Dancer auditions!!!!

Ok, that time has come. ACE grant has been accepted, 2nd time lucky! Now its action stations, GO GO GO! There aint much time to get everything done, its gonna be and already has been a cerrrraaazzzzy few months. So, auditions have come round. Thanks hugely to David Thorp for sorting me out at short notice with use of his very lovely Performance Studio space in V22. Andrew Graham led a reasonably technical audition with a fairly tricky sequence to master in a short space of time. We had about 20 or so people for 10 spaces, so it was going to be hard. A few people dropped out pretty quick feeling that this was beyond their ability, fair enough. Special mention needs to go to Paul Casson Yardley. A stage fight co-ordinator from York, not a dancer, at all, in any way. However, that said he totally went for it, in his lather jacket and cowboy boots. The man is a legend, which is why he is most definitely in albeit in a slightly more naked role...

As a final task we provided a selection of images of people in crowds, conflicts, battles, gatherings, rituals and ceremonies and asked people to create a short choreographed piece in response to an image or images of their choice. These were some of the images.

After two hours Andrew and I were really happy with everyones energy and enthusiasm, some people had really gone out on a limb. We snuck off to a pub for a couple of pints and Guinness and to decide on a short list. After much deliberation, we settled on these.

D A N C E R S

Max McBride

Megan Broadmeadow 

Annakanako Mohri 

Evangelia Kolyra 

Stella Dimitrakopoulou 

Victoria Fischer 

Iefiz Putra 

Anastasia Papaeleftheriadou 

Soyoung Park (Shan) 

Typhanie Delaup

Epic views and dustbins

A couple of snaps of my my journey to and fro my studio at V22 over the last few weeks. I count myself lucky every single day, why? Because of the view from the roof you see below. Arguably the best roof stop studio in the capital. Love it. 

Just in case you in any doubt, click this 'link' to see a wintery 360 panoramic shot I took from the roof.

As for the dustbins, noticed this on the way home after a long day in the studio. Is this a regular occurrence, a Southwark Performance initiative, or lazy alien disguises and very poorly planned attack on a leafy suburb? 

Devious plans, dances and dyslexic minds

So this is how things are looking inside some of my sketchbooks.

This drawing is pretty much where it all began. Its taken from a photograph of a fabled Mudhead Dance. As soon as I saw it, something about it grabbed me. Somehow, someway, this needs to be made. I love the way they build their town with performance in mind with ladders coming out the top of all of the houses and kivas. 

  

So my plan is to stage this rather bonkers performance/shoot at V22 in one of the exhibitions halls like the one I used to shoo the Booger Dance in last year. With that in mind I have began mapping out how the space could be used with three or four stages, a central crew and roaming performative and audience elements. The last drawing is pretty much the direction I am now heading in. My ambition is for either the stages or the performers to have a visual relationship to the place in which they are appropriated from which may end up being a borough I live in or near or somewhere I travel through on a regular basis.

This image of a mount is something I keep on returning to again and again. I think it something to do with a the ritual of making and worshipping a mount, mound, tower that draws me to it as a stage for performance. This images is one of many that I scribbled down on the pages of my sketchbook. Somewhat reminiscent of when Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind repeatedly sculpts a tabletop mountain out of mash potato. I think it something I will keep returning too.

Towards the end of 2011 I was approached about a possible group show at 176 gallery. I got very carried away with myself and produced a series of increasingly mad as a hatter plans for performances which took over the entire gallery space. Needless to say its yet to happen, lol. A little nuts maybe, but something in there stuck and the seed I planted back then is now beginning germinate in new a new pasture.

 

Plans for zig-zag hand tramp ghost dance.

Highly technical spec plans for stage design. Note, very important - 'smoke machine'.

A hobo shaman quintet band playing in the splash pool of an underground waterfall cave grotto, naturally, flanked synchronised cheerleader tramps.

Something approaching refined. Next step, make maquettes and scale model of this and others.

Shipap - Shipapu, Shipapuyna, Shipapu(yna) or Zuni Shipapulima

In a quest to find something ritualistic I decided to delve deeper into the Pueblo creation stories.

Doing so I discovered the fascinating story of Shipap, which is The Pueblo land of the dead, an underground kingdom of the corn-goddess, Iyatiku. This place is regarded not only as the place to which the dead go but also as the place from which the tribes emerged and whence babies come.

Loosely speaking the myth has parallels with the creation story of Adam and Eve. In the Shipap story the Pueblos begin life underground, in a place near perfect albeit underground. The pueblos are for the large part happy, going about their lives, but the actions of a few. These few find life is boring for them and so they start to behaving in an unruly, lewd and promiscuos manner. The rest of the pueblos decide its time to leave this world, and in so doing leave this group of heathens behind. A seed is planted and a tall vine grows. Using this vine as a ladder they ascend to the roof of the cave world. They chip, scrape and work away at the roof until a whole is made through a new brighter, better world. Ascending the vine the good pueblos leave the heathens behind, sealing the roof and trapping them below. In short, this same pattern happens three more times, with the final group of pueblos eventually emerging into what we know as earth. 

There is something about the wanton acts of the few against the will of the many that I felt I could explore. 

A mythical conflict, played out on an underground stage...

Shite-hawks

outsider |ˌoutˈsīdər|

noun

1 a person who does not belong to a particular group.

