This is a Square, Strange Loop May 2011

Ten days ago I launched a fundraising initiative through the crowdfunding platform WeDidThis. I am aiming to raise £2,000 towards the production costs of Strange Loop. Last year I received some funding to carry out the research for this project. The work just needs a little extra money to take it up to production level. I am aiming to show the work at different venues around the UK over the course of 2012, but I need your help to get it out there!

Please take a moment to watch the pitch video on the WeDidThis website:

strange-loop

Crowdfunding allows members of the public to make small donations directly to artists to help them develop a new work. Contributions can be as little as £10 and result in a reward that is linked to the project outcome.

Now I know how annoying it is to be hassled for money. I can assure you that having to ask for money is just as frustrating. My heart sank at the prospect of having to turn into a sales person for my own work. But this is not just about raising the money.

Like many artists out there I spend around 80% of my time filling out applications for funding, opportunities to carry out research, opportunities to perform work…. After spending the better part of three months writing endless applications, all of which were unsuccessful, I realised that crowdfunding was, perhaps, the only way forwards. The reason for this is that so many selection processes boil down to personal taste, perception and who you are up against, all factors that are beyond anyone’s control. If you’ve read Leonard Mlodinov’s The Drunkards Walk, how randomness rules our lives, you’ll understand how so many of the decisions being made about what book gets published, which film is produced or which actor gets the job are rarely based on good judgement alone. More than that, their success is not always down to a trained eye, or good decisions, but are more often the result of statistical processes. I won’t go as far as to say that our whole lives boil down to where we figure in a sequence of numbers, but well, that is almost very much the case.

So how do you escape your own statistical destiny? Luckily, there is such a thing as personal agency: our ability to stand up against the bad numbers and tell them where to go. Crowdfunding is about just that. It’s about cutting out the middle men and institutions  (bound by their own selection criteria, politics and institutional aims*), and supporting work just because it ticks your box. Watch the video, read the pitch. If you like the work then help it get off the screen. You can be a part of a project that reaches more people around the UK and Europe and have a chance to say that You Did This.

Thank you

Marguerite

* This is not to say that institutions are wrong to have these limitations, or that they are not effective as a result of them. On the contrary, many arts organisations aim to help as many artists as they possibly can. They’re simply oversubscribed, so they can’t be expected to produce absolutely everything

In April and May 2011 I carried out a research project, Impossible Spaces. The research received backing from DanceDigital and the Arts Council England and resulted in a work in progress, Strange Loop.  The work involves live projection in performance, where the projection is a live relay of the performance space, slightly adjusted by the use of interactive software, to create small differences between what is happening live and what is shown on the projection. My aim was to use the flatness of the projected image to extend the real space and bring about relationships that would not be possible in a 3-D environment. The resulting work in progress was a play on cause and effect, confusing the viewer’s sense of space, time and perspective.

An interview by Dance Digital explains the ideas behind my work with excerpts from Strange Loop:

What is a Strange Loop?

When I started developing this work I called it “Impossible Spaces”, a modification of Escher’s “Impossible Buildings”. Whilst rummaging around for material on Escher I came across Douglas R. Hofstadter’s thesis entitled “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” In it he describes the notion of “Strange Loops”:

The “Strange Loop” phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. (Hofstadter, 1979)

In plain language a ‘strange loop’ is an object, a statement or a situation that contains a contradiction in itself. The most well known strange loop is the liar’s paradox, summed up in the statement: “I am lying”. If I was actually lying then I am not actually lying. But If I was saying the truth then the meaning of the statement must be false. The Mobius strip is another example, as are several of Escher’s sketches.

Strange Loop, a work in progress, May 2011

So what did it look like? Here’s a short clip of the work in progress:

Moving On

It’s been five months since the project was wrapped up. In the meantime I have been to the Interaktionslabor in Saarbrucken and the fabulous Digital Futures in Dance Symposium hosted by DanceDigital, Southeast Dance and Pavilion Dance in Bournemouth. Whilst watching, listening and thinking about the way forward, I feel that I’ve finally been able to pin down my own specific identity within this broad field of technology and live performance.

• At the moment my work involves an integration of live video projection in a performance context. Dance is my background, the body is my starting point, but it’s a body placed in space and sometimes defined, perceived and manipulated by that space. The idiosyncracy of the work derives from this re-examination of the body’s relationship to the space it inhabits.

• I use some digital technology to carry out real-time video processing. But the emphasis is on facilitating an interaction between the live dancer and their virtual counterpart.

• I do not use the projection to create a new space behind the dancer. I do not project a dance film behind a live dancer and aim not to use any pre-recorded material in the performance.

• Throughout the work the audience should witness an intersection of the two spaces: the real space with the virtual space.

• I am concerned with developing an interdependency between the real dancer / space and the projected dancer / space, so that they both need each other in order to exist.

• I question what this relationship does to the movement exploration. How does it expand the performer and viewer’s perception of space? What effect does this new space have on the dancer’s movement and performance presence? How can these be amplified and extracted?

In August 2011 I travelled to the small village of Göttelborn, in the West German region of Saarland, to participate in the 2011 Interaktionslabor. The Interaktionslabor is a yearly event, organised by the multi-media performance artist and academic Johannes Birringer, during which a group of artists spend ten days living and working on the site of an old coal mine. The intention of the lab is to offer a space for artistic development, critical discourse and theoretical enquiry, precipitating a creative interaction and forging new professional relationships amongst the participants and their associated organisations. The particular focus of the lab is on work that involves a combination of performance and multi-media practice. The lab champions the notion of artistic and personal autonomy and implements this, though somewhat vaguely, through its open structure. Participants are invited to bring their knowledge and experience to the group and in turn to learn from other members in a peer to peer situation. Guest artists run workshops throughout the lab, however, whilst these workshops are selected for their relevance to the group’s interests, attendance is completely down to the individuals.

