Yesterday was one of those days I really wanted to not happen. It reminded me of a few other pre-show days I’ve had that turned me into a despotic ogre, exactly not the point of making art. Today though was one long and fun, strange piling of six weeks work into something that tomorrow will alive.

Things went, make-up got applied, lights lit, video and televisions and projector cradles made of plastic ties, high heels, bikinis, stuff, loud loud loud grinding metal … a dress rehearsal. Some things still to do, like get the lights working properly, but it’s 3am now, I not going to get time to do things like shave my legs, so I’m off to bed. More sometime soon-ish.

The last week has been a conscious block for me when it has come to choreographing the bikini-high-heel dance-a-thon/showgirl-on-nembutal-and-acid bit. Simply because actually choreographing steps, and-1-2-3-4 … and do-this-now-do-this-next is … I dunno, I think not choreography. The choreographic exactitude and Baroque dimensional complexity of ballet for me is always a wonder, and still intellectually and emotionally one of my primary influences. But to actually make steps and assign counts and structure, I have a vast and serious aversion to that lately.

In making stuff that is mostly drawn from instruction sets that gets pulled into coherency through repetition, I’m working in a way that is far more satisfying choreographically, and profoundly more interesting and involving as a performer and as an audience, but quite inimical to the idea of temporal, procedural and mechanical choreography. So there is a barely-conscious, long-term attempt to actually choreograph, that is, to make concatenations of movement using specific vocabularies in a way that has this pre-historic ballet intellectualisation of body-as-(Baroque)-machine, and do it in a way that owes more to present-day methods of doing things, that is to say, executing code.

The showgirls part though… after trying various methods of bribery, coercion, threats, mental anguish, on myself, it was all too apparent I had no interest in choreographing. Watching everyone get up and turn Park19 into a mosh-pit to Personality Crisis was all I wanted to do, so once again it’s a process of working out what works, and manipulating variables until it kinda works. It’s raw, possibly a disaster, but at 2 minutes it rides that edge between me going, “ow! I can’t look, what am I doing???”, and wanting to get up and thrash around too. I guess if it entertains me that’s mostly the point, no?

Meanwhile, Nikita and Fangyuan were turning Emile and Paul into Cantonese Opera Demons.