Carol Brown Dances: Carol Brown Writes

Carol Brown Writes

01.07.03

Photo: Carol Brown London, UK

Returned from Prague Quadrenniale 10th International Exhibition of Theatre Architecture and Scenography on Friday after a month long stay in the heart of Prague. Cat, who came as choreographic assistant, and I stayed in a spacious apartment on 28 Rijnad (thank you Pavel) just down from Václavské námêsti (Wenceslas Square). We did not have time to really explore the city because the installation was all consuming but we did enjoy the walk to and from the apartment to the 17 tram stop in front of the Národni Divaldlo. We stumbled over the cobblestones as my eyes were constantly drawn upward to the embossed buildings; relief sculptures and stone sculptures that pressed into the air above our heads. The figurative sculptures and elaborate stone formations which abounded in this part of Prague, Staré Mêsto, created an exuberant sense of play and display: A Baroque city unbound.

The Heart of the PQ was an experimental process; a vast collaboration of different artists from throughout the world working on the idea of the body as a stage for the senses within a sceno-architecture designed by Dorita Hannah. Artists from Russia, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Netherlands and Korea combined ideas but also presented their own visions for this 'theatre of the heart'. There was a strong NZ presence as Mau Theatre, Charles Koroneho, Lemi Ponifasio, Helen Todd and Phil Dadson were all performing alongside Dorita Hannah, Sven Mehzoud and Lee from Wellington who were the main architecture team. It is difficult to imagine such a large-scale and complex performance experiment being realised in any other city. But Prague is a city both of theatres and for the theatre. I loved this aspect of it, that here was a place where theatrical tradition was omnipresent but alongside this was this incredibly liberal post-communist flair for defying the expected, the conventional, the ordered and contained. At least for the participants the experience was one of an uncontainable sensorium that defied categorisation.

As a curator for the sense of touch, I had ten days to workshop ideas to instal in and around the Tower of Touch and to begin the creation of an evening performance that explored the installation environment as a whole. Rehearsals took place at the Duncan Centre, a school for contemporary dance located in a quiet suburb close to the River Vltava and in the southern part of the city. Our six Czech dancers were superb: Jana, Eliska, Lucie, Veronika, Jitka and Sandrine thank you. In the first phase of development we investigated touch, that most pervasive of our senses, as a tool for choreography by opening the sensory map of the corporeal self through yoga, massage, improvisation and body work. In these fast times it was good to slow down and listen through the intelligence of skin-sense to recognise the gestural fluency of touch. All of the dancers brought a profound understanding of how to feel the energies, pulsions and tensions of the corporeal self and to bring to the surface a kind of performative map of this knowledge. We utilised this information in performance by overlaying it with various narratives of proximity of how we are touched and how it is that we lose touch with each other and our bodies.

All the sounds, material and relationships for the installation were forged and encrypted in this time of quiet residence. The sound artist Michael Delia together with Marten compiled an electronically disturbed atmosphere of sound based on the rhythmic patterns of the body work. They did this by filling the studio with microphones and recording the aural patterns of movement whilst we worked. Later these sounds were filtered into the tower installation and further evolved for the evening performance.

We went into the production days a little apprehensive about how this evolving world of ours would be sited amidst the different energies and structures of the other towers. The Heart of the Senses became a polyphonic mapping of performance and a contestatory site for strong energies and competing passions. A strange 'salad' indeed as Tomas Zizka, the artistic director described it. In this intensely realised process it soon became evident that our practices, our subjectivities, our languages, our cultures have very long roots indeed. The intention, to explore an inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural performance research process which was design-driven, required a complex negotiation of spaces, times, and different ecologies of perception.

Our moments of intervention in the space outside the tower were performance focuses that inserted themselves into the surrounding landform. They involved us making quiet interventions, drawing attention to the subtle interplay of bodies trying to come into touch with each other. Tasks included 'holding hands with strangers' 'telling someone how you would like to be touched whilst being passive'; 'dancing with strangers'; getting a stranger to teach you a dance you do not know; 'the invention of new massage techniques; 'kissing' 'biting flesh' and 'singing another body undone'. These live actions complimented the durational performance inside the tower itself where visitors experienced integration through installation. The tower of touch existed as an oasis of calm amidst a sprawling event of confrontational sounds, materials, bodies and gestures.