The lab itself takes place in a purpose built space. The guest rooms in one wing, with large potato shaped balconies, look into an open square space. (The largely working class community typically survived on a diet of potatoes and onions, which is why the root vegetable has become a local symbol.) The building operates as a hotel throughout the rest of the year, which accounts for the comfort of these rooms equipped with a writing desk, a small fridge and TV etc. On the ground level, the dining room and kitchen look into the expansive studio/ lab space on the lower level. The group cooked and ate meals together for the duration of the lab, and this communal space became an important part of the creative routine, where we could discuss the progress of the lab and put forwards new ideas and thoughts for the coming days. The lab space is located on the lower ground level, a large high ceilinged space surrounded by full length windows along one side with views out over the coal mine and a nearby power plant. The space could be divided into two rooms with partition doors, but these were mostly kept open so that we worked in parallel at all times. Johannes equipped the lab with all the necessary technical paraphernalia: lights, projectors and cables. We were given more or less free access to whatever equipment or space was available, which allowed us to pick a working time and routine that suited us.

A view of the coal mine taken from the guest rooms

There was no studio booking or rules about when to stop working. In fact many artists chose to work late into the night. An adjacent board room was used by artists who preferred a more contained working space, particularly those editing video footage and working on costume or sound devices.

The coal mine boasts one of the tallest towers in the region. Having operated since the nineteenth century, the mine had three towers of escalating heights, reflecting the need to dig deeper into the earth as demand grew and resources ran out. The last of these was only completed a few years before the mine closed in 2001. Despite its relatively recent closure, the space has quickly fallen into disrepair. Whilst some initiative has been taken to turn the outer buildings into what they call an Industriekultur campus, other buildings, such as the old shower rooms, have been completely destroyed.

The wheels at the top of the third tower

On a tour of the site we were given rare access to the main buildings, many of which are no longer open to the public. The miners would arrive in the morning and change into their garments before walking down a long corridor into the mine itself. One side of the corridor was the entrance file with regular paved slabs on the ground, whilst the other side was grated to allow the dust and dirt to fall off the returning miners’ shoes. Johannes took us into the second mine tower, a chamber full of cart tracks, pulleys and machinery. A lift took the miners underground into the tunnels (now blocked up), hoisted by large wheels at the top of the tower. At the tunnel gate a sign on the wall lists the system of knocks that was used for the miners to communicate with the ground staff in case the tunnel collapsed.

Footage taken during the tour of the second mine, where Johannes Birringer describes the “system of knocks” used in case of an emergency:

The coal was loaded into carts, hauled up via the tower pulleys and sent via the cart tracks to the washing room, where it was purified to different degrees before being loaded onto trains to be transported across the country. A large basin just outside the rinsing rooms would collect the soiled water which was carried into the drainage system. The chamber beneath this basin is a vast empty coliseum. Today these spaces stand empty, stripped of the functions they were developed to sustain. As a result they command a new attention from their inhabitants: a question not of what they were meant to do, but of what they can do. This empty, un-lit coliseum on the underside of the basin, for example, a space that simply existed by default rather than by intention, is one of the most acoustically rich sites I have ever experienced.

Some areas were less accessible and could only be entered by unlocking several gates (set up, one supposes, to protect the disused buildings from vandalism.) One such space was the main brain centre of the mine, and by far the most chilling of all scenes on the site: the central operations room. A board across one side of the room showed a graphic representation of the entire mine. A panel of radio control devices and dials covered the main desk. The floor was littered with notes, updates on the progress of the miners, reports and faxes. It seemed as though the normal operational procedures had simply been arrested mid flow, with no warning and no time to clear up, as though they fully intended to come back to work the next day. A power plant close by to the mine still functions. It uses solar energy generated by an adjacent solar field, but it also uses coal which is now imported from South America.

The central control room

Many of these buildings became the inspiration for work that emerged amongst the group members. Our surroundings, an empty relic of what was once a noisy industrial centre, now slowly being reclaimed by nature and newer, less dusty, enterprises, provided a rich source of material for our creative explorations. Sound and video pieces were developed by artists using the mine as their starting point. Others began working on pieces generated through their interaction with members of the group. The group began to organise itself in a more or less organic way, with small pockets of artists generating new collaborations that developed into new works. Ludmilla Pimentel and Bette Grebler (Brasil) created video dance works filmed on location. The fashion designer Michele D’Anjoux (UK) worked first with Bette Grebler and Sosanna Marcelino (France) on a video that involved climbing around a prominent stone jutting out of the small hill outside the lab space. She later went on to work with Sosanna Marcelino and John Richards (UK) on a new work incorporating wearable sound devices in choreography. Hana Ma (Germany) and Sonia Rodrigues (Portugal) collaborated on a video piece which was inspired by Hana’s pregnancy, in which a video of Hana moving on the grass was projected back onto her belly and re-filmed to create a video piece with an interactive sound component developed by John Richards (UK). Tania Soubry (Luxembourg) moved in and out of other projects before doing some work with her voice using short loops. Bernard Baumgarten (Luxembourg) created light sculptures and developed a video piece that grew out of his experiments with one particular light installation, where stage lights were reflected against a steel pane.

