A stint at Siobhan Davies

What a treat this was. Having only just recently taken part in a Xavier Le Roy workshop at Siobhan Davies I was so excited about running my own workshop/rehearsal with my dancers and mudheads. The plan was to work with both groups in the studio separately, before integrating them in a final session. Working closely with Andrew Graham these workshops were in many ways a research period for us both. I had an image in my mind which I was working towards for the dances, but I felt I needed to work towards this through a process of experimentation, negotiation and collaboration.

Our first step was to get the dancers working together to create a creature of sorts. I wanted them to come together, first as individuals, then as a group, and finally turning into once organism or creature with a shared authorship and intention. My thinking was that in the Mudhead Dance I wanted to have a group of characters with individual purposes coming together to create a shared ritualistic creature made out of individual overlapping scores. We tried this a bunch of times in the studio and I was immediately happy with how quickly the performers came together and worked in synchronisation. Just the simple act of 10 people moving together in perfect responsive harmony is something totally incredible and beautiful to me. Things were looking good.

The main goal after this was to develop a series of individual scores for each of the dancers, based on appropriated gesture taken from journeys they would make to and from Siobhan Davies studio. The idea was to look for minor aberrations, unusual actions and gestures and to see if these could be deconstructed and reconstructed. Andrew and I wanted to take from the work we had done together in Amsterdam where we attempted to create a score based on appropriated gestures and moments audiences unwittingly brought into a gallery space. The task we set our dancers was to go and find 5 moments to steal. These moments needed to be bodily, and from someone else, unknowingly appropriated from, we wanted unusual gestures which could be defined as 'other'.

The next day in the studio our dancers were faced with the rather difficult task of literally writing a score based on their observed and appropriated gestures. Needless to say there was lots of head scratching, questioning, frowning and screwing up bits of paper. I was reticent, Andrew however was confident in their ability to produce material from this rather abstract task. We tried not to give too much direction, other than to say we wanted to avoid too much interoperation, instead preferring them to be exact with the scores they constructed. They could edit the score as much as they liked, but there needed to be movements grounded in the real as much as possible.

I kept on talking about Muybridge throughout all of this, this picture in particular. Perhaps this was how I was thinking we could disect the appropriated movement?

Once they had worked our their scores, which they did with such amazing commitment and energy they shared their material with Andrew and I and then presented it to the group. The pieces ranged from the slight to high energy, comic, slapstick, awkward and back again. I was blown away.

The next step was to integrate these scores with the memories they had individually of their function with the shared authorship creature we had made in the first session. This was somewhat of a curve ball for the dancers, but we had been very specific whilst making the creature initially, and pointed out to them that they would each need to be very particular about their role, purpose, position and energy within the shared creature. They were asked to memorise this as best they could, with the knowledge we would want them to integrate this into material developed later on.

More paper, more writing, more head scratching, but material was being generated at a rate of knots. The studio was alive with dancers, at first writing on the floor, then putting their scores on the wall before dancing to their own score as if it was the master of them.

Finally we worked towards what would be the main material of the actual performance. The performance would essentially be the same thing three times. Each time the dancers would start as individuals using their own edited refined score based on appropriation and shared authorship creature, they would enter the space and over time start to share a smaller and smaller space until they eventually become one creature. What I wanted is for them to reach a point of freeze at the moment their creature has reached its most perfect efficient form. I was not exactly sure how this would work out, but it felt like a tangible direction and so thats where we all headed...

These workshops were followed by a total of three Guerilla performances, set to take place incrementally closer to my studio on a route from my house. These would take place in Camberwell, Peckham and eventually Bermondsey.