Trailer Video

I was in Brussels earlier this week and met Katja. We concluded that it is best to postpone the Dusseldorf show as well and do it in the new year. It is frustrating but it the only sensible thing to do. Grrr!

On the positive side there is now a trailer video:

Indifference postponed

It is a big pity but there is no choice other than to postpone the show at CPT because of an injury. In it's place we'll present 24/7/52 which is a fun show to perform and which has not had a proper London showing in ages. We are still looking forward to hitting London with Indifference but that will have to wait. 

So the details are:

24/7/52

Camden Peoples Theatre 

58-60 Hampstead Road, London NW1

Saturday 29th Oct 8PM

Sunday 30th Oct 3PM

Tickets £10/6

Indifference in Hawaii

Here are a couple of the more silly pictures to emerge from the rehearsals in Dusseldorf. It is probably for the best that we settled upon more sober costumes for the performance. Somehow our dances needed a bit of a sober frame to look like art, something that these costumes did not supply. That said, the party store in Dusseldorf where we bought the Hawaiian costumes was quite a fun place to visit anyway. The owner had a worldly laugh and easiness to him that was quite charming. For now however the grass skirt and sea shell bra will have to sit in storage.

Press review Mannheimer Morgen (English translation)

However, if one subsequently had the courage to experience hilarity at the festival centre, in their performance “Indifference” Bill Aitchison and Katja Dreyer curiously explore the idea of free will, with the Macarena and the Funky Chicken- until the final mental breakdown. Holiday songs and popular dance forms à la Club Med are turned into vehicles to portray the perceived freedom in the rat race, which is ultimately politically provided by capitalism in order to preserve the labour force. Bringing forth Karl Marx both fiercely and with a certain razzle-dazzle, this leaves, in infinitely looping sweat and water drenched circles, more questions than answers. But the former are indeed also necessary, especially at a festival with the motto: “Venturing the Impossible”.

Mannheimer Morgen 2011

What we owe the Swiss

The presentation of the dances would not be complete without the fifth, the Birdie Song. This video captures it rather well in both its essential movements and profoundly unprofessional quality.

I cannot swear by it but I do believe I must have danced it in similar situations as a young boy. I am not aware when I first heard it, it feels as if it has always been there in the background. I discovered it is of Swiss origin and from Davos in the 1950s it has spread far and wide. It must be a close contest between it and The Macarena as to which is the most widely know of the dances we perform. Of the two the birdie dance has by far the more traditional feel to it, it sounds as if it could be very old and I could imagine a medieval version of it without too much difficulty. But no, it is a song and dance that took flight after the war. This time frame does in fact work in a sense with the text we overlay upon it, a collation of Marx quotes stitched together with my best efforts at simplified Marxist theory. It gives it a cold war time frame though to be honest I am just as conscious of how such a text can reflect our current economic plight. I rather like the way that they sit beside one another, Marx and the Birdie Dance, for without precisely undercutting one another neither do they amplify the message or mood of the other. They simply colour and contaminate in a very particular way.

The Premiere Performances

We had the premiere performance on Friday and a second one on Sunday. They seem to mark the end of a long Summer and they took place in very warm and humid conditions, so much so that not only were we drenched in sweat by the end but so too the public were somewhat sticky. There were no major technical mishaps which was a relief given the complexity the show has reached with a lot of live signalling between all of us. There was however an accident near the end of the show on Sunday where a slip which was meant to be planned turned into an all too real one. The water that we spray around the space is quite beautiful but we will have to find another way to disrupt the harmony as this cannot happen again. I am neither keen on masochistic nor sadistic performances and this was certainly something outside the frame we had intended. It is a pity as the water looked very good. There is a picture of us spraying it around on the first review we received, that can be seen here:

http://www.wunderderpraerie.de/presse.php?presse_artikel_id=291

The talk turned out to be interesting and the questions make a clear transition from the personal idea of freewill to how this is relevant on a communal level. I was hoping this side of the work would come out and it seems that these subtexts to Indifference can be read. Maybe what I was happiest with is how we managed to balance the piece so that it moved as much towards as against freewill. I think compared to earlier work in progress performances we achieved this sense of ambiguity and movement between the various positions.

