Carol Brown Dances: Carol Brown Writes

Carol Brown Writes

18.09.01

Photo: Carol Brown I am sitting at my desk in London again, a different location than the last. We have moved (in several countries and now living in a new place).

Planes fly overhead once again but cannot be looked at with the same wish fulfilment as before.
Last week the sky went dry.

It is difficult to compress the last eight months, what follows are some glimpses [only] of travels taken and ideas moved through.

Open Sky: April, in New Zealand.

I arrived in Auckland from London to participate in Future Moves, a conference organised by DANZ addressing the future of contemporary dance in New Zealand. In my keynote address, Dancing in the Mediascape, I talked about phase shifts in perception, space-time compression, and enlivening acts within an increasingly mediatized culture. On Good Friday I gave a workshop on installation performance to conference participants. Thirty white helium balloons suspended in the well-appointed studio of the University of Auckland's School of Performing Arts, formed a forest of floating forms onto which graphic animation was projected. The workshop participants explored concepts of equilibrium, equipoise and countertension to both subvert and complement the three-dimensional installation.

The conference was an opportunity to meet former colleagues and open my awareness to developments in the performing arts in New Zealand. As with each visit to New Zealand I came away with a profound sense of engagement with what Homi Bhaba describes as 'the location of culture'. Outside the conference I stayed with Raewyn Whyte, a true host in all senses of the word. Her verandah, filled with friends and partner Derek's dinosaur collection, became a meeting ground for ideas and histories.

Balloons/Voyages

In May I went to Philadelphia. There, I extended the balloon theme. In South Philly I found a shop dedicated to balloons and chose 100 pearly blue, salmon, grey and acid yellow ones. I decided against helium, this time allowing the balloons to rest on the floor untethered whilst dancers Heather and David slid, fell and dragged their own and each others bodies around in a piece called Sprawl. Phil Von's music sampled in Paris and Marseilles provided a bed of grit for their movements as they roll and collide scattering the balloons across the floor. The sounds of Philadelphia, the constant thrum of traffic moving towards or away from the Benjamin Franklin bridge merged with the footsteps of walkers in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris.

We did have casualties and became breathless with the task of inflating balloons each night.

I kept a couple of spares and last month found one in my bag whilst swimming in a lake near the town of Fürstenfeldbruck. I was there visiting my sister Pauline and attending performances as part of the Tanzwerkstatt in nearby Munich. Cessa, my niece enjoyed dancing a solitary balloon between us. Our game ended with a final flight into a field of maize.

In Philadelphia I also made a short video with Tobin Rothlein, The Idea of Sea. The film is a meditation on a journey from the city to the sea. P.J. Harvey's recent, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea provided ballast, but the piece took on its own trajectory as soon as we started filming. The journey moves from the subway of Broad Street, with its long passages and tunnels to the train, surfacing at Gerrard Street and from there in a chrysler car, driving to Atlantic City. Nikki Cousineau performed the role of an urban fugitive, wandering along the boardwalk, following her thoughts to the sea. Sean Feldman, has a cameo role, as a man dancing under neon lights, the only dance in an otherwise mood piece of urban textures.

Strata formed part of the same programme of commissioning for the company and arose from my engagement with George Perec's Species of Space. The book had a huge impact on my sensitivity to the detail of place, it travelled with me from Sydney to London, to Philadelphia. I made notes, recorded fragments of text and asked the dancers to create movement scores by mapping their routes through the city with different body parts. In July, Strata and Sprawl were performed in Potsdam and Berlin as part of Group Motion's tour in Europe. More recently a friend has written to say he has just seen Strata as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Triple Bill Tours to Austria and Bulgaria

In March Carol Brown Dances went to Vienna to perform the Triple Bill at the dieTheater in the Kunstlerhaus. I found Vienna to be a city of monuments and mourning. I dedicated the performances to Hilary Napier Dunlop who died late last year and whose career as a dancer began in Vienna with Gertrud Bodenwieser in the 1930s.