During my first few days I struggled with the general lack of direction in the group. As a participant I came to the lab with no preconception of what it would be like. I knew that I wanted to learn something and I wanted to immerse myself in a creative environment. I travelled there alone and I had not even met Johannes Birringer before I arrived on the Saturday night. During two evenings of participants’ presentations it became clear that few of the group members had much experience of working with technology, apart from the group of students from Saarbrucken who sadly became side-tracked by other work and gave up on the Lab early on. My initial frustration in being left to do whatever I wanted was not so much related to not having structure for its own sake, but a frustration with the limitations of my way of doing things. Recognising the need to at least start somewhere, I set up a work station in the main lab space where I projected onto one of the partition doors. Our group discussion earlier that day had concluded with the task of setting up a kind of algorithm in the form of some rules that could facilitate an interaction with the space/ object/ idea. A camera captured the movement in front of a second door in the space, which was projected back onto the first door with a short delay. The dancer’s task was to weave in and out of the two doors to create a situation where she seemed to be running after her own image.

We established two rules that led to the most interesting outcomes for the viewer:
1. You can go in front of wall 2 only after you go behind wall
BUT
2. If you go in front of wall 1 then you must go behind wall

I abandoned this project after the first day. Like most discussion points raised over the course of the lab, this idea of generating an algorithm disappeared into nothing beyond the first day. It is only with hindsight that I am able to recognise the value of this game like structure and wish I had kept on going further with it.

The group was joined by several guest artists. Marco Ciciliani joined the group at the start of the week. A musician and composer, Ciciliani’s recent research is in the combination of light and sound. He also creates some interesting compound tracks, where he superimposes all the tracks on a popular album over each other and slowly removes tracks bringing the initial noise down to just one song before building back up again. John Richardson carried out a dirty electronics lab, where the group used wires, batteries and empty tin cans to create instruments that use the electrical current through the body to activate when held in both hands. (Lifting off one hand would break the circuit and cut the sound.) We also had a presentation on the Kinect box. This inexpensive motion capture device has created quite a stir amongst digital arts communities. Whilst conventional motion capture devices remain beyond the reach of most arts budgets, this compact and cheap piece of hardware can be easily hacked into and used to generate data on the body’s location in space and time in a 3-D capacity rather than a regular camera’s 2-D. It still requires some programming knowledge to manipulate the data, and the main programme currently being used is Motion Builder, which is still beyond most artist’s budget, although it can be accessed for free if you work in an education context.

Three days into the lab a guest artist, Stefan Zintel started working with us on PD (Pure Data). This is the non-commercial version of Max MSP, available on open-source. Having worked with Isadora which is built on Max, this programme was like a raw version of the same thing. Whilst its language is slightly less user-friendly, it has many similarities to Isadora. We spent two days putting together these patches, during which time several participants simply gave up. For me these workshops were crucial. They allowed me a chance to look at interactive software in a slightly different way. One of my reasons for not working with a programmer and choosing to do the technical work myself is that, despite the less sophisticated patch work, having that hands-on time with the tools means that I cut out any potential filters in the form of another person’s pre-conceptions. Working with PD gave me a similar feeling. Whilst Mark Coniglio’s Isadora provides a number of interesting and easy to use tools, it has still been organised by him and, therefore embodies his viewpoint in some way. PD is slightly closer to a blank slate, less manipulated or tainted by another person’s ideas. Our very first patch on PD involved an ‘actor’ called a ‘Bang’. This generates an impulse when triggered, like many of the trigger actors on Isadora. To trigger the ‘Bang’ to send a signal to a note generator, we linked it to an impulse generator. The possibility of setting up an automatic trigger to carry out actions on a patch was always possible in Isadora. I later found the equivalent actor in Isadora, the ‘Frequency Generator’ in the sound tools, which formed the basis of another work which I will describe later. I also learnt how to develop a patch on PD for motion tracking and hope to be able to use this in future projects.

It was not until almost four days in to my stay at the Lab that a chance viewing of some video footage precipitated a conversation that then led to a collaboration between myself and two Luxembourgian artists Gianfranco Celestino and Anne-Mareika Hess. During those initial days I was not alone in my ramblings. Many artists moved around the space ‘scratching’ for an idea. During this time Celestino had taken some video footage of Hana Ma walking in a straight line in different locations of the mine. I instantly connected this image with an idea that had struck me whilst sitting in the Lab space on the morning of the first day as Birringer led a discussion amongst the group. Allowing my mind to wonder, I looked around the actual lab space and traced through all the available lines that the space had to offer. I then considered the possibility of filling in the gaps between the lines with video footage of the outdoor space and imagined a continuous walking pattern along these lines that would involve a dancer in the real space walking into a projection of themselves in the filmed space.

This rough sketch shows the setting for the MAG project with the intersections between the real space and the projected image

Over the next two days we set out to create MAG, a combination of projection in performance with a focus on drawing the design and architecture of the outdoor spaces into the indoor performance space. We created a story board of the different intersections that we wanted to create, based on the lines that we could see in the performance space. We then went outdoors to find the locations that fitted in with the lines we had identified. Whilst filming we aimed to achieve the neatest possible fit, so that in transitioning from the real dancer into the projected dancer the dimensions of the space and the height of the dancer remained consistent.

We found ourselves caught up in a conversation between the dimensions of the actual performance space and the perspective of the camera viewpoint. Our resulting work in progress was a very raw proposition. As a group we would like to develop this into a work that can be re-made on different buildings. We are also interested in the possibility of using an indoor space with projections of the outdoors during the daytime, and an outdoor space with projections of the indoors at night.

