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