THE MATERIALITY OF WORDS – AN UN-MANIFESTO

ANDREA ROBINSON

Words come easily. Flow. Words flow and dip and swim and swing. Words dance in the air cold air, air currents on wings they fly out like a swallow in a Russian proverb. Words disguise words hide in the currents, words hide in language. Words and language become conflated; are not the same.

What happens to words when we share them? We mark the words to our steps to our breath to our heartbeats; our breath and our bodies take on the words, are the shape of the words. We speak in shared footsteps, we speak and we do not understand what we are saying even when we have met the words before. We take the words that once belonged to other mouths. We take them and we let them inhabit our mouths, travel down and settle in guts. We spit them, sing them, whisper.

Use these words to tell, to teach, to bind. Use them anyway we want, they still hold their own meaning and keep it hidden. Take a word, take a phrase, hear it said, repeat it, roll each sound around your teeth and across your tongue. Take the words and try them out like a three year old building a first vocabulary. Listen as they change and take on new meanings.

But these are the words that are spoken, read out loud, sung. And these, these are the words that are written once as they flow from my unedited thoughts to my hand to the pen to the page. And which stage of this process is the writing, the act of writing or is it all a moment a section of thought an unexpurgated free fall that has no context other than to land in symbols on a white page and become a system – part of a system – that is learned, given and received. What if a character enters this set of symbols – a protagonist or antagonist, an actor in the pattern of the signs and sines and symbols – are they absent receiver, the present do-er, distant. Are they the flow or in the flow? What if the actor is Austin, telling me to read it again, telling me not How To Do Things With Words but How Words Do Things To Me?

What if it is Acker telling me I read her wrong, placed too much imagined meaning on what were only other people’s words, repurposed. What if there is no materiality other than this borrowed pen and the blank page. And the coffee cup drained of coffee and my notes of all the words we’ve read and talked about so far. And what if I am the character and this isn’t a story and my character is struggling to understand because this language only looks like their own language and it becomes increasingly opaque as it is written (and typed up and rewritten) and sometimes the only reason for the action of writing the words is to fill the blank page and when it is written and if it is typed then it is no longer about the blank page and the actuality of it, the material ink on the page becomes the original act, (the art?) and the transcription, the rewritten, this is the re-action, the next action, the changing meaning, the version, the punctuation, the reading back for sense and spelling, the edit (but not the final edit).

ASSUMING NOTHING – KATYE COE, A SMALL THOUGHT

KATYE COE

Photo by Anne Tetzlaff Choreographer: Florence Peake Performers: Lizzy Lequesne, Eve Stainton and Katye Coe

Being SDD’s first Torchlight Artist is giving me an opportunity to think about dancing in a different way. My Torchlight time is focused on investigating two themes, Surrender and Afterwards, which are my anchors but not necessarily linked.

Dancing does something that makes me more attuned to others and to my own sense of sentience. There has been a lot of talk of empathy and awareness in recent years. I go further. I want to bring attention to the deeply felt histories and unspoken knowing that attentive and skilled dancers have. It is important and urgent today.

These feelings are not exclusive to dancers. I like to imagine that all beings share these things deep down. These senses are often buried because we don’t necessarily use them so often in the every day. Maybe this is to do with the way that we are encouraged to make sense of everything, maybe it is because we no longer pay attention to intuition or to gut feelings. Our attention is split between so many different things all of the time. I believe that there are huge benefits to giving a different value to these intuitive or gutsy intelligences and that we are missing out by not doing so.

Performing dancing is also always relational … in relationship to. And in a world where the individual experience is being given such enormous emphasis, performing dancing is an important resistance corps because it is always an enacting with.

Surrender is something I experience when performing dancing – it is necessary to enter into the world of others, of the choreographer and the other performers I am working among. It is an act of great generosity. It comes from a place of quiet choice where agency is given space to materialise. It has nothing to do with submission in my experience. But there is for sure a letting go that is necessary.

And the afterwards … what dancers and others go through following a dance performance is complex and full of feeling and thought. My experience and in speaking to others, is that this afterwards is often experience alone and not given a place where it can be discussed and shared. I would like to change this.

None of this is about knowing. And it isn’t about answering questions or proving a point. I’m not interested in those things because if I go towards knowing then I go towards something fixed or finished. The kind of experience that I’m pointing at doesn’t answer questions or tick boxes. It does something else.

I found this quote earlier this week and it moves me and makes me remember why this is so important. I re-found this quote today and it is quite simply YES.

They are some words by Rosemary Butcher that were published in London Dance, about Gill Clarke shortly after Gill’s death in 2011. They were two amazing change makers who taught me so much about dancing and dancing practice.

“Gill’s passionate belief was that the dance practice she and her colleagues are involved in, has strongly embedded ethical values that are fundamental and timely; readiness, openness, curiosity, embracing individual enquiry, working co-operatively to find solutions, creating situations where learning can happen, embracing uncertainty, ambiguity and specificity, and “tuning” ones “skills of attention”. What better approach to our time and place.”

So perhaps what I am learning, and what I would like to shine this light on, is that the intelligence that dancers apply in their work, could bring vitality to many other situations outside of the world of performing dancing. In torchlight events I am inviting people to contribute who attend to situations where this kind of information or these kinds of intelligences are also visible. People like midwives and those who care for people at the end of life.

I also intend to bring alliances to things that each and every one of us experience. Falling asleep, orgasm, grief …

let’s see.

FIONN DUFFY and TATE N LYLE RESIDENCY

FIONN DUFFY and TATE N LYLE 

We’re very excited for our residency at Siobhan Davies Dance. Here’s some of what we’ve been doing to prepare:

Skyping one another.
Applying to Arts Council England for funding to pay ourselves for our time there, and some ‘experts’ (friends we want to drink beer with) to visit us.
Talking to each other about whiteness, about somatic dance, about institutions, about buildings.

Listening to John Giorno’s Everyone is a complete disappointment on repeat.
Asking some friends if they’d like to share some work on our online radio broadcast, Radio Play (Tuesday 31st July, 6pm – till late).

Listening to the work they’ve sent along so far and been THRILLED.
At the encouragement of a curator, applying the work we’ll be making to a festival taking place in February 2019, despite not having yet made it or knowing much at all about what it’ll be. (We said it’ll be a sound installation and then described a previous work we had made).

Preparing for a lush sunny London: selecting sunglasses, summer frocks and tank tops; considering best beer and berries picnic fare; practicing our best dances for a sun-drenched studio with all the windows thrown open.

Editing together the sounds of our laughter. Have a listen here (isn’t it gross?).
On hearing that Ed Sheeran has been accused of plagiarism, listening back to our work ~ on the tube.

Waiting to hear back from the Arts Council.
Writing this blog post.