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.