(UN)ONES

BY MARIA RODRIGUES

As part of the Young Arts Academy, a project for young people led by Barbican Centre, I choreographed a dance piece. Commissioned by Barbican, (UN)ONES was presented on the 10th May 2016 in the Fountain Room at the Barbican Centre, London UK.

(UN)ONES portrays how individuality can be suppressed in society. It shows a constant fight against conformity – From all of us, to all of us.
A group where one can stand out and reveal oneself. There are personal statements being presented: I am who I am, what I want to be and not what I am expected to.
I intended to convey my personal beliefs and ideas such as: gender equality; denial of social conventions and universal truths; the freedom of the being and one’s expression.

If you’d like to see the video recording of the performance, please click below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJExF0DPglA

WORKING PROCESS

(UN)ONES started to emerge from my inner will to fight conformity and to break through.

I knew I wanted a large group: 12 dancers so the sense of the society’s patterns could be emphasised. I also made sure I had an equal number: 6 female and male performers – gender equality. I looked for different individuals, with various backgrounds, and not just about their dance training, but cultural too. I ended up with dancers from Israel, Malta, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Malaysia and the UK.

I needed to have the soundtrack ready just before the rehearsals. Working  in collaboration with a musician for a dance piece was really interesting. It was quite a challenge for me to find a mutual language we both could understand – but we did it! The soundtrack was composed and produced by Henry Bird, a third year student at The Guildhall Music&Drama School.

We had 2 days of rehearsals and,  for the results I wanted to achieve, I had to condense quite a lot of information in a small period of time. However, we had a discussion in group about the theme of Individuality, how it can be suppressed in society and also about personal experiences. I believe that movement should come from an impulse of connection, from one’s truth. So the more the dancers could relate to the theme, the better they would embody it.

In addition, at least half of the members in the team didn’t know each other or had never worked together. Building group awareness was an extra task that I had to offer, encourage and which would be essential for the performance.

In terms of the creation of the movement, I worked in collaboration with the dancers. I had in mind the walking patterns, the intentions, the ups and downs in the narrative, etc. But I needed them to be them in this piece as much as possible. Therefore, they created their own solo and gestures that I directed afterwards.

The most challenging moment of this whole process to me was setting up the counts for each section and finding the most effective music cues. As this was *my first piece*, I realised loads of things to think about for a next time. But something that helped me from the start, was allowing myself to think that things change and that is alright. I might have had a pre-conceived idea, but once you have bodies in space, it’s pretty likely that you’ll have to adapt your thoughts to that reality. Questions and conflict come up and the interesting part of it is to solve them.

I worked with a brilliant cast, not just technically as dancers, but as people. I made very clear from the beginning that suggestions were more than welcome and we all helped each other. I also had the help of Kerry Nicholls during the rehaersals, a high profile choreographer, dance teacher and mentor. Kerry was a precious help and support from whom I learned significantly.

I’d like to mention how Next Choreography helped me grow, build up my curiosity and interest in seeing things from different perspectives. I felt I was confident enough to create this piece, take charge and actually start my future.

FAILURE – A PERFORMATIVE INSTALLATION

BY TATIANA DELAUNAY AND KATHARINA JOY BOOK

A set up /environment combining various elements to be activated by the performers’ presence.

A piece about –
Failure of communication, translation and interpretation.
Failure to be present, presence.
Falling, fragility, and chance.
Choices; the things we keep and those that we discard.
Documentation and memory.
Moving material between mediums.

Using –
Performative instructions. SMS-based dialogue. Skype. Translation processes. Sound and stories. Receipts, saved for your records. Sacred objects. A toilet seat. Phones. Two men.

Words → objects. text → movement. Sound → words. Movement → story.

Activating the installation by our presence means that we perform movement and create moments in the environment we have set up.

We tell stories through objects – things that fell out of his pockets, the button he might have lost; objects lost and found. We recall memories in the shadows of an overhead projector, translating and interpreting them via these kept objects. We interrupt ourselves frequently, with trivial (but maybe not so trivial) text messages spoken aloud.

We perform a script of Facebook messages while ripping off calendar pages and slamming the toilet seat – attempting to make those words our own.

Another episode begins with us trying to embody other people’s gestures, and continues to show a series of movements we relate to falling and failing.

There are elements in the installation that the audience/ the visitors interact with directly – in one instance, ‘instructions for webcam‘ on a laptop are to be read (and, if interpreted in that way, acted out); in another instance, visitors can search a document of archived SMS conversation for key words – and find out how often “work” or “sex” was talked about. Generally, audience members are encouraged to enter the installation to engage with the different elements.

All in all, the performance includes four movement based episodes within the installation set up. The chronology of the episodes is flexible, they can be performed in intervals or all in one go.

