Just me alone … and Sunn 0))) … unjoy.
I wasn’t sure how useful me being in a studio on my own would be, despite a short list of schedule that I knew would take hours to make sense from. I surprise myself. Quite fun and I feel like a despotic scientist doing something resembling computational demonology.
This was a carryover from yesterday and the slight grimness I felt from watching Bonnie and I go through the whole thing and what was missing, why was it hollow like a zombie corpse? So I decided, having no one but myself for entertainment (poor choice of companionship, no?) I’d try and not induce crying by trying to do too much.
(Also pretended I was Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker making her solo Once.)
Things to do: Watch video from start. Try to get through the first ten phrases. The word for today is deliberateness. Find all the detail that has got mushed into choreography, decide – in a purely dictatorial fashion – what is going on, what operations are happening and on what body parts. Make pages of notes (feels like work, but in fact merely a precursor to). Do it a few times and video (haha, really, yes, actually dance a bit, Frances, on your own, with deliberateness).
Bonnie and I decided the first block of five phrases were more-or-less ok, though in watching the video on my own with no real time I have to finish by, I found some stuff that just makes it more … coherent or something. It’s just being accurate about what we’re doing, even when that happens to be a decision we make for ourselves every time we do it. The aim then was to find this level of sophistication in the next lot.
Partially I don’t know the phrases too well, a residue from how we assembled them, with me watching the video and describing it, and partially it was how we learnt them, with a slipping of focus into just choreography, empty steps without the blood that interested me in the first place.
So now there are pages of descriptions, a vague and general plan on how to do this for the other fifty or sixty phrases, and the first ten as a block I feel ok-ish about. It only took four hours or so. (Oh but Bonnie and Lina have to know what I know next.)
It looks as though I’m watching myself while video-ing, like staring in the mirror. I’m actually watching a bunch of maps of the Large Magellanic Cloud and mapping all my body-parts, in a strict order to them. It’s kinda fun, that there’s a progression of movement I go through, but also these maps, what I choose to pay attention to, which ones materialise, all changes what I do on a quite subtle level. I think this is getting close to evolving movement that isn’t a corpse or shell, that has the pressure inside of something living.
Tomorrow I do this with Bonnie, and Friday then (I don’t like to predict how my life will be even that far into the future) I get to do another ten on my own. It’s like learning to dance, or something.
Anyway, a little piece of me dancing for three and a half minutes.
(And big surprise, I found a print of the first page of Leibniz’s manuscript of monadologie, so beautiful to look at and read.)
