When working on a move – when testing a move:

Where does my movement begin? Where in the body does it begin? What is the spines relationship to the move? the head? the feet? where is the in breath and the out? What propels it through space? what is its rhythm? What is its emotional intention? psychological intention? What is its opposite? What action word would describe it? What poetic word or phrase would describe it? What impact does it have on the space ? What impact does the space have on it? What is its texture?

Where is the focus – where are the eyes – if you have where the eyes are clarity seems to come….

Can the body express the moment and not the face – let the body do the work

Where exactly does a movement begin middle and end – and then how can you keep a freshness and openness to the movement   – where is the play in the movement

What are your restrictions, your boundaries for the move or the moment or the phrase -

Submerge a part of a movement – top half of body only  – simplify – what is absolutely necessary?  - extracting the essence of a moment and removing the fluff – the unnecessary.

Impose an outside structure on your material – trip up your habitual structuring and rythmical  traits -

How do you expand a move without losing its essence ? Option to song a move  – break it down into tiny parts and focus on the movement within a movement.  Look for longer than  you are  comfortable with at a quantifiable amount of movement – get something small but clear – then proceed from there.

What is the perfect amount of effort for that moment for that movement …

These questions are what I will take on to my next projects – both as a performer and and a choreographer.   I am itching to make work – with this new set of eyes.

I went straight from Bank into performing – that was difficult. The time and space allowed for exploration during the Bank project can not be found in the pressure of a 6 week produce a piece of work schedule. What we were given during the Bank project can not be found again – I am very sad that is over but keen to make sure that the work started here finds a way of coming out.

This was also really helpful in reflecting on what my challenges were. One colleague for example took a new direction that radically changed her Portrait. It was so apparent and exciting, I was inspired to question the ways in which I needed to shift and challenge myself.

What transpired for me was a need to play with ‘volume’ in my Portrait and to recognise how much more deeply I could engage with my material and how it could be refinement or varied at each point in my Portrait. Also, a theme of emotion and physicality: somehow my material was quite emotive and I wanted to balance that with a performance quality that kept it physical – so it was less closed and prescriptive.

I was most struck by the idea of ‘zen-like oblivion’ that Jonathan Cole referred to, which I relate to something akin to the notion of a fully realised dancing state. (I wonder if this is something we can ever ‘achieve’? Or just something we sense and catch glimpses of?).

Jonathan described how when we experience pain, it become the whole focus of our consciousness. We identify entirely with the pain: we are the pain. He went onto describe the moments in physical activity when the thought process and the physical act can conjoin into a similar state where we and the activity become one thing – such as in long distance running. He referred to this state as the ‘zen-like oblivion’. This really excited me as the process in which we were engaged included a lot of thinking and questioning of our movement that for me can at times take me out of my physical expression. However, this idea allowed me to see a possible plateau in the process where the clarity of thought and intention and the physical expression can become interdependent and perhaps even integrated.

In other words, I found it helpful to use this idea to conceptualise a potential culmination point in my process where thought and action where integrated (but not necessarily merged).

The complex element of the research was that it took a lot  of trials and experiment to work this out and I wonder if there is a habitual and common experience in dancer about perceiving space as neutral element of training.It was a constant hit and miss for me and I kept loosing important characteristic of what I was doing each time…and it was extremely helpfull to work even more so as a group on this.I think that was very much of a group effort.