I sensed the vacuum left by the exile of her company in 1938. There is startingly little evidence of her work there now, though critics pointed out the continuity of a tradition evidenced in our own programme. Jarmilla Weisenbock at the Theater Museum hosted a visit by Pauline and I. We pored over images from the archive of Mirquette Hirmer a former dancer with the company. Her extensive archive detailed tours of Poland, Germany, Bulgaria and to London.

We also took coffee and cake with Magda Brunner Hoyos and Esther von Wartburg. Magda was with Bodenwieser in Colombia and went on to establish a solo career there before returning to Vienna. Esther had studied with Bodenwieser and later with Chladek (after the war). Both of these women had moving narratives of survival and creative lives, fuelled by the impact of Gertrude Bodenwieser at a crucial stage of their development as women. They both commented on Frau Gerty's improvisations, describing these as inspirational events, Esther would leap from her chair to demonstrate a movement and contrast the Chladek method to that of Bodenwieser.

In June the company ventured to Bulgaria, a country that the Bodenwieser Tanzgruppe had performed in before the war. We performed at the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, and in the Varna International Theatre Festival. Rome has its cats and Varna has its dogs. They wander the streets desultorily, the great unwashed and all of them opportunists, but wonderfully tolerated and fed by the locals. The festival in Varna is a meeting ground for theatre practitioners within Central Europe. Our work was well received within a context of political excitation as the elections the following week were on course to vote in Bulgaria's former King as head of government.

In Sofia we enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere the mist and rain lifting to reveal lush mountains and the spectacle of Soviet era architecture decaying in public spaces. At a post performance discussion we were asked about the role of sexuality in our work: how can the body be said to speak in its own language outside prevailing ideological orthodoxies? It was an interesting debate and one of the most willing audiences I have experienced to really grapple with questions of meaning in relation to the performed body.

The theatres we performed in could not have been more contrasting; from the heavy concrete and vast halls of the National Palace Culture built in the 1980s to celebrate Bulgarian socialism, to the 19th century proscenium arch opera house in Varna with its apron stage, huge back stage area and ornate features, a tribute to European high art sensibilities. It was this extraordinary mixture of different epochs and the sense of a country in transition which made an impact on me. Alongside this I learnt a salutary lesson, that as a performing artist in Britain I am privileged to assume certain resources as essential to the art I produce, when touring outside this relative comfort zone, there is a necessity to make do and appreciate the difference.

Programme

Research into Anatomies and Architectures gathers pace. I presented my research to date as part of a Roehempton School of Arts seminar in June, and at a conference for tertiary dance educators in May. These seminars are an opportunity to share and discuss some of the projects being undertaken and their research outcomes.

Funding has been received from London Arts to develop Nerve for performances in London in early 2002. Together with the architect Stewart Dodd, I am currently redesigning this urban wave form installation for a premier as part of the British Dance Edition in Birmingham in February 2002.

The solo, Sleeping in Public, being performed as part of the Wandsworth Festival at Battersea Arts Centre in November, is in process. It will be a short work centred on a spoken text and will form an accompaniment to the duet, Nerve. Visuals for this work will be in the form of a projected data stream of architectural fragments within the city of London.

Machine for Living has just completed a month long redevelopment period in preparation for performances in November in Dance Umbrella and touring in 2002. We have secured funding through the National Touring Programme of the Arts Council of England for performances in the regions of England.

I am also working with the architect Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen on a proposal for Spawn, a fluid space of multiple becomings, to explore the potential for embodying spaces within a mixed reality environment. This will be a major focus for my research programme in 2002. It will involve cross-disciplinary collaboration between architecture, dance and technology to create an ecology of perception in which new models of performance can be explored.

Management

Since early this year management of Carol Brown Dances has been through Gwen van Spijk. Gwen has successfully secured London Arts support to employ an administrative assistant, Kyla Lucking. Kyla is located at our London office in Diamond Dance Studios.

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