It was a natural reaction to the environment and the context in which we found ourselves to assume that all that was available was free to use. However, whether or not this applied to our own work, was not clear from the outset. The idea of using found objects, spaces and materials and re-presenting or re-contextualising them in an art work, was the basis of one particularly fractious interchange over the course of the lab. A dispute arose from the use of video footage taken by one artist of another artist’s work and being used as the raw material for a video installation piece. The specific details of the situation demonstrate the interwoven layers of relationships that resulted from the parallel creative practices – in itself an interesting result of our working structure. The video artist Sonia Rodrigues took some video footage of another participant, Sosanna Marcelino, wearing sound devices imbedded into a costume developed by Michelle D’Anjoux in collaboration with John Richardson. Rodrigues used the footage to develop a video piece that investigated the layering of images to produce a 3-D video effect. When the video piece emerged in the final showing, the costume designer D’Anjoux took umbrage at this use of her work without her knowledge, and requested that the work be removed and deleted from Rodrigues’ library on the basis of there having been no discussion on the usage of the footage. During a group meeting the situation was discussed resulting in a more or less unanimous agreement that the question of copy-right should have been raised at the outset of the lab. This could have been in the form of a contract signed and agreed by all on the nature of the forthcoming exchanges of information and ownership of material generated, shared and re-used by the group members in the course of the lab.

The group as a whole changed over the ten days, with people arriving at different times in the week and a large number leaving after just six days. In the final few days three UK based artists, Anne Laure Misme (France), Jennifer McColl (Chile) and Sandy Finlayson (UK) arrived with their video installation work that was projected onto a window pane in the lab space. They also began making a new work in the three days that they were resident at the Lab. As a result of the movement of people, the group dynamic changed several times, as did the relationships and conversations amongst the group members.

In the last few days, frustrations with the set-up of the lab came to the fore, with suggestions that some kind of structure could have facilitated a richer experience for all the members of the group. The key issue was the lack of consistency with which the term “autonomy” was applied. On the one hand the lack of formality was extremely liberating, but it was also at odds with the timetable of workshops and performances that required participants to at least work towards some kind of end. My own frustration lay in the way this ideal of autonomy, a concept that gripped and inspired me on my first evening at the lab, rapidly disintegrated. It gave way to a more sceptical concern that the term was being used in some way to justify a lack of any real plan. ‘Freedom’ and ‘control’ are difficult concepts to identify, and claiming to have either is never as straightforward as it may seem. To me freedom needs structure in order to support and protect it from being hi-jacked by known or unknown hierarchies. The problem with autonomy is that it requires an enlightened self-awareness, like an internal compass, to keep it on course against underlying currents.
Despite my frustrations with the lab, I am still re-assured by its existence and what it stands for. As an emerging artist I am often disheartened by the amount of applications and selection processes which seem to dominate my working practice. Money is short, and the number of makers is high. So selection is an obvious necessity. But it does feel important that there are spaces where artists can select to participate in a research project, as opposed to being selected by a panel. This self-selection is the basis for a bottom-up approach which I think will become increasingly important if we are to find a way to bypass the agendas and politics of organisations. By co-incidence, a few weeks after this Lab, I attended the Digital Futures in Dance Symposium in Bournemouth, where this notion of individual agency and empowerment was discussed in the context of open web platforms. Marlon Barrios Solano (a dance artist and founder of Dance tech. Net) called on artists to consider how they might make use of the web in order to generate and support a ‘Bottom –Up’ approach to the distribution of dance work. But this, he argued could only be achieved through some kind of ‘architecture of participation.’ My true disappointment with the Interaktionslabor was that it seemed ideally placed to provide a space for open interaction, but it lacked the direction to facilitate this in a meaningful and considered way.

By the end of my stay I began to view the space and its intention as a kind of proposition. It gave me one valuable resource that is hard to come by in London: time to think and try things out. During my last few days at the Lab I set up a series of patches on Isadora that involved delays, live capture and instant playback and used ‘Frequency Generators’ to trigger an automatic movement from one patch to another. Entering the first scene sets off a chain of impulses by which the software will automatically move from a delay scene, to a pre-recorded playback, to a real-time relay during which frequency generators start and stop a live capture and then returning to the first scene (the delay mode). Every time the second scene is activated a ‘Counter’ actor is triggered to increase the movie number by 1, which loads the movie recorded in the previous loop. When the movie comes to an end it triggers a jump to the next scene and so on. All this happens without the need for any manual actions on the keyboard. It generates a loop during which actions are played back, or recalled creating a constant forwards and backwards movement in the work.

On the final day of the lab Sosanna Marcelino worked with me for one afternoon to begin integrating this series of patches into a live movement piece. Due to the quick movement through the scenes, we focused on small gestures and decided to contain the projection and performance space by using a configuration of tables. We started off just placing objects on the table, an orange was added to the configuration and soon became one of the features of the piece. The choreography lay in the accuracy of timing and spacing with which we worked through the series of gestures and exchanges.

The set up for the final project

This all took place on the final day of the lab, when emotional and mental exhaustion were beginning to set in. It was also the hottest day of our stay, with temperatures of 33 degrees in the shade. But something of the neatness of the structure we were dealing with forced us to push through even though the work became increasingly complex. It grew to involve a dozen oranges, plates, knives and napkins. Our final sharing at 10pm that night, watched by the few remaining members of the group, Johannes Birringer, Claus Behringer, Sandy Finlayson and Sonia Rodrigues, concluded a journey through anxiety, frustration, inspiration, tensions and friendships that have come to define my ten day experience at this gem of a space. It was appropriate that this final work was set around a table and portrayed the exchange of food and thoughts. Our own eating space was a meeting place for ideas, cultures and practices, and so this virtual meal seemed a fitting note on which to end.

