limerick IRELAND 2012

limerick IRELAND 2012

rewriting distance with Mary Nunan

October- November 2012
 
october 25th, 2012
 
Workshop with MA students choreography and BA students voice and movement.
Importance of conversational nature of practice, to liberate the use of voice (text, language) and movement simultaneously.
How it began. With Lin catching the wind and the flight of the birds. Circling around. And (re)discovering red and green.
A journey from being stuck to flying; from frying to flying; from nightmares to dressing up at Halloween; from God to collective
consciousness; from yellow to blue and pink.
How it ended. Bringing back a memory of me trying to levitate in the garage of my grandparents. Trying to float, to fly from
one side to the other, without my feet touching the ground.
The beauty of having a good conversation with friends or loved ones and meanwhile keeping the bodies engaged with the
space around, with each other.
 
october 29th, 2012
 
They announced a hurricane hitting the East coast of the States today and when it turns land inwards it might meet other storms,
creating a Frankenstorm. Which is really a bad pun. The cynism of our media age.
So we have been circling around in our first exploration together: a lot of water, a lot of breath. Getting stuck to the desk and finding
a way out.
Sharing our common passion for poetry: Guido Gezelle, Brendan Kennelly, Wallace Stevens.
“And when the blackbird flew out of sight.
It marked the edge. Of one of many circles”
(Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird by Wallace Stevens)
The windows in this room framing the sky and the landscape like a Jeff Wall photo.
Lin re-enacting unconsciously with the paper roll extending her arm, the image of Mary an hour earlier casting with her raised arm
a beautiful shadow in the tiny light shaft above the photos of a place, demolished now.
How we all resonate the same archetypal images which connects us: the shell, the horse, the air, water, waves, birds, a lion,…
The beauty of stillness. A summer’s breeze. A song.
And in the background the cynism of our media age. A hurricane turned into a Frankenstorm, possibly deciding a presidential election
and our choices for the next couple of years.
A question of scale. What is small? What is large?
No matter how stuck we are, there is always a way out.
And when you think it is the end, someone will start a new song or create an amazing body sculpture with only a roll of paper.
 
“The delight of keeping it light!” (Mary)
 
tuesday october 30th
 
Mary’s question: “Who is the audience?”
Today it started with leaves of grass – Walt Whitman – moving and the smell of music which is woody.
Later we discovered how the body is a raft, which is comfortable because of its clear boundaries. 
But there was also this other desire to stay porous, to dig the earth, to drop, to walk in the sea and be able to continue to breathe
under water, with the waves and the diffracting sunlight high up.
We ended up all being the audience of the traces we left in the empty space, the calligraphy of lines, dots and words on a white sheet.
To leave – leaves you with – leaves of tender memories about the things and people you left behind.
Spanish has two different words for reflection, whether it is in a mirror or in the mind.
The shadow of my hand picking up the pen I dropped.
The reflection of my hand touching the leaves.
My hands energetically scanning the raft of your body.
We are digging a breeze of breath!
 
wednesday october 31st
 
I have been reading John Dewey the last couple of days. “Art as experience”. His philosophical distinction of shape and form.
Your beginning – the unfinished outline of your body or is it, the outline of an unfinished body, was an echo of that reading.
How ‘art as experience’ is about relations. How we always attain for the whole, but need the tensions of holes. Holistic.
Sooo…ma…
Don’t say the word. The clicking of the camera will finish it for you.
“Between my finger and my thumb 
The squat pen rests, snug as a gun”
(Seamus Heany)
You asked me what ‘a squat pen’ is.
We threw the I-ching. And its answers was the unfinished relationship between a father and a son. Which might be very much
the case, both for Heany and myself.
And then Mary showed you. Your bodies alternating between squat and snug. Offering the release of laughter.
Sooo….ma…
 Body
‘Body, you are my buddy!’ ‘My chum.’
We need the tension of the unfinished to connect the fragments to the whole. (Again me paraphrasing Dewey).
 
thursday november 1st
 
“I speak
 because I am shattered”
(The Red Poppy by Louise Gluck)
“By God, The old man could handle a spade
Just like his old man”
(Seamus Heany)
The Happy Grass by Brendan Kennelly
 
Some of this week’s realizations.
The importance of creating gaps to be filled in; leaving things to be found; dropping things to be picked up.
The dark side of somatics. It is not about interiorizing your awareness. It is about keeping your awareness for the environment
alive, on the surface, skin deep.
The beauty of revisiting, re-membering, re-composing with past fragments.
But also stay present. In this room. With the weather changing constantly from rain to sun and back.
The grass singing. The sun being at the heart of the poppy.
To allow yourself to appropriate some else’s poetry; your own secrets; the nickname only your closest relatives know.
The level of thrust, of openness it requires to be vulnerable, to allow ‘to see through’, to walk and stumble on long forgotten words.
“They gave their sorrow a name
And drowned it”
(Eevan Bolland, Atlantis, A lost sonnet)
How we progress in the practice: spiraling.
How intimacy is never a matter of scale.
How it is okay to be stuck, to be stung.
 
friday, november 2nd, 2012
 
“What do we see, when we feel the dance.” (Mary)
One of the recurrent themes of this week: the porous boundaries of our body that define us and the possibilities to extend them to
the environment, to the objects with which we play and to the other.
“A lot happened!”  (Lin)
 
Workshop at Dance Ireland, november 5th till 9th, 2012
 
Noisy Ear. It is the apex of dance, poetry and drunkenness (paraphrasing Foucault).
Dance and poetry have in common the way our body re-members, that is dissects and reconstructs the past through associations
triggered by our senses in the present moment.
It is fine and necessary to be porous to all the ‘noise’ around us, to get intoxicated by it. But we also want to integrate the words we
steal from others into our own phrase, story line.
To integrate them is the base of our own integrity.
 
As you stand, I am walking
Scratches your hands
Layering a grey line
Into a keyboard of light
 
How the outside dialogues with the inside.
How different voices pick up each other’s story lines, each other’s rhythms, each other’s sense.
There is no nonsense. There is always sensitivity, sensuousness.
The power of gestures, of distance and proximity, of inanimate things becoming alive.
Our hand is a puppet with which we can express anything, create anything form icebergs to unicorns.
We walk in each other’s footsteps and weave a story together. The fragments become a whole. The pieces of the puzzle fall into
place as we progress, spiralling through what we recognize and repeat again, differently and how we build in surprise through dialogue
and rhythmical change.
When to leave, when to enter, when to re-enter.
Using what is most immediate: the raindrops outside, a Doris Day song on the radio this morning.
The power of rhythm. The consciousness of the non-beat. The silence. The pauses.
To create with the sculptural quality of the body. Its porous boundaries.
How engaging it is, to see people really engage in whatever basic actions they are doing.
Not to hide the fatigue, the searching and questioning.
 
Guy Cools
Limerick, Dublin