Exchanging stories at the museum

I was lucky to be invited to join the DEC group in rehearsals and perform with them at the Story Museum last week.  The Story Museum is slowly launching itself (actual opening in 2014); it has taken possession of its new home, and is currently showcasing a number of installations. A very neat exhibition called "Other Worlds" if you get a chance to go (until 27th May 2012), do step into these bubbles of evoked stories, and strange and magical worlds.
We occupied the 'Story Exchange room', a perfect place to improvise collaboratively across art forms: visual artists Clare Bassett, Kassandra Isaacson, and Suzie Moxley doing life drawing, simultaneously projected to the wall behind the dancers, musicians Bruno Guastalla and Malcolm Atkins improvising, and dancers Susie Crow, Ana Barbour and myself also improvising, all of us continually responding to each others' stories.
It was strange and fascinating, yet not entirely unexpected, how collaborative work across the arts encounters the same "vocabulary" problems as I've experienced in academia. There's always so much to learn from how people with a different perspective approach things!

I was very grateful for the opportunity to join them, it was a real eye opener at so many levels! I loved every second of it all.

I love stories, I enjoy museums, I breathe dance... so this event was an absolutely perfect combination, both inspiring and fulfilling! :)

Here are some photos taken during rehearsals:

More photos of the whole group at work here.

Learning from the older generations

It's funny how ballet doesn't teach you explicitly how to breathe and how to locate your centre. Watching footage of how ballet was danced in the 1930s and 1940s is very instructive in that sense. Ballet technique has changed, there is no doubt about that. Today's ballet focuses on extensions and virtuosity, a bit in a  circus-like fashion. It forces admiration. But then in the 30s and 40s, as I realised watching a 2005 film retracing the history of the Ballets Russes after Diaghilev, extensions where by no means small (just not as extreme as they are today), and virtuosity was very present, in the turns, in the intricate footwork. But also present was a strong sense of emotional expression through movement, which I feel is dwindling in ballet nowadays. This was very apparent to me on the DVD, especially when it came to the port-de-tête, not just the port-de-bras  and épaulements. And watching this I came to think (again) of that nagging question in my head, that of the location of the centre in ballet.

Compare those two interpretations of the variation of Giselle Act 1, by Dame Alicia Markova in 1951 and by Marianela Nuñez in 2011:



It's hard to say which one I prefer! I'm of my time, and Marianela Nuñez's Giselle seems more familiar. But Dame Alicia Markova's Giselle is so real! See how her head and neck are free and relaxed, how soft her arms are?

I wonder to what extent the acting and miming can be compared. Undeniably, they are of their respective times.

Welcoming spring as summer

Yesterday Saturday was a busy day, where dance and space and performance articulated the day.
The morning workshop with Struan Leslie explored notions of space, pace, tempo, interactions and intentions, focusing on habitual actions as/in performance, and looking and seeing, personal spheres and engagement with others in context. A very rich morning that sparked many questions and ideas in my mind; thanks Struan!
The afternoon was an exciting programme of talks by architects and choreographers and their connections to space and movement in space. The main highlights for me were the focus on light and materiality, and the filling of "empty" urban spaces with dancers, be they aerialists or ghost dancers whose presence is mediated via mobile technologies.

Today was more about recovering from all this action (including going to the digital dance installation at the O3 - lots of fun, triggering the sounds of my sewing machine via movement - and watching the performance by Retouramont dance company at the castle). It's in that contemplative mood that I ended the day, welcoming the arrival of British Summer Time, and possibly even of summer in this warm spring day. Here are two photos where I tried to capture the fantastic dusk light as viewed from my living room :)

Dusk in Wolvercote

15 min later...

