Carol Brown Dances: Carol Brown Writes

Carol Brown Writes

Photo: Carol Brown London, UK

19 June 2006/ 5 July 2006 London

I have just presented a performance talk with Mette at the Siobhan Davies Studios. Mette performed a watercolour drawing whilst I danced under the ribboned roof of the studio on a hot Sunday, we talked about dancing and drawing as core practices for architecture and choreography respectively, and how these practices are affected by working with new media and digital environments. The audience was mainly drawn from the architectural community. A woman asked me about the relationship to sound. I had played Jerome Soudan’s music and a track from Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s Equatorial Stars to support the dancing-drawing. The music provided a sonic architecture where we could meet but I hadn’t chosen to focus upon it in the talk. Yet it was there crucially as a reference point for her and as part of the matrix of the event.

Dancing six months pregnant is a new experience for me. I am finding being on the vertical axis preferable to shifting off-balance, and I am using the floor a lot more as a support for upright movement rather than as a surface to roll, subside, slide and shunt across. My movements feel slower and more controlled, deliberate and aware. I can tilt but I cannot roll. My centre of gravity has shifted slightly forward to accommodate the extra contouring of my belly. Of course feeling the baby moving inside me is more evident when I am still than when I am moving but I like to think that he/she is also riding the space deep within my own body and embedded in an amniotic sea of its own and is being rocked by this dancing.

Sea themes are important in this dry summer as I contemplate the next two projects, SeaUnSea and Deep and Beneath. The former uses the idea of a synthetic seascape created through digital processes to create a playful and contemplative environment for dance. Deep and Beneath works with the idea of the Ocean and the processes through which Cunningham Dance Company created their work of the same name. Merce speaks of how dance itself is like water, involved in constant transformations and evanescent. When I met with the video artist, Roswitha Chester yesterday we spoke of how a single event, like a drop of water falling into a still pool, or a single sperm inseminating an egg, create a ripple effect of change and transformations with repercussions which permeate way beyond the singularity of the initial action.

Of course this flow of life can be stopped short at any moment. This is something which I am also interested in exploring. What Andre Lepicki would call the ‘still act’ of dancing and how choreography might also be about a resistance to the ongoing continuum of motion which holds us enthralled to the art of the kinetic but which also struggles to speak of anything beyond its own intrinsic value as movement-for-itself. I am currently writing a review of Lepicki’s book, Exhausting Performance (Routledge 2006) so have been thinking a lot about his ideas of kinaesthetic momentum and the modernist drive towards movement.

The first three months of my pregnancy I was mostly in New Zealand working on the International Festival commission, Aarero Stone or Stone Tongue. This work which was a form of lamentation came into being at the same time as the beginnings of the new life, so I have felt this very direct connection between the dance and not just lostness but also newness. The performances were the culmination of an extended research into the stories of stone. Stones became the metaphor and the material of the performance as I carried, moved, balanced and counterweighted stones on my body, letting their associations with geological time, memorials, monuments and the inert bodies of various mythical and historical, ‘stone women’, feed the imagination of the piece. If there was a physical question which I was interrogating it was how does stone move and how are we moved to make of stone, memorials for the living and the dead?

This week is the anniversary of what has now been termed 7/7, the suicide terrorist attacks in London which exploded the lives of so many last year. Like 9/11 those of us who survived that London day will always remember where we were and how we came to know of this tragedy on the day it occurred. Charles Koroneho, was staying with me at the time and we were on our way into the city when a bus driver advised that no buses were going over the bridge into London north of the river. We went to Wandsworth Town instead, but there was a problem with the traffic and no-one was going anywhere fast. A pedestrian had just been fatally knocked down by a car. This recently deceased person died at around 9.30am on the corner of Buckhold Rd and Wandsworth High Street. He/She lay there covered in a body bag awaiting the ambulance. I remember Charles saying someone should be with him/her. He/she looked so alone. The day will always hold these twin memories for me, the physical memory of encountering a fatal accident in my neighbourhood at the same time that news of the bombings in the centre of London was being texted to me from friends in Sweden, New Zealand and elsewhere in Europe.

Embodied memories are something I have always been interested in and often explore in a more formal way choreographically. When I returned from New Zealand in late March this year, I went to Paris and the Centre National de la Danse, to give a performance talk about Gertrud Bodenwieser as part of their event based on the Archives International de la Danse. My former dance teacher and mentor, Shona Dunlop MacTavish came from New Zealand for the event and brought her companion and close friend, Louise Petherbridge. I was very pleased that Shona agreed to join me at the end of my talk and performance and to answer questions about her experience of dancing with Frau Gertie. She talked about the importance of music to Bodenwieser.

Karin Hermes dance company, Atempo, performed a reconstruction of The Demon Machine with the live and original music of Lisa M. Meyer (played on piano and cello). I have danced two different versions of this, one reconstructed by Shona in the early 80s for Dunedin Dance Theatre, New Zealand, and the other by Bettina Vernon and Evelyn Ippen in 1987 at the University of Surrey, England.

Karin and her partner come to our hotel in Vaugirard the next morning and between croissants and coffee from the breakfast buffet we discussed the different interpretations of the score with Shona. Karin’s reconstruction was based upon the labanotation score which Margaret Chappel organised in Sydney in the mid-50s. There were a few ambiguities in this which Shona was able to clarify, like the lateral movements of the demon holding the female dancer in front of him and the twisting of the arms in the machinic section. I attended a rehearsal before their performance and gave feedback on the first part of the dance, the ‘Elysian Fields’ section which should be performed with this sense of uplift and upsurge through the upper body, so characteristic of Bodenwieser’s technique. This upsurge started with the floor and the connection of feet to floor and moved upwards through the body particularly the chest, neck, head and hair and extending all the way like a ripple or wave through to the fingertips. Another wave effect.

Shona and I explored Paris together, moving slowly through the urban matrix to visit places she had been to as a young woman before the second world war. Places with personal stories like the Eiffel Tower where she went after her classes with Ellen Tels who had been a student of Isadora Duncan. We were there during the unrest over the new employment bill which Chirac eventually threw out but not before protests against this had closed down universities and created mass protests by students and workers and brought about a general strike. As Shona and I were exploring the city and visiting her history places, heavily armed soldiers and police were keeping watch on the streets and waves of protesting students were blocking entrances to public and educational buildings. All the while Shona talked of her memories of being there in the years 1937-38, staying with her brother and her mother and enjoying all the city had to offer her before she was called to join the Bodenwieser Tangruppe as they escaped Vienna for the tour of Colombia which certainly saved Bodie and her Jewish dancers from the Nazis and was a signature event in Shona’s life. Shona had also visited the studio of Raymond Duncan at this time and had an ‘audience’ with him.

Email: carol@cranium.demon.co.uk

Other Entries: 19.01.05 | 01.07.03 | 22.11.02 | 16.05.02 | 18.09.01 | 29.01.01 | 21.09.00