Notes and Credits

Interaktionslabor 2011 was held at:

Industriekultur Saar
Boulevard der Industriekultur
66287 Quierschied-Gottelborn
Germany

Links: http://www.iks.saar.de/

http://interaktionslabor.de/

Photos taken by Marguerite Caruana Galiza and Klaus Behringer
Video footage by Marguerite Caruana Galizia

My attendance was made possible through a DanceDigital Bursary. The travel cost of this project was supported by the Lisa Ullman Travelling Scholarship Fund.

Located in a converted coalmine in the West German region of Saarland, the centre is equipped with technical facilities as well as live-in accomodation for artists attending the lab. It was set up by the multi-media performance artist Johannes Birringer, who co-ordinates and leads the annual research lab event.

During ten days in August, the international Interaktionslabor in Göttelborn collaborates with XMLab and Donlon Dance Company on creating a new PERFORMANCE ACADEMY, a shared platform of workshop spaces and research facilities for performance-media design, interactional and wearable concepts, and investigations of gestural processes, protocols, and social choreography.

With its partners XMLab and Donlon Dance Company, Interaktionslabor shares the sense that the concept of research should be opened up (again), and aims to acknowledge the relevance of experimental treatments of actuality – of forms of collaborative creation – that may take us beyond the perspectives and protocols of (established academic) inquiry as we know it. Which is why we have chosen gesture as focus of the inaugural workshop – gesture as practice that is at once aesthetic, corporeal, and political.

Interaktionslabor is a laboratory for interactive media, design, and performance, founded by Johannes Birringer in 2003 on the site of the former coal mine Göttelborn (Saarland), and developed over the past nine years into an annual summer residency-workshop for performers, media artists, filmmakers, engineers and writers from different artistic and cultural backgrounds, always open to participants’ ideas, processes and project proposals that nurture collaboration and research as well as the building of transcultural networks. At the end of the workshops, which are housed in the beautifully renovated industrial spaces of the Coal Mine (participants also live in new Guest House on the mine campus), Interaktionslabor has exhibited works in progress as well as co-produced new installations or performance later premiered in other countries. The lab has been invited to Brasil and the US, and now enters into a new phase of collaborative research exchange and partnership in the Greater Region.

Interaktionslabor 2011 Press Release

Birringer’s focus on the artistic questions that arise from working in a digital environment are particularly relevant to my work at this stage. My ten day stay will be documented on this blog.

The travel cost of this project is supported by the Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship Fund. The research laboratory itself is covered by a bursary from Dance Digital.

Whilst watching Siobhan Davies and Matthias Sperling in rehearsal last week, I began thinking about the reasons / implications of this way of working. For those of you who did not see it, Davies and Sperling’s hour-long rehearsal / discussion was broadcast live via web link. The public was able to follow the discussion and contribute to it by posting their questions. I couldn’t help being intrigued by the number of questions that arose from two people talking about a dance performance that no one had seen. (because  of course it has not been performed yet.)

At the moment several choreographers and companies are trying to open up that studio process by allowing the public to interact via live screening of rehearsals. But does the time in studio constitute all of what we do? Many of us are lucky to be able to get into a studio and try things out, without having to fork out money to pay for space. So a lot of our process has to happen else where. Of course the time in the studio is important. But so too are all the endless hours leading to and preceding the work in the studio. A number of questions have come out of these thoughts. Have you got any answers?

How do you arrive at making?

I know Siobhan Davies proposed a similar question in a series of talks last year. My question is really based on physical exploration. How do you bring yourself to that creative space that is grounded in movement? Do you go to classes? Do you watch dance works? Do you think about movement?

How do you keep the studio time open?

How often do you invite external feedback into your process? How do you maintain some form of perspective? How do you remain relevant to the current dance scene?

This week I attended a research lab with a dance artist called Joao Fiadiero. He calls his work Real Time Composition. It has some resemblance to a group improvisation or a devised theatre piece, however he insists on some very particular details. The idea is that as a group we work to develop a line of thought (emergence) and sustain that to the point of collapse. Communication is completely non-verbal during the actual composition. However after the process he would dissect each move and discuss whether it was the strongest option or not.

We had a lot of problems with various members in the group either willfully or unknowingly sabotaging the work with their own ideas. Luckily towards the end of the week this somehow resolved itself with these individuals becoming quieter, participating less and in one case not returning to the sessions.

The process of composition involves making choices. In a group situation this is complicated by the question of others intentions. To remove this problem Joao has three rules. The work starts with someone providing an initial image / idea / action. It’s direction is not clear. So the first rule is to inhibit one’s impulse to act on a situation, to consider all the possible next steps and then to decide how to contribute. Of course if your initial idea still seems to be the best option then you can go with that. In the mean time someone else may have already contributed a second action. This second action gives the first action some direction. In this instance everyone has to re-adjust their minds to the situation and take in this new information, letting go of the previous idea. Letting go is a second rule. A third action confirms the direction and establishes a line of thought, what Joao calls a “Tube”. Now the whole group contributes to this tube of thought taking it to the point of exhaustion or collapse. The third rule is to do with making a change. The tendency will be to try to see something different, to originate a new idea before the previous thought is completely exhausted. If everyone did this then the direction of thought would never be established, the work would keep falling apart at the third action. So Joao’s third rule is to do with when a change should take place. This, for him, should not be a question of individual choice. It should be a necessity. You can initiate a change when you run out of resources, when an accident happens that changes the situation or when the material begins to loop. An accident could also mean that someone in the group misinterprets an action generating a new line of thought, for example. Or if something placed in the space accidentally falls. This brings about a divergent strand of thought, a new paradigm, which grows into another tube.

