In the beginning...

This blog will serve as an online journal and record of studio based activities, rehearsals and guerrilla performances associated with Adam James' project, The Mudhead Dance.

Taking place on July 7th, 2012 at V22 Summer Club, London. This project is kindly supported by The Arts Council of England.

What I want to do is overlay and combine worlds, rituals, references and characters to create something that awkwardly sits in-between the real and the mythical.

To reach this new world I will hope to employ the following methods. 

1. Firstly I will develop costumes for three separate tribes inspired by a mix of aspects from appropriated local outsider characters.
2. Work the individual and group choreographic scores developed with dancers in the Siobhan Davies into a series of dances/performances specific to each tribe. 
3. Design three stages based on a combination of aspects from the Pueblo Shipap Mythology and elements of South East London which in some way feel linked to the same myth.
4. Create a troupe of sacred Mudhead Clowns whose job it will be to upstage the rituals performed by the tribes. The Mudheads will wear masks developed from the Mud Circles shoot.
5. Incorporate a live soundtrack played by Professor Frank Millward. The beginnings of which have already been established through working together at the Siobhan Davies rehearsals. The soundtracks brief is otherworldly, underworld, dank, epic and relating in someway to an urban gritty environment. 
6. A trio of ghosts from Tramps gone by will be designed and employed to act as guides to and through this new world. These ghosts are to be based in part on real archival stories, found, remembered and fictionalized. 

Central the projects ambition is my need to create a new moving image work. As such I am approaching this in the same way, albiet a bit wonky, as one might approach a music video shoot. Which is why in part I plan to work with the Director Steve Glashier, with whom I have had the pleasure and sometimes displeasure of working with on many shoots around the world. My ambition is to create 15-20 minute film with a cyclical narrative or sorts to be viewed much like a moving painting.

The film will hinge around three set pieces comprising of performances around a stage, each performance will be viewed, interrupted and eventually upstaged by the Mudheads.

The other primary goal of the shoot is for it to be a live performance. As such it will be open to the public throughout its one day duration. Throughout the shoot the ambition is to integrate the audience into aspects of the shoot and film itself by positioning select small groups choreographically within the stages. The aim is to open up the entire process of making a moving image work, and most importantly to pose the question of how the real relates to the fictional, the stage to the screen, the stage to the film set, the audience to the voyeur. 

This is where I am headed.

The performance hopes to scratch in the dirt

The performance hopes to celebrate the forgotten

The performance hopes to bring the outsider inside

The performance hopes to stir-up the sediment

The performance hopes to soak up the gravy

The performance hopes to upturn the skip