It was, as ever, a pleasure to be in Mannheim at Wunder der Prarie, the team were very welcoming and the art and ideas remained the focus of the festival rather than it being about the institutions or personalities. I would have liked to have seen more of the other work and been able to participate in the discussion around it all more fully but was already happy to see how the festival amounted to far more than the presentation of isolated performances and art works. It certainly felt like an excellent context to show the piece in as there was already something in the air.

A thank you to Jaspreet and Carlos our assistants, to Gabriele, Wolfgang, Tilo, Katia, Uli, Julia and the rest of the festival team, and to Oli drafted in to deal with the technical side of the work.

Pictures to follow!

Premiere Time

I won't write much as this is a busy day. Tonight we'll give the first proper performance in front of a public. The show is delicate and can fall apart but there is no safe path to take with it, performing it too safely kills it so we have to trust one another and trust that the work we have done will come together. This all makes me a little anxious, in a healthy way, and excited. Even though I have been here a number of times before, this feeling does not disappear, it merely becomes recognisable.

Final Rehearsals: injecting freewill

We were in Mannheim for a few days getting used to the 'Kubus', the space where we will first present the performance and are now back in Dusseldorf. It is only now that we are at the point of putting it all together and balancing the competing demands of the performance. It proved quite revealing. The performance has been gaining complexity and rules to the point that it becomes difficult to follow as a wholly logical game and instead starts to approximate a more organic system. This is quite a relief as for quite some time it made robots out of Katja and I. It was only after we came to the realisation that we had created a kind of deterministic prison that we were able to look for ways, using the system that we had created, to create escape paths out of it, ways in which we as the performers could make it work for us instead of us work solely for it.

Today we completed two runs. A new element that was introduced was that Katja and I would have a 'secret intention' that would guide us through the performance. This can be best described as using the performance as a vehicle to allow something else to happen. For example, I decided to use the performance as a time in which to think about a decision I am making. This colours my actions and gives me something internally to do when I find myself in front of the spectator. This secret intention is something that we make afresh for each performance so that it is not used as a way to stabilise and give a consistent emotional tone to the performance but on the contrary, a way to allow freewill to creep into the moment by moment actions of the performance. I was also pleasantly surprised that when using a deeper dilemma that I face as my secret intention, the tone of the performance did not necessarily grow overly negative.

A further way in which we have injected greater freewill into the system is by allowing ourselves to choose whether or not to follow the agreed upon sequence of events. If we choose not to we get different sorts of error signals which in turn we must register and decide how to react to accordingly. Overall this has shifted the balance further towards having us as thinking individuals in front of the public rather than as performers illustrating a series of decisions in as precise a way as possible. As someone with an appetite for chaos this feels more like home territory. The effect should be that the line between improvisation and set actions should appear blurred, as indeed it is in life.

Hey Macarena!

It would be crazy to make this performance and ignore this one, then again it is a bit crazy to make this performance full stop so that logic doesn't follow... Yes, the Macarena. And here they are doing a performance of it on a beach. One of the qualities of this performance of it that is quite attractive is that it is done as a performance for a public rather than danced in a social situation for the benefit of the participants only. The fact that it is a circular dance makes it work far better as a social dance but they show how it can be made into an act here. There is also quite a difference between the dancers here and the typical dancers, here they are professionals and they are camping it up for the cameras.Of all the songs we do this is probably the one that is the most known, I have spoken to people in three continents who all know it. It is also a bit more contemporary than the 80s dances and so has wider recognition between present generations. It is brutally simple but allows room for individual expression.

What The Show Wants: a fatalistic dramaturgy

This is a wooly idea that is attractive nonetheless as it does offer some freedom. Basically what this amounts to is if we don't necessarily pull things out of the show if they don't fit our concept. Indeed, rather than working with a concept or rigorous structure up front, this process has been more intuitive. We have some very basic material in the form of these songs and dances and instead of getting rid of them we simply agreed that the 'the show' wanted them and it was up to us to work with them, to persevere and find something in them. As they are unpresentable in their natural form this "what the show wants" strategy has thrown demands upon us, demands that have resulted in a number of unusual ways we adjust the songs and dances. By saying it is the show and not us who has decided, we place responsibility for these decisions outside of ourselves and see our role as helping the show realise its full potential.

