A week residency at Weld to work on the performance-installation It’s been a while since you hollowed my bones culminated in a test version of the work. The invitation sent out was as follows:

You are invited to enter the space.
You are invited to encounter a series of choreographic materials within an
installation-performance format.
You are invited to reflect on and discuss your experience, if you like.
It’s been a while since you hollowed my bones is an ongoing research project exploring
performative relationships between language, image, and sensation. It seeks to activate a
somatic-linguistic sensibility, where language is experienced as embodied and bodies as
enlanguaged.
In this phase of the project I am experimenting with different strategies for choreographing
the space and testing ways in which an audience can encounter the choreographic materials
within an installation-performance format. You are invited to test these things with me, to
enter a project-in-process, and contribute to its unfolding.

I am thrilled to share that after a very long publication process the edited volume Art and Dance in Dialogue: Body, Space, Object was published in November 2020. This interdisciplinary book brings together essays that consider how the body enacts social and cultural rituals in relation to objects, spaces, and the everyday, and how these are questioned, explored, and problematised through, and translated into dance, art, and performance.

My chapter in this book drew on sounding score, a research practice concerned with the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, to explore the contingency of dancing bodies and bodies of the dance. The chapter positions my studio explorations in dialogue with new materialist approaches to matter, particularly Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-actions,’ to provoke a more nuanced consideration of what was emerging from sounding score as it evolved.

A huge thanks to the editors who persevered with the process and to all the authors for their rich and varied contributions—what a great project to be part of!

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For 2020-21 I will be joining the board of Släktet Ekonomisk Förening, the organisation responsible for running the artist house höjden, located in Östberga, Stockholm. höjden was started in 2019 by a group of freelance artists and is an interdisciplinary artist-driven platform for production, context and daily work, primarily in dance, performance, and choreography, but also other artistic disciplines such as visual arts and music.

Read more about höjden here and if you are in Stockholm, come by and check us out!

During a week in October I again had the opportunity to host the AT ISSUE* morning classes at höjden. I proposed some tasks to explore what I have previously termed the ‘somatic-linguistic’—that is, the way in which language is embodied and our (mind)bodies are enlanguaged. In other words, my proposals for this week were concerned with unraveling different layers and thought patterns of voice and movement. The somatic-linguistic is an ongoing area of research in my practice, but I chose to propose things that I had not tried before, and as a group we decided on further proposals we wished to explore. This meant that the content of each meeting, and the week as a whole, was entirely shaped by those present. 

Here are some of the traces and articulations from the week:

*AT ISSUE is a structure for morning classes organised by INSISTER SPACE that facilitates collective studies of artistic proposals. During each class members from the organisation INSISTER SPACE will host sessions during which a proposal (such as a question, task, theme or material) is put forth and then studied collectively. During these classes we will respond to the issue at hand, articulate and share experiences, leave traces and, in turn, see how the different proposals affect and contaminate each other throughout the week.

During a week in June I had the opportunity to host the AT ISSUE* morning classes at höjden. I proposed an issue for the physical study circle that stems from my current research around anatomical language and the naming of bodies (working project title: Hollow the bones), and which worked with poeticizing and problematizing some of our somatic-linguistic entanglements.

Proposing some things from the research to study collectively in this format felt a useful way to move forward with the work, which is still very much in process and something that I am still getting to know.

Here are some of the traces and articulations from the week:

 

*AT ISSUE is a structure for morning classes organised by INSISTER SPACE that facilitates collective studies of artistic proposals. During each class members from the organisation INSISTER SPACE will host sessions during which a proposal (such as a question, task, theme or material) is put forth and then studied collectively. During these classes we will respond to the issue at hand, articulate and share experiences, leave traces and, in turn, see how the different proposals affect and contaminate each other throughout the week.

In May 2019 I had the pleasure of teaching a class at Echo Echo Dance Company’s Contact Improvisation Festival in Derry, Northern Ireland. Some nice dancing, nice meetings, nice lighting!

etymologies anatomies spells recipes bones poem-scores labyrinths somatic-linguistic entities spirals creatures rewording kaleidoscopic unfoldings unleashing naming poeticizing problematizing authority not-origins tracing histories embodied entangled

The autumn has seen me start to explore in the studio some things that have been germinating in thinking-writing spaces since the start of the year. During September 2018 I had a short week-long residency at Weld, which was followed by another week of studio residency time at c.off in November. For the first week I worked solo, but for the second I was joined by the wonderful Lewys Holt who was half outside eye, half collaborator, and half another dancing body to try things out with.