"Splice" at Brookes' Drama Studio

And here is finally my next post, on the third performance of "Splice" on 28th Jan 2012 (review by Susie Crow, here). It was almost two months ago now, but with the distance, I can say it was probably the performance I was the happiest with. This time I felt centered, and better prepared. The lighting was grand (thanks Pete) and in particular, we opted to have the light pulse with the music at the beginning. Obviously I wasn't entirely happy with my performance but then, who ever is? And it still is work in progress...
Here are some snippets of the feedback I received:

• "The beginning is very strong and very contemporary" - I really like that, and it's probably due to the sharpness of the movements -something I'm always trying to perfect- and the fact that the music is intense (that's Manu's "Néon clignotant d'une pharmacie") and the minimal lighting, make me look like as a shadowy figure progressing by saccades in a dimly lit environment.
• "The middle section looses in intensity". That's the portion that is more balletic. I suspect that as this is more my comfort zone, I did slip a bit into auto-pilot, which naturally must have shown. I must make sure that I keep projecting during that section, especially as it comes after the beginning which seemed so strong.
• "The third section is still a bit messy, but the final image is great". I couldn't agree more with this. That section is improvised, and improv' is not my forte. I also realised that in a sense, I had a catalogue of images I liked and that I generated in rehearsals, in which I could tap and that although this is helpful, it did make me rush through too many of those images, without letting them the time to emerge properly. Definitely something I should work on. There are two ways I could deal with this: one would be to fix this section more, rather than improvise it, the other is to work on my improvisation skills :).

And here are some shots that Bruno took during the piece (Thank you Bruno!):

A "What's this thing?" moment. Studying the rope and wondering how

to interact with it.

Photography: Bruno Guastalla

Struggling with the rope, on the way into a position that I like to call

the "fish swish" (one of those images in my catalogue of images for

the improv' section), somewhere between struggling with the rope

and finding it to be a friendly presence.

Photography: Bruno Guastalla

The rope as a comforting presence, leading to the end in foetal

position under the rope, the rope wrapped around me.

Photography: Bruno Guastalla

This is all very encouraging, and I shall have to keep working on it. :)

Shifting centre

One amazing thing about trying other dance forms when you come from ballet is to experience how other dance forms, in this case contemporary and butoh work with their centres.
It seems to me that, in my ballet body, my centre is located quite high, somewhere along my diaphragm - that may be particularly high and specific to me, but  I'm still convinced that compared to other dance forms, the ballet centre is relatively high.
In contemporary and butoh, the centre is much lower, sinking into the pelvic region, somewhere in the middle between the coccyx and the navel, and to me the butoh centre feels lower than the contemporary centre. This low centre allows groundedness, and in turn a much greater mobility in the upper body.
Shifting my centre is key to my dancing, and, as I realised last time I performed, to a good performance, or at least to one I can be happy with - and I wasn't very happy about my last performance (at the Pegasus's Scratch Night on 13/01/2012 - review by Ana Barbour here).
The tech rehearsal went great; Euton Daley (the director of the Pegasus Theatre, who was doing the lights for the evening) set some lovely lights for me, and Dariusz Dziala took some great pictures (Thanks D!)...

Photography: Dariusz Dziala

Photography: Dariusz Dziala

Photography: Dariusz Dziala

Photography: Dariusz Dziala

In the evening, right before the performance however, I knew already that something was off - I even remember asking jokingly in the dressing room if anyone had seen my centre, that I had lost it --and actually Emma Webb, who was performing just after me (and who will be part of the Moving with the Times show during the Dancin'Oxford Festival 2012), took her boots off, turned them upside down, and, when I pretended to catch my centre, she said: "I didn't know it was invisible!" :) -- yes, yes, I know I might have been putting even more pressure on myself this way. But then I knew also that I would be needing all my three centres for my piece. This piece is called 'Splice', it starts very contemporary, slips into classical after about 2 minutes, and then into more butoh-like improvisation (I can't really call it butoh, but it's definitely inspired by what we do in butoh class with Café Reason). So according to my theory of migrating centres, I should be able to shift my centre throughout the piece. In reality, I think the solution to this problem is simple: stick to one centre, the lowest one I can find, given the state of my nerves. I suspect centres are like voices, the more stressed you are, the higher they shift... so controlling the centre and keeping it low should likely help me both with the dancing and with the stress :)

And I'm even getting a chance to experiment with that on the 28/01/2012, at Café Reason's Diamond Night... I'll let you know how it all goes, and I'll also tell you how this piece came to be my first ever choreography...