Of course I am well aware the show is not a living creature with its own freewill yet it is an entity with a distinct character, the nature of which is slowly revealed or, I should also say, constructed. As we go further in the rehearsals it becomes clearer what fits with the show and what does not so in this way we develop a shared understanding of what it is. Still, the idea that the show should make some unexpected demands of us is always attractive so we remain alert to these.

Waikiki: a story told forwards and backwards

Today we have been looking at the ending... We did not find it but found instead a penultimate dance routine. We have settled upon a line dance performed backwards. This will have words accompanying it, voices that relate two competing versions of a simple story. The first tells it forwards insisting upon a causal logic linking one episode to the next while the other tells the same story back to front insisting on a consequent logic operating in the opposite direction. The result is two different stories as the connecting tissue that makes the two causal sequences possible must necessarily vary depending upon the direction in which the story is being told. With such a complex set of demands it is fortunate that we have seized upon a very simple story of a beach encounter in Hawaii between a hula mistress and a melancholic Swede named Johan. The story is basically that of the song Agadoo. It is a story so common that we already know it.

I am not sure which has been the more demanding, dancing backwards or constructing this backward/forward tale. I rather think it opens up a new approach for me to engage with narrative, one which has a fatalistic dimension to. I suppose if this were taken to the extreme then it would end up with God or the big bang or some other creation myth as the line... or else the admission, and I don't know why that happened. 

Dusseldorf: a city of discrete magic

We arrived in Dusseldorf and one of the first things Katja said to me about the city was, "there is no magic here." Whilst I was inclined to agree that the urban space is neither squalid nor special I came up with the reply, "the magic takes place inside the buildings." I very much hope that proves to be true and Black Box in FFT Juta is where some of it is to be found.

Yesterday was our first day of rehearsal. Some days give you a eureka! moment. Yesterday was not one of them. It was in fact somewhat broken and frustrating yet it was not without some significant work. We are looking at how to construct a more complex cueing system that grants each of us more volition, a very substantial issue central to the form of the performance. It is perhaps not surprising that we don't find a complete solution in an afternoon and to be fair we have significantly improved what we had. A major limitation of the performance previously was our centrality, there being no good reason to occupy alternative positions given the type of dances we have to work with. We may well have found a way to solve this using far more of the space. We still have to now try this in practice and see what it brings but I am confident that it will add greater depth to the work. So, no magic just yet, but solid work that permits the magic to shine.

Goodtime: A Line Dance

This is Goodtime, the third of the five songs we're working with. It is, quite obviously, an American dance. One of the qualities that differentiates it from the previous two is that it is a dance that changes the direction in which it faces, it works its way through 90 degree turns to make a circle. Well to be precise it makes four L shapes with slight spurs that can look like a swastika. I don't particularly want to go there however with this performance and there are plenty of other interesting qualities to it. The lyrics for a start are quite special and we will have to work with them quite deliberately. To this end in fact James has offered a wonderful technical solution. There are parameters that alter these songs (and dances) and one of these is a change in tempo. Goodtime speeded up does of course sound plain silly, like a gnome song. However, when it is speeded up and the pitch dropped the lyrics become audible once again and it simply sounds like a manic line dance. Working with this we have been training in dancing it at double speed and there is a strange quality that takes hold when dancing this way for a few numbers. I find that I myself have sped up in order to follow the pace and when a normal paced song plays it seems interminably slow, like some sort of zombie dance. Another attractive thing in this dance is the connotation the American West has with the libertarian spirit. A type of extreme freedom from organised social control. This brings up the question of freedom and society, of an absolute freedom of the will and how this has consequences beyond abstract philosophical and theological speculation. The recent debates on the riots in London were good examples of this question of freewill and responsibility clashing with freedom (or lack of it) within a consumerist economy to buy products. My favourite phrase about them that I heard was they were "shopping violently". Goodtime has something of this in it, it is a song of the worker who feels entitled to a weekend's play, a sort of play that is so connected to the work that it is escaping from that the two may be seen (from a distance) as two sides of the one coin. Why do I compare it to the riots? Simply as the riots held a similar tension between shopping and protest. They could be thought of as the anarcho consumerist shopping by any means necessary. Again from a distance, it appears to be two very different activities that collapse into one entity.

