Thursday, the last day of our second week, though it feels like our first week as we were in the VR Lab all last week, and only now are settled in Chunky Move, where we turn the lights off, open the blackout shades on the skylight and bask in a somewhat submarine transparency of the indirect light hazily sliding eastward across the floor as the sun moves into afternoon.

I have been apprehensive. I decided a good name for my next blog would be, “frances thinks about things then thinks about how to feel anxious about these things.” This week, after the maelstrom of the first day has been slightly slow, or rather a feeling of pushing against immovable resistance. I’d wanted to get through past the learning from video, past the learning to remember, past the settling of movement onto our bodies, all things that in terms of making performance don’t especially interest me beyond a small part of time, and on to what I hoped would be the fun stuff.

It was only Thursday we got to that, and the anxiety of if it didn’t work, I’d have to make some nice steps and do the conventional choreographic thing and pretend it was all evolving, generative systems. There is a lot of, “Well, we can’t go to that detail in doing this thing” in astrophysics, as in, “It’d be nice to model the entire universe but I’m not that smart, so I’ll just do the gravity bit of it”. I’m starting to sense this wave of realisation nearing me also.

So we got to a point where I had to not be dancer anymore and be choreographer for a couple of hours and watch. We ended, after I established a rather haphazard system to improvise from the phrases with, a … thing … that might work quite nicely. What works so far is the proximity of two people, and the unison of movement that then gets unfolded by various operations. In itself, when we get to the level of familiarity with the improvisational operations and methods, this alone on top of and disrupting the rather intricate, creepy and alien phrases would make something beautiful in itself.

Of course I want to go further … at least until I have to stop.

Now that we have some understanding of this with two people, reintroducing myself could make for 3-body fun. And certainly a need for a video camera. And then …

An impending meeting about Far Infra-Red and Radio analysis of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a bunch of stuff to understand and make useful on TreeSPH and SPH alone, stuff on Kepler’s elliptical orbits and 2- and 3-body orbital problems… that could be the entirety of the basic structure, that then somehow must have a sensible and legible correlation with short and long unfoldings, bins, the phrases themselves, and huge monsters of other stuff I won’t mention now as it induces confusion and pain.

Thursday was rather good.