intention must be present and we must take time to believe in what we are doing.

• it is vital to relay this to the performers.
• they must be clear on what the intention of the piece is.
• we must take time to get them to believe in what we are all doing.
• we must keep talking to them about what this intention is.
• is the experience of time (the 1 hour) the whole intention for the piece? if so, it must form part of our process of working.

‘blurring’ the line between audience and performer

• when the audience gets involved in a choreographic way, they start to experience the work and create it at once.
• feeding an audience instructions and the politics of this - dictatorial or helpful?

score 1

score 2

score 3

score 4

score 6

lydia discusses 2 of her pieces:

1. for multiple people mopping (real mops and real water)
2. for multiple people ‘flying a kite’ (imaginary kite)

many people attempting a similar action results in  repetition and subtle difference.

this relates strongly to the repetition of gesture that i have been interested in recently.

score 5

lydia and i meet in a coffee shop to talk about the project.

i discuss some of my recent interests regarding blurriness, 'snowiness', ambiguity, and obfuscation. i show some images of interest to me that are related to these material qualities. lydia took some notes on these.

lydia: in under 1 hour with the practice, performers tend to still be nervous and tense.

after one hour, one begins to settle into the practice, the space, and the environment in which one is doing it.

from there, we are able to grow more organically within the practice.

we make a provisional schedule for all our sessions:

lydia's response is positive, but suggests that it would be better to talk the players through the instructions as it unfolds, rather than give them a score to hold in their heads.

what can we get the audience to achieve through verbal instructions?

we discuss the idea of giving the audience instructions on pieces of paper.

• how do we structure this? 
• where do they receive the instructions? 
• when do they perform them? 
• what kind of instruction would be generous? 
• are they all different?

by the first session with everyone, we agree to have:

• a list of thematic key words, describing what we want it to be, e.g. durational.
• a clear intention for the piece.
• a skeleton plan for all 4 sessions in march.
• movement/sound exercises that we can do. things that are fun, not immediately serious - to get to know one another in a loose environment.

a small gesture.

getting people moving and thinking about movement, choreography, and material.

how we relay the intention to the performers is as important as what it is.

how can we guide the performers through the thought process we ourselves went through, to build a solid understanding of the intention for them?

lydia: we can control the contexts that the performers associate with certain pieces of information and this can be a very powerful way of making the intention more easy to understand.

as the weeks unfold, which concepts and keywords do we introduce and when? what do we introduce first?

i prepared a text score for our session:

the goal is to move the room into a state of relaxed chatter so that every expression is welcomed in the space.

asking the group to come up with a small gesture, which we will probably have to make smaller. get them bored of this tiny movement, then start to develop it.

lydia and i had 4 official meetings before we began devising with the group.

the important points that came out of these 5 meetings are shown below.

these come from detailed notes which i took after every session.

all quotations are paraphrased.

meeting 1 - 27.01.25 (ambiguity, layering, senses, repetition)

meeting 2 - 03.02.25 (duration, audience, intention, planning)

meeting 3 - 10.02.25 (movement scores, my score, plans)

meeting 4 - 25.02.25 (preparing for first meeting with everyone)

lydia suggests that i should lead this session. i was initially uncomfortable with the idea, i felt that lydia had more experience leading these kinds of sessions.

however, i knew she had a good point. the performers are all friends of mine so it would be more natural.

this reduces the risk of confusion. a score chucks all the key words in at once. feeding it to them one task at a time is a less intensive approach which introduces concepts more slowly.

in pairs, one person uses both hands to firmly hold various places around the body of the other person, while humming something like a tune. take turns.

lydia:

• to what extent will 1-hour-ness be the 'point' of our piece?
• what is the result for the audience and what are we asking of them? 
• is it to sit there and experience it (i.e. a traditional idea of ‘the audience’ - how ethical is this?)
• is there a level of autonomy that we can give the audience to be the masters of their own experience of the piece? 
• can we allow the audience to enter or exit the space at will? can we allow them to move around the space at will - closer or further from the performers? 
• how do we facilitate their feeling able to do so? how do we ‘invite the audience to leave’?

what do you do in response to having a warm foot? how do you move? everyone will have different responses with different rhythms and sizes of movement

discussions of snowiness and the outlines created by things covered in snow created a link for lydia to things leaving impressions, the ambiguity of these impressions.

lydia’s piece i performed in, gray area (for five dancers and four double bassists) ends openly, the audience doesn’t know whether to clap or not.

when the performance is actually over and people go to the theatre bar, the presence of one of the bassists playing jazz carries the performance into the real world.

the line between the performance and real life is blurred - does the piece ever end?

when you are dealing with other work of this ‘non-conclusive’ kind, how do you actually end, then?

the other person is being made aware of their body and of someone else gripping it, which is also a vulnerable experience.

lydia has prepared some scores to try with the group. these are choreographic scores - facilitated propositions, invitations to movement.

no one in the group apart from lydia is a trained dancer.

lydia said that this is exciting for her as a choreographer.

but we want to make sure the group is comfortable with movement.

can this be a way to level the playing field between the audience and the performers?

we also want to give everyone the opportunity to talk about their own practice and interests.

so that we can weave these into the sessions and make them feel involved and invested.

a vocalising of your sensations which requires a deeper conceptualising to translate your senses into language.

intention

1. i am interested in achieving complex sonic results through verbal cues that can work with any group of people (e.g. asking a group to sing any note = a thick chromatic chord)
2. lydia says she achieves complex choreographic results through pedestrian movement (the lack of artificiality creates a natural abundance of miniature movements)

duration

lydia: a 1 hour piece feels like 1 hour piece, it doesn't feel like a durational piece. after 1 hour things begin to feel 'durational'.

get them excited about the space that a small movement has, staying with, and appreciating it for a time makes the prospect of durational work a lot easier.

revise the plan of introducing the next concepts

lydia: it is good to establish a mode of communication at each session. one week might be mainly spoken instructions. the following week might be more concrete text scores.

i ask lydia if she could lead the check-in, as i felt she had a more sincere energy with which to invite genuine responses, whereas i tended to fall into irony. she agreed.

coming up with movement out of nothing is intimidating for new dancers, but tracing an environment with a body part is immediately visually interesting.

lydia: remain passive for as long as possible. get to know each other as a group through informal activities.

a lovely exercise which is exposing for both parties. the hummer/holder is having to choose where to hold the other person and what to hum, which can be exposing.

lydia asks: how do we partition this span of time? in sections? in layers where multiple people do different things (scores) at once? scores could contain tasks that take any amount of time to complete.

me: how it might work to time these section changes?

musicians are used to stopwatches but what about dancers?

how do they know when a durational work is really over or when to change?

lydia: through rehearsal. dancers are very good at internalising sensations of time. even a 3 hour piece can be accurately performed each time.

plan the introduction of concepts for the weeks.

what can we get the audience to achieve without verbal instructions? what can you make them aware of implicitly or covertly?

they aren’t just pawns or tools for us to play around with, they can develop themselves in that room!

remind them that everything they do, is ‘what we are doing'. there doesn't need to be any self-consciousness about their ability to move dancerly, they are already doing what we are doing.

typically, the audience knows nothing and the performers know everything. can we reverse this relationship?