Landscape scores…
BEING IN PLACE
The focus of this 17-month programme of research, based in both Wales and Brighton, has been my immersion in five wild places in Wales. This has led to the generation of drawings and writing that I am using as visual and auditory scores for creating dance and music. I have been facilitating a workshop situation alone and with dancers and musicians in a ‘black box’ space in Brighton. I have been directing my work towards cracking the code of a new creative device for site-embedded work. This was thanks to a major Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales.
I have begun to do presentation/installations on this ‘Being in Place Homing Device’.
‘The Being in Place Homing Device’ has a wide potential for sharing with others in facilitating workshops and creating new site-embedded work. In the arena of working with others in this workshop/devising situation I have cultivated my role as mentor/facilitator with an option to direct. The presentation of the device works as a performative event in itself.
slideshow of the Being in Place installation at the Nightingale, Brighton
Background:
‘Being In Place’ is a 17-month programme of research-based activities predominantly based in Pembrokeshire with some activity in Brighton and abroad.
My intention is to further investigate and refine an element that I began during my [in]scape residency at the Mostyn, Llandudno in 2005 and from the research that resulted in my choreography Dance for Neanderthal, commissioned in 2010.
My process is to immerse myself in 5 rural locations and develop ‘Landscape Scores’ from which to experiment with Visual Polyphony in a ‘black box’ control space. This involves submersion, for brief episodes, in collaboration with other practitioners’ artistic ‘languages’: choreographic, inter-disciplinary, visual, sonic, dramaturgical, archaeological and geographical.
I would like this work to have more than just an ephemeral performance presence and to create a solid, useful tool for developing practice in the future – for myself and others. Applied to other situations and to artists from varied disciplines, I want to push the boundaries of my work and to open up possibilities. This is a means to progress dance as an art form, to take it into new areas. I hope that the whole project will be a catalyst for this work that is inherently embedded in and springing from landscapes of Wales.
This program will include workshop activities, rehearsals, mentoring, presentations, feedback sessions, exploratory visits and meetings.
This is all made possible as a result of receiving a major Creative Wales Award.
At the end of the project I will present the results of my research. Presently, though, I am totally immersed! – in a multitude of traces of the landscapes, in ideas and inspiration that are springing from some deep and vivid experiences in landscape, from the scores I have generated, from the processes being developed through exposing dancers to my scores, from my own exposure to the work of other artists, thinkers and land ‘immersees’… This process seems to both be chaotic and have its own sense of order that reveals itself flow by flow…
There is a necessity for incubation before much at all is revealed. SO I am reluctant to say much at this time. Instead I will gradually feed in images from notebooks to this blog. I am purposely avoiding taking any photographs or video footage of the 5 places. I am purposefully avoiding showing any video footage from the workshops in the Black Box Space. This would be a hindrance because I am developing methods that explore a sense of creativity that the usual use of video as outside eye and memory aid could not tap into.
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