After premiering Sounding lines at Weld in Stockholm during February 2018, it was interesting, and challenging, to re-meet the work several months later within the context of the Open Choreography Performance programme at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios. Sounding lines was performed at SDDS on 15th June 2018, as part of this performance evening:

https://www.siobhandavies.com/whats-on/performance/open-choreography-performance-evening-summer-2018/

Performing the work that evening gave me a lot to reflect on in relation to the nature of solo work, and the multi-faceted labour (physical, emotional, pyscho-somatic, energetic) required to re-rehearse, re-find, and re-present a work based on an improvisation practice that, although choreographically structured, is highly variable and shifting. (Read: it was a lot of hard work for one performance. There is a real question here about how much work is worth doing, and for what).

Noticing how the body shows up differently in the practice.

Noticing about how the practice shows up differently in the body.

Noticing how sometimes the experience of the practice sits comfortably in companionship with the choreographic structures of the work (structures crafted with the aim of supporting the practice).

Noticing how at other times it doesn’t; noticing the practice rubbing up uncomfortably against choreographic structures that, instead of offering support, impose conditions, needs, and expectations on the practice at the core of the work. 

During November 2017, sounding score was in residency at c.off. This process existed parallel to a process of writing about the work for a forthcoming publication, and this double process of two completely different ways of engaging with the research was an interesting one to inhabit.

Some articulations of sounding score in the context of an interview with c.off can be found below:

 

When and how was this project idea initiated? (Feel free to elaborate on your source of inspiration for the topic and your exploration of the complex web of bodies and in-between spaces).

 

sounding score is concerned with the entanglement of material bodies—human bodies, bodies of non-human “objects,” bodies of language/text—and with the spaces in-between these bodies that the act of dancing opens up. The starting point for sounding score was a desire to explore the complex web of bodies, imagination, things, and places that constitute two particular material things—the sounding lines that give the project its name.

This project was initiated in September 2016, and arose from something akin to a research mash-up. The proposal was to bring three strands of my research (which had previously manifested as separate enquiries) together to coexist and connect. My proposal was to observe the existing overlaps between the enquiries and find new ones; to reimagine the possibilities of the enquiries by throwing them into a melting pot; and to let them seep into one another, bleeding and blending.

One of these research strands was the affective entanglement of human and non-human things, which was the focus of a previous project. sounding score builds on those previous explorations whilst also approaching this affective entanglement from a slightly different perspective, being more interested in engaging in a practice of shifting, expanding, dissolving, and reforming bodies’ boundaries—or rather, of attending to the ways in which they are already, always doing so.

How has the project developed from the original idea?

 

Although the project started as a proposal to mesh and re-imagine previous enquiries, it quickly took on its own identity. The sounding lines remain at the heart of the enquiry, but the process has also generated a lot of iterative and derivative material abstracted from the sounding lines, which has then been layered back onto and folded back into the work in ways I could not have anticipated.

One possibility that has emerged from the original proposals is a collective text making practice. This is something that I am currently exploring the potential of, and which I would like to further investigate within the context of the upcoming studiekretz.

Do you have any specific methods for working with the material?

 

At the moment I am working with two broad methodologies: a trust in the doing where things emerge and then refine themselves through repeated doing and conscious articulation of the doing; and a reciprocal feedback loop between writing and dancing, where each subtly shifts and shapes the other.

What are your plans for the working process in the studio and afterwards?

 

At this stage in the process I am exploring strategies for opening the practice to, and crafting it for, an audience. The question that I am working with is ‘what of the research gets shared, and how?’ The idea is that this project will be presented publicly at some point during 2018.

What are your thoughts on the upcoming studiekretz that will be departing from your work, do you have anything you’d like to say to a potential participant?

 

The studiekretz is a chance for me to share some proposals from my current research that relate to collective text making, and to open a dialogue around the work. I will be proposing a series of text-related tasks, as well as facilitating a discussion structure tor reflect on our experiences of the practices. We will be working in and with the English language.

 

 

 

 

 

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see also: Weld residency cont.