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.
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