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!