This notion of emergence and divergence occurs naturally in evolutionary and social theory. And of course it has many obvious applications to composition, creativity, scientific research etc. But I felt it resonated strongly with the question of choices in life. If 90% of your life is out of your control, then the question of autonomous decision-making needs to be adjusted. You cannot expect all the things that you want to happen, or all the things you work for to pay off. You could keep attempting to construct your life, but the truth is that this would take a lot more energy then necessary and it is simply inefficient. So the best solution is to make decisions based on the way things are, and to learn how to let go of your intention when accidents arise, to learn how to reconsider your options in the light of this new information and to discern whether it would still be valid to continue with your original intention or if that pathway has now ended and your energy could be more efficiently used in another direction.

The clarity of this image has resonated strongly with me on both an artistic and a personal level. During the course I was running off to teach every evening. One evening, following the second day of workshoping I realised how deeply I had been invested in the work. The whole day had been spent practicing RTC by breaking down every single move. Analysing each contribution, and inhibiting every impulse to act. That evening I turned up to teach my class, intending to go through my usual class format. At the end of the class I realised that I had only been able to get through what would normally take up only  15 minutes of the class. My sense of time had been completely distorted, and the number of options at each stage in each exercise had multiplied tenfold.

I know Joao’s workshop will have a long-lasting effect on me and my work.

During 2011 I will be working on a digital dance work as a bursary artist at Dance Digital, Essex. My aim for this project is to develop an interactive performance / installation, that explores the notion of “Impossible Spaces”.

Inspired by M.C. Escher’s impossible buildings, the Impossible Space will use the two dimensionality of the projected image to extend the real space and bring about relationships that would not be possible in a 3-D environment. The projected image will show an aspect of the real space, put into a configuration that reacts differently to the ways we expect. The main technical challenge will be working out how to make this set up interactive, so that the environment changes with the movement in the space. Artistically I face the challenge of bringing to life the self-reflexive situation, bending the logic of space through the intersection of different planes, like a Möbius strip that folds back on itself. Escher is a key influence, however so are the works of the visual artist Dan Graham, such as Present, Continuous, Past(s) (1974) which uses mirrors and live video relay on a short delay to bring about an interaction between the viewer in the present and immediate past.

The process will be documented on the dedicated blog page of Dance Digital which can be accessed on the following link:

http://margueritegalizia.dancedigital.org.uk/

Impossible Spaces is made possible through a Dance Digital Artist Bursary and is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

I say “last night” with a specific intention. The performance tonight will be different. It’s an indeterminate work. Warby’s association with the American choreographer Deborah Hay resounds strongly in her creative practice. Like Hay, Warby refuses to fix material. Instead she works through the piece, generating material as she goes along. To do this she says she is constantly reading the layers of elements that inform the present moment: the space, the audience feedback, the projected images (birds in flight, birds crashing into the sea, birds dying) as well as the thematic elements. She uses the structure (lighting cues, costume changes, visuals and sound) to frame her performance explorations. The piece retains its identity through these fixed markers but it also remains open to differences capturing the vulnerability of the moment of making, its rawness and the hightened performance presence that this brings to the work.

I was particularly interested in the way she classified this work. This, she says, is not the same as improvisation. For Warby, an improvisation is a tool for searching material from the body. The awareness is more open to anything. Whereas, her performance practice has a more channelled focus. She doesn’t call herself a choreographer either. She says that choreography is what results from the interplay of the elements of the work, in which her collaborators play an important role.

Warby’s approach to making work is one to envy. She never starts from a concept. In her own words, themes “arise from the floor”. One member of the audience asked very poignantly how she is able to secure funding for a work that has no definite starting point. Her reply was that her applications talked about the basis of her approach and the importance of her collaborators.

I spent some time trying to work out how my own work fits in against that of Warby and Hay. This is what I think: Whereas Warby’s work is clearly indeterminate, it is not about indeterminacy. Like Swan Lake, for example, is not about the ballet technique, but about the tragic love story, so Warby’s ‘Monumental’ conveys the themes of strength and vulnerability in the imagery of soldiers and swans, through the medium of an indeterminate performance practice. Does our knowledge that the work is not fixed affect our appreciation of it? Would the work resound as strongly if it were all set? Rhetorical questions perhaps. In TV solo I am trying to draw out the indeterminacy as a key feature of the work. It would be like making a ballet piece about the process of making a ballet piece, to use the same comparison. The question I can’t help asking myself is: am I just years behind Warby, or am I simply on another track?

This solo work started off as a research concept during a residency at Clarence Mews in August 2010. Having scraped the surface of the notion of indeterminacy I took my first steps towards developing a solo that involved some degree of indeterminacy within its structure. More details of the work will be coming soon. I am aiming to perform the work informally at some point in October – November 2010.

Impossible Spaces

I am very excited to announce that I have been offered a bursary from Dance Digital in Essex, to develop an interactive performance / installation on the notion of “Impossible Spaces”. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s impossible buildings, an “impossible space” is one that does not add up. It makes use of recognisable elements put into a configuration that reacts differently to the ways we expect.  My interest is in identifying how we navigate and re-orient ourselves in a space that is both recognisable and different.