A little background

To inaugurate this blog I thought I'd give a little round-up of what I've done so far, before I get to what I'm up to these days.

Basically I started dancing very young. Ballet mostly. I've only stopped for about three years when I had to write up my PhD thesis; and then my first post-doc kept me off the dancing tracks. Paradoxically, it's when I was working towards my PhD that I danced the most. Everyday 2 hours at lunchtime, except for sundays. That's also when I realised that I had acquired a sound ballet technique thanks to a teacher I always remember with extreme fondness: Geneviève Guillée -- and when I'm in Paris, time permitting, I always try to go and take a class with her.

Geneviève Guillée, de l'Opéra de Paris.

Photography: Michèle De La Casinière

Her warmth and support as well as her teaching have always been precious to me, and still today, in ballet class I often feel her presence and influence, as if she were sitting on my shoulder, whispering corrections and encouragements into my ear. She was my teacher for 7 years, in my child and teenage years in Paris, before my family moved to Switzerland.

Later, when I started my PhD in Switzerland, and moved to Berne, I looked for a ballet class and found City Ballett Halamka (now City Ballett Halamka-Otevrel, since the sad passing of founder, director and teacher Ivana Halamka). My ballet practice became a daily one, and although I was asked then if I wanted to make a career out of dancing, I well knew that I was already too old to start a career then (I was 27); so, instead, I took all the opportunities I could to dance; as practice and on stage. I joined the semi-pro company attached to the school and took part in a number of shows (the photo in my About section is of a solo dating back to those days). 

In 2008, my work took me to Oxford, and I decided that my 3 years break from dancing had to end; the chase for a new ballet class started again, like after each of my moves. I was lucky to find Susie Crow (of the Royal and Sadlers' Wells Royal Ballet) and now go to as many of her classes as my workload permits. More than a ballet teacher, Susie is a choreographer, and thanks to her, I had a chance to perform again. She choreographed a piece around Dante, for an event where music, dance, and poetry combined forces to evoke the Divine Comedy.

Getting back into dancing after that long break was hard and frustrating, and I'm not sure I'll ever completely get back to the level I had when I left Switzerland. 

But dance is a lifetime learning experience, and if on some aspects I'm sure I'll never get back to where I was, I'm still progressing; and I'm also having regular epiphanies... "If I held my upper back better, my landing from jumps wouldn't feel so lead-loaded!"; "Holding the turn-out of my standing leg really helps for balances, be it at the barre or in the middle, on demi-pointe or on flat"...

Those epiphanies are always a joyous moment where it feels like I've found a secret to unlock the way to improvements, and often also one when I think "if only I had understood that earlier!" :)

In many ways, moving to Oxford has opened my mind, probably because I'm happier in my job than I've ever been before, I'm now ready to try things out, to get a bit more adventurous with my dancing, even to try and choreograph ("awanturnik!!" would say someone I know).

So I've taken up butoh, and go to contemporary dance classes when I can. I'm also giving a go to improvisation. And amidst this exploration of new dance forms, I always find tips and tricks that feed my ballet practice, and vice-versa. 

And this is the point at which this blog starts.

Now, in the light of those new dancing adventures, I would like to document and share my thoughts on how butoh, contemporary dance and ballet keep feeding each other in my dance practice. How do they help me find my expressive tone, how do they influence my dancing vocabulary? And in my attempts at choreography, how do these findings make their way into steps, narratives, tableaux? What kind of processes are at play, and what kind of movements and movers inspire me? 

Inaugural post in the works...

Watch this space!

First post coming soon... promised :)