We have sore necks. Some nice bruises, a bit of skin missing from the bony bits, and a few nicks from over-enthusiastic fingernails during an exuberant strangling. More of the same, really.

JD yesterday said, “why not do the strangling on their stomachs?’, so we’ve gone off on a very different trip from November. The focus then was very cinematic and slightly stylised, like a medium tight close-up on hands, wrists, forearms, face and neck, the remainder of the victim’s body and the stranglers mostly fixed in space however hysterical it got around the mouth and fingers. Today, following on from the monstrous performances of everyone, Luke, Gab, and Bonnie went quite bezerk, with the singular focus usually reserved for chopping wood.

I spoke a bit after about how it had developed, and how the focus had emerged then, and the importance of the cinematic frame in the 12min.max. development. This time I’m really happy to let it romp wherever it goes, and the out-of-control mania. There’s my own internal conception of what I would like the scene to look like, and opposite that is what happens in rehearsal, which I am completely unable to predict, nor do I wish to control.

We moved on to starting the Botticelli section, his etchings of Dante’s Inferno instead of being scores of bodies in torment become a time-lapse photograph of a single body, hysterically writhing across multiple possible paths. There are several layers to this; one is the finding the simple movement paths between two bodies in the etching, then there is being extremely particular about the accuracy of the bodies positions, the contortions, extensions and tensions in limbs and muscles. On top of this is the death metal equivalent of balletic flourishes, the fluff on top of the pure technique, the aplomb and deportment. The death metal equivalent is the whole pantheon of head-banging and saluting Satan, spasms and raucous moshing. Then there is speed. Faster. Faster Faster. More!!!

How this is all going to fit with Agoraphobic Nosebleed, in 15 second bursts of insanity, grappling folds of skin with pinching fingertips and teeth, a rolling ball of madness …

So we finished rehearsal with a continuation of the plane crash stuff, working in lines, just trying to follow each other’s head and upper body movement, with Acid Mothers Temple keeping us hallucinating, little ticks and shudders and eyes glazed like sucking on a sheet of micro-dots. A superior weirdness is emerging in hell, from five dancers who are just phenomenal individually, and together have a blazing genius and intensity.

Oh yeah, the most important part of any rehearsal: eating Gelati.