I am really looking forward to this exciting opportunity to develop my work with projection in performance. The project will start in November 2010 and run till the end of May 2011, with performances towards the end of the research phase. I intend to keep a running log of this project on my blog page, so watch this space for further details!

Sami Cotton and Andrea Just in rehearsal for Score for Four

Introduction

In June 2010 I completed my Masters in Choreography at LCDS. It was a process fraught with the stress of attempting to create a substantial work, to develop a clear and distinct artistic vision for the future, whilst working in practically impossible circumstances. These restrictions and expectations bore down heavily on my process and clouded my approach in a way that overshadowed the potential of the work. After a few months of rest I feel a renewed excitement in the concept of the work and feel the need to engage with it on another level. One of the major disappointments during the process was that I was unable to engineer some kind of peer feedback. This left my thought process incomplete and tangled. I feel that articulating creative practice is an essential aspect of making. It places work in a context and challenges you to develop stronger methods of communicating, and ultimately achieving, your aim for a work.  I set out here to redress this, by offering my thoughts on this process and inviting your own comments on the scope of this work. This is slightly different to asking for feedback on a piece. I’m asking you to engage with this work on a conceptual level. My main aim is to answer the question: what is ‘Indeterminacy’? What does it mean to me? And why I do I feel that it offers a fresh approach to choreographic and performance practice?

Solid Vs Liquid

It’s tempting to throw the term “indeterminacy” around like some catch phrase on a marketing pamphlet. But I argue here that the term has a very specific meaning which, in application, has had a profound impact on my creative practice and my thoughts on the identity of art work.  Firstly, something that is indeterminate is not unspecified; it can have very clearly defined properties. However, unlike something solid, that has a fixed shape and size, an indeterminate object has boundaries within which it operates in a state of flux. It is dynamic, fluid, unpredictable. So too is performance art, dance, live music and live acting. All events that take place in real time are open to indeterminacy. Can any two renditions of a dance piece be exactly the same, even if the choreography is completely set? When visual artists refuted the commodity value of art works they turned to performance practice to develop work that was ephemeral. It seems strange that dance artists attempt to solidify their work by turning it into repertory, attempting to reproduce the same thing on each performance. I acknowledge that there is historical value in reproducing past works and appreciate that repertoire is an essential factor in developing a commercially viable practice. However, I wanted to highlight the instability of performance practice. I wondered if I could do this whilst still making a choreographed work.

Improvisation

How is this different to improvisation? Improvisation is clearly indeterminate. It offers parameters within which an interchange takes place. These parameters maintain the identity of the work, they give it shape. The number of times people wrongly assume that improvisation is totally free displays a widespread misunderstanding of the form. It takes an extremely experienced artist to be able to read the space and contribute effectively without falling into habitual, self-indulgent waffling. My vision for my own work was to retain the immediacy and engagement of improvisation within a choreographed work. I visualised the pre-set, choreographed piece as an intricate weaving line, contained by a set shape. It carves around the space; it is intentional, known, and impermeable. The improvised work looks like an empty square.  It invites, proposes, allows the dancers to bring in their own purpose, it is unknown, a potential. I wondered if I could impose my own squiggles, lines and purpose without fixing the actual shape of a work, like drawing something on a canvas but then allowing the frame to be fixed at random. This was the image that drove my experiments with four scores, resulting in Score for Four (2010).

This work was not, however, the clearest example of the scope of indeterminacy. I complicated my brief by selecting too many scores in the first place and created some confusion as to whether or not I was creating a piece based on scores or an indeterminate work. But before I go into this let me clarify what indeterminacy means in relation to historical avant garde practice.

Composition Indeterminacy

The term indeterminacy is applied to many different applications of “randomness” in the performance or process of making a work. The notion of “randomness” derives from the fact that choices are made that are in some way beyond the control of the maker and result in outcomes that could not have been achieved otherwise. There seem to be two main categories within this field. Firstly, a work may involve indeterminacy in the process of making. This means that rather than making choices about every detail in a work, the artist refers to some other mechanism by which components are structured. John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s experiments with Chance Operations are a clear example of this form of indeterminacy.

The chance procedures used by Cage in the early 1950s, exemplified in his seminal work Music of Changes (1951), displaced his control on some aspects of the composition by referring to the Chinese Book of Changes or the I-Ching. To do this he generated three 64 cell charts which related directly to the 64 Hexagrams of the I-Ching. The three charts related to “sonority, duration and dynamics” (Pritchett, 1993, p 79). Every aspect of the music was determined by throwing three coins. Cage consulted the I-Ching to find the associated hexagram, leading him to the equivalent cell, which determined the sounds to be played. Through these complex procedures Cage removed his subjective inclinations from the process of composition allowing sounds to emerge from beyond his pre-conceived ideas. (Pritchett, 1993, p.83).

(Excerpt from my MA Dissertation, June 2010)

Cunningham / Cage

Merce Cunningham carried out similar strategies to generate his dance works resulting in the decentralisation of space and a movement vocabulary that defied a dancer’s instinctive sense of flow. However, like Cage’s early chance experiments, Cunningham’s choreographies were always set before the performance. The dancers were not involved with making decisions in performance. It is true that the combination of sound, movement and set was left up to chance. Cunningham did not rehearse his work to Cage’s music. The different components shared the same space and time, resulting in chance combinations in performance. Did these combinations change from one performance to the next? Cage’s later works did move away from completely set scores, allowing some room for difference, however Cunningham’s choreographies never ventured into this territory. I argue that the Cunningham / Cage equation did result in some surprising, random combinations of music and movement. However, the significance of this was in the liberation of one from the other, the idea that any visual could accompany any sound. It did not penetrate the dance performance itself. In fact the two remained defiantly separate.

