’d the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

OPHELIA DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

Thursday 24 November 2011 at 9pm
Friday 25 November 2011 at 9pm
Saturday 26 November 2011 at 9pm
At a Private Living Room in Armadale

Ophelia doesn’t live here anymore reveals the story of Ophelia as a monomaniacal botanist – wilful, unpredictable and in love with a self-harming sociopath.

Ophelia doesn’t live here anymore is a cross-artform opera, a collaboration between Daniel Schlusser, composer Darrin Verhagen, video artist Richard Grant and choreographer Frances d’Ath,
with design by Marg Horwell. Performed by Daniel Schlusser, Lily Paskas
and Karen Sibbing in the role of Ophelia, the project will bring together text from Hamlet,
video, physical extremes and Verhagen’s dark combination of music and Noise to create
a new chamber opera performance installation.

That suck’d the honey of his music vows,

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,

The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

In-between there was much coding and designing, learning of typography and how to edit and create typefaces, little reworkings, bigger reworkings … Daniel spent the previous six weeks of so sorting images, text, and other things, and the site went from being this familiar thing I’d looked at for so long into what it was intended to be — his. So, I’m very happy to for Daniel’s site to be alive.

You can find him at danielschlusser.com.

danielschlusser.com – home

danielschlusser.com – productions page

danielschlusser.com – life is a dream

danielschlusser.com – daniel himself

danielschlusser.com – news

danielschlusser.com – 404