By stitching the performer's body into the space we attempted to suture the mind to the body but also to create an anatomical theatre for the perception of one's own embodiment. Performance design choreographs habitation of space as much as what happens on stage. In our obsession with mind-body integration, we created healing spaces rather than spaces which confront and confound. In this way our tower had a very different aesthetic resembling a clinic or unusual institution to some of the other towers. In the Tower of Touch the audience's experience is prefaced by the therapists, a group of women identically dressed in red uniform dresses, clear slip-on shoes and black Louise Brooks wigs. They gesture to their visitors and speak in an appropriate language - Czech, Russian, French or English - "Welcome to the Tower of Touch. Please enter be careful on the stairs as you go up, they are very narrow."

The risk in this space is signalled by the caution to go carefully up the stairs. For Dorita and I the intention was to de-stabilise the audience's usual perceptions by making their physical experience of the work, one of perilous vertigo and instability. The audience climbs the stairs which have a deep red insert and cross to an adjoining 'tower' the 'anatomical tower' and a platform for viewing, 7m above a slab below, encased within opaque plastic sheeting. Peering down through a waist high vertical slot they see a body or bodies below engaged in a range of different actions. A woman with red hair and beige panty girdle is seen twisting into and out of the frame. From below this woman self-dissects, choosing the composition of her body on the slab, segmenting parts, and highlighting through shifting textures of light. Somewhere between massage table, dissection slab and surgery the performance evokes a proliferation of associations as corpse, sexual object, fleshy materialism, damaged goods, or living sculpture. Each light state denotes a different density to this body heightening the associations. At times the person below is seen speaking in fragments, stories of bodies found and lost. At other times of the day there is a massage happening on this table, or body work, or a man lies following the drift of his thoughts as if he is in analysis. What started as a specific durational performance for myself became a performance in flux in which I experimented with the content viewed below. This was also a reaction to some of the associations with voyeurism that attached to the tower by virtue of the presence of mostly female bodies. For me, it was important that the tower was not fixed in meaning and that the proliferation of associations invited audiences to be curious about the space and how they were touched by it through a sense of the 'body-in-flux'.

Invited to experience this event the audience is also gently touched by the therapists, sometimes by holding their hands, a slight press as if to strengthen their awareness of the moment, or a standing massage to shoulders, hands, arms. The atmosphere is one of porous body boundaries but within the convention of a clinical or healing environment. The formality of the space asserted the role of the performers and denoted their control over the space and the kinds of activity and contact that would happen there.

The second part of the installation was accessed from the ground level. Visitors were invited to drop below a tall black silo. Lying on their backs on a mattress and supported by red cushions their arms pressed into the strangers lying alongside. From this prone position, they would look up at a screen above them onto which a video projection of the action within the anatomical tower, filmed from a diagonal angle was relayed. Watching the live action in this way was a huge relief from the requirement to stand, negotiate the staircase and generally deal with the social space between bodies. Here, in this prone position individuals would relax, sometimes to the point of sleeping, enjoying the sense of their bodies being held and supported, touched by the design whilst witnessing the event within the adjoining space.

The relationship between artist and audience can resemble that between analysand and analyst. In the Tower of Touch we attempted to subvert these relations by creating a space where the audience experiences a kind of psycho-surgery and are massaged through the space by a team of therapists who are asked to analyse their need. That is to read in the quality of their presence the kind of touch they lack. Given that there was no invitation or request offered, it was surprising how open visitors were to our experiments. Of course not all needs were to be met, this was a performance after all but there was an attunement to touch as a tactile tool for negotiating our encounters in the world.

After a while our tower gained a reputation as a place you could come to to have a massage. People arrive and request this. Like the chicken that is almost killed in an act of ritual theatre perpetuated by the Monkey's Wedding group (South Africa) and Mau Theatre (NZ/Samoa), there is a tendency to blur the boundaries between theatricality and reality here. I remind these visitors who come seeking a real massage that this is performance only and massage is not a given within this space. One of the reasons the experience of the tower as performance becomes confused with social reality is also because the Exhibition as a whole has many visitors, including children, students and pensioners (who arrived on the free Monday). This was challenging and refreshing. It required a supple framing of the performance installation with a large and diverse public audience rather than the customary knowing art specific audience.

Other performers, like Kyzl Trakter from Kazakhstan roamed the floor beating drums and in a state of delirium weaving between people before crashing out on the carpet. Our closest neighbours and perhaps the group I felt most affinity to were the Russian based Akhe group in their anarchic kitchen. The kitchen was open all day and alternated between loud explosive moments of strange cooking demonstrations and the dailiness of food preparation, cooking and cleaning.

I am interested in places and experiences that force us to think differently. This was certainly one of those experiences.

Email: carol@cranium.demon.co.uk

Other Entries: 01.07.03 | 22.11.02 | 16.05.02 | 18.09.01 | 29.01.01 | 21.09.00