Tatiana and I first performed this on 26th April 2016, at Hoxton Basement, London, as part of the exhibition You Are Not A Failure, curated by UAL Curation Society. The exhibition mostly consisted of fashion objects – garments, drawings, photographs. We had envisioned the performance episodes as ‘interventions’, to happen intermittently, not as ‘shows’ to be watched at a set time in front of an ‘audience’. This didn’t work quite like that, people did gather as soon as they noticed we were performing, and it remained unclear in some cases when we wanted to be heard and seen and when it wasn’t the point to have everyone’s undivided attention.

It was wonderful for me to see visitors attempting to follow the instructions for webcam! Someone even said they hadn’t spent so much time with a piece of art in a gallery before.

The episode where we perform Facebook messages and slam the toilet seat resonated with many people and we heard interesting thoughts from them about that. We are now working on refining and expanding the movement and choreography sequences and learning more text messages by heart.

SESSION WITH BEN DUKE

BY LAUREN WAGLAND

Looking back on the year of Next Choreography, numerous sessions stood out to me but one which I found particularly eye opening was a session with Ben Duke in December 2015. The session explored a kind of journey and path way to choreography. Through the session we used different stimuli to trigger others, first we looked though books and magazines and picked out a photo/image that personally stood out to us. From that image we wrote a series of poems and words that captured it. The final poem was a longer more detailed one with the instructions of having to be written in the first person and to include a feel for the five senses. This then became the information that was used to create a piece of choreography.

What I found interesting and captivating was the process in which the choreography was produced and that by the end there were so any different options and ways of looking at it. The fact that the poems were not written with a purpose of producing another piece of work from but just what you saw or interpreted from your chosen image made it easier in some ways and more meaningful to then use the material to create a piece of choreography.

One Poem produced from the session:

(I)
Spell, Hear, Touch, Taste, See

I capture the traveling journey
full of representation and sectors of life
documenting it in irregular black and white squares
hearing the silent stare
watching the tension of pen to paper
touching the cold, solid object
tasting the warm-hearted movement
continuously doing, watching, hearing, tasting, feeling

FESTIVAL PLANNING

BY LAURAA

Term 3 is in full swing and we’re busy planning the upcoming Next Choreography Festival (3 July), which celebrates the end of our course for this year.

Our session with Emma Gladstone (Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Dance Umbrella) last week gave us food for thought as our plans take shape. Emma shared her experiences and approach to programming and producing a festival. This input gave us all lots to consider for our festival; the frame we provide for the work within the event, the audience, what and how we communicate about the festival, and our hook.

As Project Coordinator it’s my job to produce the festival, working with Charlotte (NC Facilitator and curator of the NC Festival) to ensure our participants ideas and experience are at the heart of it.  Members of the group are developing work in progress for performance within a Young Artists Feedback Forum at the event, they are devising an exhibition that reveals their learning from across the year, they are considering the use of each space within our beautiful building to inform our festival programme ensuring we welcome and engage our audience.  I’m so excited about seeing their ideas develop with this focus upon our festival.  The group are brimming with thoughtful intelligent suggestions, which reflect their inquisitive approach to the whole course, and I am delighted to help realise them.

Join us on 3 July!

A MEMORY

BY BETHANY MONKLANE

As we gradually approach the end of the academic year, I thought I would share a moment from earlier in the Next Choreography course (from the 28th February to be exact), that had particular poignance for me.

After exploring devised movement during the session, where the dancer worked in collaboration with a fellow class member to improve on an individually devised dance piece, we wrote down in our notebooks a stream of consciousness that summed up what we had felt during the class, each sentence starting with the words “I am going…”.

Hannah volunteered to perform her devised movement work to the class, and did so beautifully. Without having heard my written stream of consciousness, Charlotte suggested I read my internal dialogue as a narration to Hannah’s movements. We started off just performing our separate creations at the same time, not necessarily paying much attention to the other’s work. However, the more she danced, the more observant I was of her accents and of her moments of stillness, and so I adjusted my tone of voice to fit her movements. By the end we were entirely in sync, moulding our own creations to make this epic improvised choreographic piece.

I was surprised and genuinely awe struck by how well our two art forms fitted together. Without having any relation to each other’s work all evening, we had somehow created a piece that combined spoken word and dance, that could have been devised in collaboration from the beginning of the night. I wasn’t the only one to notice it; the entire class was buzzing with excitement by what we had all just witnessed! I left the session that day feeling this incredible sense of satisfaction, and yet I felt blown away in equal measure in experiencing what I had during that session. We were chosen to perform together totally by chance, and somehow ended up being exactly what the other needed to make our pieces whole.

This was only one of the many times Next Choreography has made me think so existentially, but this particular memory I know will stay in my mind for many years to come.

The stream of consciousness that I read out is as follows:

I am going on a journey, only analogue scribbles of scrappy lines. I am going down a path of handwritten nonsense, forward, backward, dip sideways. I am going between the lines, unsure if they feel it too. I am going down linear strips of elephant grey, brown, there white circle, safe. I am going to move, between them, no? Yes. I am going on a ride, far beyond this place, above anything physical; I am going nowhere, yet straight, and hoping all go upwards.