capital eye/i

capital eye 1
Originally uploaded by little bit1000.

this is a video still from this weekend's technical rehearsal at which we memorized an interview between Jay Leno and Brad Pitt and played with video..

:-)

this pic is my eye live looking into camera as i try to control the size of the projected image and keep my eye still enough and sometimes look as if i'm looking. What we like about this score is the immediate intimacy and vulnerability - exposure - combined with the "blind" public eye and the challenge of this kind of physical/psychological exchange between performers....

it will be *much* easier with a tripod...

versatility of choice

Just came back from FIP - excellent workshop with Nina Martin. There was a lot of really engaged dancing and discussion which is both rejuvenating and exhausting all at once. The work is very simple and so of course extremely complex. Reducing choices to the most pared down version and then being faced with the multitudes of variation within that tight frame. It opens the consciousness of consequence and allows more sophisticated choice-making.

In terms of the work we're doing on this project, there was a lot of relevance in the movement material and also in the care needed in staging relationships (how easily power dynamics are set up).

one of the best quotes of the weekend:
low ambition in high-risk situations

Other things - I got pointed to a classic book that I'll have to find The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Erving Goffman 1959) and to a radio program: Thinking Allowed (in particular the episode Identity and Self-Imitation) that might be relevant to our work.

all good stuff

moving targets

Getting ready to go to rehearsal...thinking about how ideas manifest in movement. How or why, i suppose. What are the connections between thinking and moving, moving and thinking that makes sense? We use language to mean something, to give meaning, but there's visual language and kinetic language too. I've always considered dance/movement as a way of knowing the world - just like so many things are ways of knowing, or being, i guess. Thing is, sometimes what we think we know turns out to not be how we want to be. So here's to knew connections, wherever they might be lurking.

hyperbole, part 3

in the same vein as book cover blurbs: what about the way that newspapers and magazines write their headlines? i've never understood the necessity that media people feel to make puns and otherwise corny turns of phrases in newspaper and magazine headlines (though some are fighting back) this also happens on television with the text 'summing up' the story or statistics being discussed by the newscaster. why why why? is there some inate fundamental human desire to cheese everything up??

process images

apologies for the poor quality - images taken with my web cam which has no focus... this is some of the process work done on Sunday. Mapping ideas and looking for links, gaps and themes.

some words:
shame/blame
struggle
artifice
false modesty
intimacy and vulnerability
being viewed
power dynamics
revelation
armour/padding
deception
confession
collusion

more hyperbole

One of the ideas that we're playing with has to do with platitudes uttered by celebrities and what they can actually mean:

"I'm just so honoured to be among the nominees" = "If I don't win this year, I'll kill my agent"
"I'm leaving politics to spend time with my family" = "Someone caught me with my secretary"

I also think the idea of testimonials and over the top praise is interesting - read this - and relates back to the press releases that claim that a show will change your life.