“...the personality of this piece is now becoming apparent and Sue’s ideas are really becoming manifest.”
It is now week ten of the creation process and it’s getting sweaty! Partly due to the velocity with which our brains are working to remember what comes next. We now have a substantial amount to run in sequence and with the four of us regularly bombing around the space, we are really getting a sense of the nature of this quartet; pretty athletic.
With each section we are venturing deeper into a movement world. Trying to develop a ’primitive’ or slightly rough language that steers well clear of anything too sculpted or contrived, I imagine this is to balance with the tightly ordered organisation in the space. Sue’s primary idea of the structure informing what movement is and isn’t appropriate at any given point, has meant at times I have been dying to break out of the formality of this work.
This was magnified by observing the intimate and moving ’stories’ the other quartet have been working on. The freedom I perceive they have been allowed in generating imaginative and personal dances that speak somehow of their idiosyncratic responses and histories.
Sue has explained that whilst they may have emotional journeys inherent in their work, the challenge they now face is how to make this relatively dense language read. How to create a structure that leads the viewer through their half of the evening. Whilst our quartet is controlled in its use of space/movement and though we are struggling to find the right vocabulary, when events do take place or movement language does appear it reads clearly and memorably. We therefore have a useful if sometimes frustrating parameter to develop within.
I had subsequently questioned whether, with currently few moments of personal expression in our quartet, there will be any emotional resonance for the viewer. On chatting with Sue about this, she described the emotional response potential for the viewer in simply watching four people charge about the space, accelerating, putting on the brakes, shifts of dynamic and the negotiations that constantly happen between us. This can also be emotive to witness in its raw form.
So... now that we have four out of five sections sketched out, the personality of this piece is now becoming apparent and Sue’s ideas are really becoming manifest. Each new section revealing more of our personalities and, by having more choices available to us, our autonomy. It requires an incredibly charged attention between us as performers, which I really enjoy and I look forward to the point where I’m not only consumed in trying to remember what comes next.
