Development of choreographic work // 2020

Tasks

What does existence mean to you? To be human? Questions/brainstorming

• Brainstorming these moments of existence

• What do you recall? What speaks to us?

• How are we going to relate to ourselves and to other people in the future?

• GIF dances - 5-10 repetitions, celebratory things, universal looping movements

• Clay moulding - pushing the body through clay, resistance

• Switchboard - playing on the switchboard, switch board master - switchboard in the air, switchboard on partner

• Elastic body - tension, release, revolving around 360 degrees

• Humming into singing into crying, throwing sounds into the space

2.

• Going through the elements - water —> wood —> wind —> earth

• Going through them somatically, really articulating what they are and then finding a way of accessing them rhythmically

• Snapping in and out of these states

3.

• What do you do to a face that you care about? What gestures? How would you react?

• Do this with another person

• Imagine this and do this task by yourself and then with a stranger

• Speaking and then become quieter and quieter, as if you were having a conversation and suddenly it’s just mouthing words

• How could this task become participatory?

4.

• Singing/humming/hymn

• Throw a sound into the space upon entering it

  A word

  A hymn

  A laugh

  A hum

5.

• 魂 = soul, mind, spirit

•  Using the soul symbol as a point of reference to create a choreographed phrase

• Thinking about personal history, using the lines and points of the calligraphy to influence your movement pattern

  What does this tonal wash do to your experience of the space? How are you changing, affecting, contributing to the space upon entering?

• The difference between being in the physical ritual and embodiment of practice or the performance of it

• We are not performing the work

• The concept of ‘The Everywhere’ - a metaphor for Dreaming time

• Sound being continuous, eliciting the dreaming which is ever present

• The relationship between ritual and performance.

• Through the act of ritualistic performance, we confront a transformation

  A transformation of ourselves

  Of what we see

  How do we negotiate the space between ritual and performance?

• When does the public become the work?

Constellations of Thought (As It Fades)

Takeuchi, R. (2019), Constellations (As It Fades) [glow in the dark yarn, LED light]. QUT Frank Moran Gallery, QLD, Australia.

Light, passing time, memory, loss and rebirth - what makes up the galaxy of your mind? I began the solo development process creating movement material from personal memory and by taking inspiration from the simplicity of Nature - the entangled branches and spider cobwebs, in particular. I wanted to draw on these different lines of ideas, considering them as constellations of human emotions, consciousness and experience. The resultant sculptural, performance installation has become a somatic contemplation for me and I hope to explore the potential for this sensitivity to be shared with the viewer. 

In Constellations of Thought (As It Fades) I’m combining an installation using glow-in-the-dark yarn and lighting with my solo practice that I’ve been developing with dance practitioner Kay Armstrong. I have been very interested in working with light and ephemeral works that are constantly in flux - all of these materials as metaphors for time and space. I wanted to play with the idea of refractions of light – how lighting changes and impacts what one can see. I wanted to activate primal senses through darkness and examine what it means to see small residues of the body in darkness.  

In the documentation of this webbed sculpture I’ve been thinking about wrapping, moving and reacting. How can the spectators navigate the space? When the spectators negotiate the space, I’m anticipating the space being dark - the spectators will have to map the space for themselves.

The work has been influenced by artists such as Tomas Saraceno, Ken Yonetani, Marina Abramovic and Ryoji Akita with Forsythe.

My primary questions in assembling my new performance installation work are:

• How can choreographic play enliven agency?  

• How do you facilitate someone's agency through a process of decontamination and entering a work?  

• What does it mean to move through the threshold between passive spectatorship into enlivened and performative spectatorship? What is it to go into this space? To pass through the threshold?

• When disrupting the expectation of a ‘critique situation’, does it alienate the viewer's experience, or add a layer of curiosity?  

See pictures below for process shots of installation documentation:

The images above are documentation of my choreographic journal documenting the process of development under Kay Armstrong which took place over three weeks.