Wherein I discover that ImPulsTanz knows about my blogging of settlement and having revealed as such in their newsletter, I suspect the game is up.
No yoga for me today, instead a pleasant sleep-in, snooooze… oops I’m going to be late. Rolling on the floor with Ivan, no concrete is not so hard if you accept it doesn’t yield. Box-steps, pointing, prancing, prancing and turning and pointing, walking in many different ways, running a little. I realised this year I like simple, repetitive things. Excitement over many many many pliés, each one new, the same over running, each step oh who knows what it will bring.
Trying… to… remember…
The bound dancing has become dragging, pulling these bodies around on the floor, sometimes getting them up slightly only to drop them down. I think what I like in this is that it is not so much violent, and most things tend towards being non-antagonistic or confrontational. There’s a gentleness and care in swinging these somewhat helpless four about, though it can get frenzied at times. It’s much grunt work though, figuring out how to move efficiently a person who can’t do so much to help. And figuring out how to move each person as an individual. Jonathan is quite happy to be pushed down a cliff and bounce his way to the bottom, Elodie is deceptively strong and has a completely different momentum. It was good today to spend some time just working out how to do things with one person, become familiar.
I think we did handshaking again. I have a memory of this.
Fighting. Stalking. Circling and lashing out. It’s an old movie, maybe a black and white war movie with James Stewart, sleeves rolled up, a punch comes, single, deliberate, aesthetic in the completeness, a head snaps back, staggers, more circling, maybe pouncing and driving a shoulder into the stomach. Or Sergio Leone, a long silence and flash of naked brutality.
Two people circle and smack their chests with their hand while the other fist lashes out, it’s disturbingly convincing when it all happens. We do this two-by-two, then into groups of four. Then another change.
The girls dancing in a line, slow motion to The Knife. I didn’t notice how similar these eight are in height, but possibly is an illusion of the stage they are on, the backlighting, the fans blowing their hair. Forever doing the same moves, heads fall back with one hand behind, hips jut, slow dirty running turning and clapping… Tried in a line then a group, three, two, three. I think it looks better this way the sense of depth and also that the inexact unison gives it a more feral, deranged, orgiastic sense, like the rows of dancers at the ImPulsTanz party, bedlam and sweating walls.
The fighting is added in, in the darkness. It feels… hmmm… like therapy. All this together sometimes acting out base and damaging scenarios, sometimes caring for each other, somehow always morally ambiguous, and perhaps in this we reveal ourselves as unsympathetic.
I forgot the present. How to give. Maybe when I don’t want to, or want something in return, or want to manipulate, or don’t want to receive.
Lunch?
Oh! Running. (Was before lunch I think.) As therapy. How to indulge the desire to escape the settlement by running away. Some try to escape and are stopped at the river (two tonnes of sand apparently arriving tomorrow), and are then held by two people and forced to run, held off the ground, legs shackled by arms maybe, all manner of exhausting yourself through grunting physical exertion.
I’m surely forgetting something.
Concetta! James! Elisabeth! Jean-Pierre Louis Saint Bouillion mmblemumblemmble… We talk through with Anushka all this, or maybe better to say the post-yesterday discussion she and Hans had about this, then begin to write a three-act play that should last several minutes only. I get to play the Baroness, Hans my butler, Concetta my cleaning lady and Johan the visitor with the very very long French name.
Act one my happiness is broken by discovering the Baron is dead (James: “The Baron is dead!”), act two further grief discovering he left the castle to Concetta (James: “The Baron left left you nothing”), act three I kill myself, and it is revealed the Baron had syphilis infecting Concetta and causing her thus to kill herself (she had an affair with him)(James: “The Baron dies of syphilis!”), and then Jean-Louis who was in love with her also follows us out the balcony window, leaving only the Machiavellian James with castle and emptiness. I return from the grave to haunt him.
That’s if we play it straight. All the stuff from yesterday applies: Misheard lines, wrong lines, improper prompts, set disasters, lighting mishaps, oh catastrophe, arguments backstage, primadonnas, oh I think I should be an alcoholic for this scene, or maybe actually drunk. And to do all this in several minutes, fast and hysterical but trying to keep up with what comes next.
We finished at 9. Only my body was tired and my brain fuzzy, I wanted to keep going if this wasn’t burying me.