Back in the studio!
I’ve been lucky enough to have been offered free studio space from Dance Base over the past few weeks. I’ve gone from finding forests, and quiet spaces and adapting around swings to having a massive beautiful space all to myself. I have to say both have their challenges but I am so grateful to be back in the studio again.
I also am so grateful to have been supported by Citymoves. I was lucky enough to have received an artists bursary from them to investigate my practice from home. As mentioned in a previous blog post, this support gave me the motivation and structure I needed to start investigating my improvisation distillation practice, and reflection process, which is essentially this blog. Their support has allowed me to take various detours and has kept me moving in different ways throughout lockdown.
I’ve been yearning to be back dancing in Scotland for a while now, and even in the midst of a global pandemic I’ve been so well supported by these organisations. I am so happy to be dancing here and I can’t wait for the Scottish Dance Community to be thriving again, and people will be dancing together and sweating on each other and sitting shoulder to shoulder in theatres again soon enough.
I thought I would share a few videos below. I’ve been working on developing some set movement material, what you’ll find below is sort of version 2.5 of something I’m thinking won’t be finished until version 10 or 11. But I thought I would share it here regardless.
To create material I’ve been working with automatic writing, in which I set myself a timer for three minutes and just write without thinking. I then use the words as landmarks and inspiration for movement - it also helps me keep track of the order. Some of the other things I’ve been playing with is trying to learn my own improvisation. That process requires watching a video of myself over and over again and learning the movements I’m doing - which is pretty self explanatory I guess but much easier said than done.
I’ve also been trying to find other moments of contact, and similar to the swing, moments of sharing weight with another object. I worked for quite a long time one day on sharing my weight with the wall, but I haven’t gotten too far in creating any set material using it. The selection below is just some light-hearted improvisation, but what I love about sharing weight with the wall is that from the perspective of the video it allows you to do things that seem like they should be physically impossible. There are a few transfers of weight there that definitely would have ended up with me being splatted directly onto the floor, but the magic of shared weight and physics allows for so many possibilities.
I have lots and lots of footage from my time in the studio, so I’m only sharing a fraction of my explorations, and there’s still so much further I want to take the wall research and I also want to continue going with the initial phrase too - I’m excited to keep going.