Performance Indeterminacy

This brings me to the second category of indeterminacy: performance indeterminacy. Cage himself describes this in his 1958 essay. This second category requires aspects of the work to be left open to the performer’s choices in performance. It results in works that differ from one rendition to the next, although the extent of this difference depends on the amount of control retained by the artist or renounced to the performer. The European composers Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example developed ‘Aleatoric’ scores where set motifs are given to the performer who navigates the score at will in performance. This leads to recognisable material occurring in a number of different combinations, a format also used by Trisha Brown in Locus (1975). More radical examples of performance indeterminacy occurred in the ‘Open Form’ work of the composer Earle Brown and the later works of John Cage.

In summary, performance indeterminacy results from the creation of possibilities within a score, in order to facilitate variations between the different performances of the work. To dissect this further, if the elements comprising a composition can be separated into content and structure then it follows that there are three possible combinations that could result in indeterminacy: structure can be open whilst the content is set (as in Stockhausen’s Klavierstrück XI and Brown’s Locus); structure can be set, whilst the content is mobile (as in Morton Feldman’s Intersection 3); both structure and content are open (as in Earle Brown’s Four Systems).

(Excerpt from my MA Dissertation, June 2010)

Scores

Note the relevance of scores in this context, an aspect that greatly complicated my own investigations. In musical composition the score embeds the composer’s purpose for the work. Using ambiguous visual scores was one means of bringing about difference in performance. (As in Earle Brown’s December 1952).  I was greatly influenced by the work and writings of Fluxus artists, especially that of Ken Friedman, who offers his scores freely for reproduction. He calls the difference in each reproduction of the work its “musicality”.   Another influence on my study was my exposure to Matteo Fargion’s work with scores. Fargion’s ethos is to ground choreography in more objective compositional choices, rather than simply playing around with material in space and seeing what happens. During a workshop with the composer, he asked us to write out a score by which two people walk across a space and back. Even within this limitation a number of possibilities become available. The difficulty is to introduce each change at the right moment, preventing the audience from losing interest in the work as it develops. I wondered whether it was possible to achieve this same rate of change without actually setting it. This involved displacing my control through the use of rules.  In this way a dancer’s decision to move from one vocabulary into the next was determined by the activity of their corresponding partner. By introducing conditions by which a dancer could chose to make a change, I retained some sense of cohesion throughout the work, whilst allowing for some mobility from one performance to the next.

Rules

This shift from the word ‘Score’ to ‘Rules’ is an important one. A rule is bound to the material by which it can be realised. The rules to a game of monopoly will make little sense to the chess player. Musical scores abide by a set of rules by which they can be interpreted. So the score itself is not necessarily the rule book. This is highlighted by the fact that many Fluxus scores are accompanied by several composers’ notes to aid the performer in their interpretation (the rules of play). Had I noticed this earlier in my process I might have abandoned my talk on the use of available scores, and sought to illustrate instead the ways in which what I was actually attempting to do was change the rules by which those scores had been developed.

The Identity of Indeterminate Works

This notion of rules brings me to my final question. When a piece is performance indeterminate, where does its identity lie? Does the actual work exist in the form of its multiple possible realisations, or in the rules that bring them about? This question could be applied to Deborah Hay’s Solo Commissioning Project, during which dance artists commission Hay to develop a solo using the blueprint of one of her own works. The differences between the solos result from the artists’ individual choices within the given structure bringing about solos that are specific to the individual choreographer / dancer. These different solos are given a character, flavour and title by each artist. They result from the same rules. Are they the same, or are they different?

Conclusion

I’d like to leave that question open, partly because I know I am under-qualified to address Hay’s work and partly because I know that this solo format differs slightly from my own interests.  I know that my aim is to create works that are complete, finite and identifiable as themselves, but which allow for some mobility from one performance to the next. My reasons for this are not simply to challenge the question of choreographic authority or ownership, though this certainly seems to hang around the notion of indeterminacy. I feel confident that my voice is clearly evident in the rules that I prescribe. But in expecting the performer to work with those rules within the performance, I hope to draw out a more realistic and engaged performance presence and to develop works that are, to some extent, unknown to me, liquid, permeable. My last work touched on ways of achieving difference. I set material and opened up the structure. I set the structure and opened up the material. I also applied the possibility of difference through the errors of memory. My research concluded as follows:

The point of this research is to demonstrate that indeterminacy can be integrated in the process of composition and in the performance of choreographed works. This can lead to unpredictable outcomes and a more engaged performance presence, which were my main interests in this work. In its more radical interpretation, indeterminacy presents questions of identity and authorship due to the contribution of the performers. The re-instatement of my control at various points in the process removed this concern in Score for Four. There is, however, a further conceptual aspect of indeterminacy which makes this approach significant to me, relating to its ability to present more than one outcome. This challenges the assertion that an artwork must present a single, completed and pre-selected perspective. Instead it presents multiple possibilities by which the work can be explored, highlighting the notion that a work’s identity lies somewhere between the artist’s intention, the performer’s contribution and the viewer’s perspective.

(Excerpt from my MA dissertation, June 2010)