memory | invention of memory | the mind of the body | hope
‘ A body whether sitting writing or standing thinking or walking talking or running screaming is a bodily writing. Its habits, stances, gestures and demonstrations, every action of its various regions areas and parts all emerge out of cultural practices, verbal or not, which construct corporeal meaning. Each of the body’s moves, as with all writings, traces the physical fact of movement and also an array of references to conceptual entities and events. Constructed from endless and repeated encounters with other bodies, each body’s writing maintains a non-natural relation between its physicality and referentially . Each body establishes this relation between physicality and meaning in concert with physical actions and verbal descriptions of bodies that move alongside it. Not only the relationship between physicality and conceptual non natural, it is also impermanent. It mutates, transforms, reinstates with each new encounter.’ Leigh Foster. S ( 1995)
The body as it stands, a living monument, shedding skin, heaving flesh, watering eye , it breathes a history, silent, an inferno.
The body as it rests takes the from of the imprint of the space in which it lingers.
“Hold me” “ Touch me” “ Carry me”
An encounter, momentary, on the train reminds the lady of her skin as another brushes it with theirs. Their bodies connected in momentary performance, remembered and stored in an archive ( name unknown)
In the shadows there is a memory of the body, clouded by routine coding and becoming morphs into image of the body unknown.
In the shadows there is noise, fear and outrage. A body in perpetual motion somersaults through the dust, shedding its fear for the expression we have somehow forbid it.
In the shadows the body breathes, loudly and with certainty, each breath filling and expanding every cell.
In the shadows there is such life that cannot be notated, lest we should forget its documentation.
‘ To choreograph history, is then is first to grant that history is made by bodies and then to acknowledge that all those bodies, in moving and in documenting their movements, in learning about past movements, continually conspire together and are conspired against. In the process of committing their actions to history, these past and present bodies transmit a mutually constructed symbiosis. Together they configure a tradition of codes and conventions of bodily signification which allows bodies to represent and communicate with other bodies.’ Leigh Foster. S ( 1995)
In the darkness, I can hear my heart beat, first in my chest then in my stomach. It pounds. Motion which reminds me as to the force of the living body which holds strong. To carry myself through unknown territory, a biped ( ?) perhaps not at times. When I dance, I don’t dance, as dance is a word. It is a feeling which defies the printed word. A sensation of being in space and time, embodied through the veins that pulse.
Towards a notion of dancing | moving | sensing | touching | dancing; the body still in endless relentless motion in time and space takes refuge in the medias which consume eagerly its form.
‘The goal of performance installation is, therefore, to uncover spaces of experience and transformations of bodily states that raise questions about physical and mental conditions.’ (Sabine Huschka. “Media-Bodies: Choreography as Intermedial Thinking Through in the Work of William Forsythe.” Dance Research Journal 42.1 (2010))
When the body arrives to space | asking the question | what is purpose?
Perhaps it was asked to dance, to wait, to stand still, to listen
Such commands facilitate a code of movement
It may choose to accept or decline
in acceptance there is subjectivity just as much as in objection
Each body takes a route
A form
A state decided or undecided in its form
‘The dancers fall back upon the knowledge of their technique in order to reorganize themselves into unusual new choreographic structures and operations. Their focus is neither virtuosity nor grace’ (Sabine Huschka. “Media-Bodies: Choreography as Intermedial Thinking Through in the Work of William Forsythe.” Dance Research Journal 42.1 (2010))
‘ To approach the body as capable of generating ideas, as bodily writing, is to approach it as a choreographer might. Dance perhaps more than other body centered endeavor cultivates a body that initiates as well as responds.’ Leigh Foster. S ( 1995)
When the city becomes us, and us, it. A compromise of the humanist contract, a new draughtswoman who counts flesh in stones. We walk the streets protected from its absurdities.
In a world where the population is multiplying by the second, we surround ourselves with ever higher buildings and faster cars which allow us to have less and less contact with the ground and more importantly with each other. It is easy to exist with very little human contact, the internet has enabled virtual extension of the physical public domain, connected the private sphere to all aspects of the outside world. Personal stereos ensure if desired we have no need to even listen to the land scapes we wander through. The ‘glofication’ of the shopping mall has allowed the ‘real city’ to be side lined, hence urban spaces are losing their significance in the community and the notion of community has expanded to the point that it has been lost.
I am fascinated as to the side effects of this gradual change to the definition of a city and the spaces these developments leave behind, the forgotten undeveloped parts which are hidden or ignored in the shadow of hyper urbanity. How do such changes in the urban landscape affect the body, then more widely creative practices which employ the body as vehicle of expression and then more specifically with a direct focus on the changing landscape of choreographic practice and how perhaps such shifts in the urban landscape are being emotionally and physically responded to within the ever growing discipline of site specific choreographic practices
What language can the body speak when we mute our mouths? What temptress is unearthed when we allow our vocal chords a pause? To dance to dawn and say nothing. We live in hope. Still keeping ballet shoes at the door, still stretching, still trying the splits, for fear the body may become silent.
Urban re:passages 