Hybrid Dances

Today I was looking at the video we took of Saturday's show and taking notes, mostly mental ones. Even with the benefit of video to place my point of view in the spectator's seat it is still difficult to see this at all freshly and not be bound up inside the creating and performing of it. This does not doom the effort to introversion but it is a tension I am always working with. What did become clear was the idea that there should be a visible cueing system whereby performer, lights or sound could all initiate cues that would have visible repercussions on the other parties was not fully developed. I wanted to get away from the typical composite staging of all elements working towards a unified vision moment to moment. I rather wanted to see each have a degree of independence. In order to make this visible some clear stages building up to the complex system that it has become need to be made clear.

Something else that needs to happen is to go further into choreography. Here are some photos from rehearsals the other day. Yes it does look like dance. We have to persevere with the rather C-list material we have been given and arrive at a genuinely interesting physical staging of the ideas as that is a very significant part of the performance. In these photos Kayja is attempting to perform two dances at the same time: the leg movements of The Papaya with the upper body movements of Agadoo. The result is, strangely enough, like neither. This hybrid has its own ethereal quality.

Work In Progress Show

Yesterday was the first time we went public with any of this material and as such it was a revealing moment. I was nervous in that way that can happen when there is genuine uncertainty as to how it will turn out: it could go well it could turn very bad. Fortunately it was more the former than the latter and there is now enough of a sense that this is a show that will sustain itself and not just some sort of provocative one trick pony type of performance. We will have to continue to be involved in choreography in order to develop the show, as it will not rest as an ironic commentary on things we don't care much about. It has already pushed me into unknown territory in terms of my actions as a performer, I believe there will be further surprises in store.

One curious thing I found myself saying after the show was this. I was asked, why did we choose those songs and dances? My reply was, it was not us who chose, it was the show that more or less made the decision. I will explain the logic behind this elsewhere but this is a running theme so it should be pointed out now.

Papaya Dance

This is the next of the five dances that we have been working with: The Papaya. It originated in The Philippines and then spread over Asia and America largely bypassing Europe. The basic movements are very simple, though there is a section that speeds up and also a large impro section about half way through. Watching endless videos of school groups, prisoners and shop assistants doing The Papaya they all treat this unset mid-section differently, though most do set some sort of elaborate routine to it. The music is unusual and dates from a 1976 recording by a Polish jazz singer Urszula Dudziak. The story goes it was picked up by a Philippino TV game show not so long ago and with the addition of the dance became a huge hit. Not that we are busy with this history, we are not approaching these dances from a documentary point of view, but it does make a curious story. No, for us these dances provide a movement world into which we have placed ourselves and through the manipulation of certain parameters such as tempo, direction (fwd/back), volume etc. it is proving to be a diverse enough world to sustain a performance. Well, I say that now. On Saturday we will give a work in progress showing, that may be when we see better what sort of world it is that we are constructing.

Enjoy The Papaya!

Getting Started: Agadoo

Hello, this is the first posting for this blog following the performance Indifference and as such I feel a duty to EXPLAIN what it is, why it is, where, how it is and what it will be. Needless to say I will not nor cannot do that. Instead I will simply drop into the middle of it and we will have to work out where we are as we go along.

Today will be the first day of rehearsals at the Nightingale in Brighton. We have just come from London where we were last week working at Chisenhale Dance Space. Katja and I will resume our dancing and philosophising to music that should have died a natural death a while ago but which we have brought back into the spotlight only to have it manipulated, speeded up, slowed down, pulled one way and another by the ever inventive James Dunn. Neither Katja nor I are trained dancers, though we both are experienced performers and can learn complicated sequences so the results are quite curious. It is as if the dance is used as a way to show the person rather than the person the vehicle to show the dance.

Here is the original Agadoo:

This was Black Lace's biggest and most distinctive hit from 1984. Like the other music we are working with, I never touched it at the time as it was about collective choreography, which seemed to me as an adolescent boy, the most desperately uncool thing imaginable. I am sure I have been to British wedding receptions and heard this playing and seen grannies and children getting up and following the movements. In a culture that supposedly values the individual so highly it is curious that there remain these group dances for amateurs that are not folkloric but contemporary. It is these dances that we are inspired by and it is only now with the distance of time and the filter of art that I can come to appreciate them and find something in them that completely passed me by first time round.