• a person who is not accepted by or who is isolated from society.

In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the government to 

relocate most Native Americans of the Deep South east of the Mississippi River from their homelands to accommodate European-American expansion from the United States.

Manifest Destiny:

was the 19th century American belief that the United States (often in the ethnically specific form of the "Anglo-Saxon race") was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific Ocean.

The Indian [was thought] as less than human and worthy only of extermination. We did shoot down defenseless men, and women and children at places like Camp Grant, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee. We did feed strychnine to red warriors. We did set whole villages of people out naked to freeze in the iron cold of Montana winters. And we did confine thousands in what amounted to concentration camps.As slavery became a racial caste, the Virginia General 

Assembly defined some terms in 1705:

"All servants imported and brought into the Country... who were not Christians in their native Country... shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion.... shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master... correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction... the master shall be free of all punishment... as if such accident never happened." – Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705

In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, an outsider is a type of creature, or "creature type". Outsiders are at least partially composed of the essence (if not the material) of a plane other than the Prime Material Plane.

What follows is a bunch of images sifted out of the thousands which I collated over the last year or so. In one way or another these images relate to either The Booger Dance, Mud Circles or The Mudhead Dance, some a little more obliquely than others. Like all artists I am very much a magpie, I pick things up on my day to day ramblings to the studio, and occasionally they form a permanent part of my nest.

 

   

 

  

Something which sticks in my mind was a show I saw at the V&A sometime in 2011. An incredible show of costumes for theatre, which I sadly cant remember the name of. It was one of those shows which I went along to not expecting anything much but ended up being blown away by one thing in particular, which now looking back was probably a major influence on all work. These were three restored archive Russian films about totalling about 6 minutes called 'Dance before the Ballet Russes', dating from approximately 1881 to 1909. The films were choreographed by Luigi Manzotti, Nicolai Legat and Mikhail Fokhine. I managed to shoot a couple of seconds a snaps on my phone, just before a jobs worth security guard told me off. 

And now onto the beginnings of The Mudhead Dance. My Mud Circles shoot had gone well, better in fact than I had hoped, though strangely I have still yet to edit this film? I am now fairly certain it will form part of The Mudhead Dance film, not sure where or how, but I think it will fit somehow.

So the lead up to the Mud Circles shoot, and then this work began with a collaborative body of research with a dancer and choreographer friend of mine, Andrew Graham, with whom I had worked on The Booger Dance. We decided it would be good to spend a period of focussed time together working through ideas and seeing how we could work together. I put a proposal forwards to PAL LAB for their movement and meaning grant and was thrilled to be awarded a grant. If your interested in seeing how that panned out we set up a blog named after our first collaborative project in the Red Light district Amsterdam 'VLO'. On it you will find ramblings, meanderings, thoughts, ideas and research a lot of which fed into The Mudhead Dance.

I felt my practice had reached a point where questions needed to be asked, I wanted deepen my understanding of the ‘outsider’, somewhat of a preoccupation of mine. Prior performances and films of mine have involved processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, in which I appropriated characters and gestures from the streets of London and re-staged them for a camera or live audience. All of my work is essentially a study and interpretation of the theatrical nature of real-life encounters. I like to see how re-framing, re-staging and changing their context can open up new worlds from which questions can be raised about how we ‘perceive’, and are in turn defined by gesture and façade.

 

Over time I have created an archive of appropriated micro-performances, objects and situations in the form of candid films, photographs, recorded sounds and drawings. I live in sunny South East London, an area which is a constant source of inspiration to me. I find myself drawn to the actions of the over laden man running for the bus, the sound of two drunks fighting, the person talking to themselves on a Bluetooth headset, the old lady nervously withdrawing money from a cash point, the mythical white witch of Camberwell, the man avoiding cracks in the pavement, and the scary woman barking at pedestrians as they walk by.

My broad interest in role-play, recurrent myths, rituals and the fool eventually brought me to discover the Pueblo Indians, in particular the sacred clowns known as Mudheads. What fascinated me was how within Pueblo society there is a high value placed on the role of the fool and their unique ability to restore equilibrium through anarchic behaviour. Clownish depictions of western stereotypes, lewd genital thrusts, excrement flinging and dunking of children in rivers are all venerated when perpetrated by Mudheads. These actions attain a holy status when practiced by the Mudhead or ostensible outsider. 

What is it that distinguishes and elevates the actions of fools from one culture to the next? Is there a need for a scapegoat within cultures? What actions define an individual or group as ‘other’? 

Over a period of two months Andrew Graham myself began using the body and movement to respond to subtexts, candid photos and specifically the writing of Jacques Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator. Something we tried to nail down in our discussion was what makes ‘us’ distinct from ‘them’?

Running parallel to my research with Andrew was my ACE proposal for The Mudhead Dance. Let me tell you now, writing an ACE proposal is no small undertaking! I began working on my proposal around November 2011, brought a producer on board to help me out around January 2012 and finally submitted it around Feb 2012. Dishearteningly my proposal was initially rejected. For perfectly sound reasons, mostly related to the logistics of me staging a £10,000 film shoot rather than my hair brained concept, which was reassuring!




These following pictures are just some of the characters specific to South East London that I have spotted over the last few months. In one way or another these characters will form the start points of the ensuing work.