Wednesday, June 2, 2010

ALTERING STATES AND SHIFTING STRUCTURES

I have just finished a three day workshop at Dancehouse. With 10 or so other people we all started to explore some of what I have been playing around with (in isolation) for the last 4 months. I realised that I have an obsession for layering different sounds in the room as well as closing myself off from the world by using earphones- closing off and making a new world. We danced, we shook, we watched, we chatted, we listened, we made our own little worlds, we thought about the idea of habits, we tried to find our habits and then the opposite of them, we moved plinths around the room, stood higher than our height, made up false events, tried to imagine we were in a different space, tried to make ourselves someone else, allowed ourselves to be lured my the music, we stepped on the beat, we decided what we were doing was pretty stupid and then we told ourselves there was no such thing as stupid, we wondered why we thought that was stupid anyway, we wrote scores for our habits, we thought that maybe habits could be called recurring patterns, we watched someone say 'yes' after we had decided that committing to something was a little like surrendering to something but you had to know what you were committing to before you could surrender so then we decided that maybe it was just about the idea of 'yes', we watched patterns emerge from the scores, we discovered we liked Led Zeppelin (some one us), we rediscovered we did not like Nick Cave (some of us), we discovered each others particular tastes.

And more.

But you can't write about the 'and more' because it happened there and it is a little indescribable.

Altering States and Shifting Structures Workshop at Dancehouse
Monday 31 May-Wednesday 2 June 2010
Participants: Tinuviel Walker, Kelley Jirsa, Tamara Searle, Alexandra Knox, Rebecca Jensen, Sarah Aiken, Sara-Kate Oldfield, Carlee Mellow, Leeke Griffin