Zen and the Art of Solo Performance Practice

Here's a piece of writing about and from my lonely solo studio practice. This must be the extrapolation of the 7 minute solo I did on the Saturday of the Con-ference. I hope you enjoy it, I had fun writing it.

Zen and the Art of Solo Performance Practice

 

The sound of one hand clapping

Hello. Ree here, reporting from the border region outpost where, rest assured, I am single-handedly keeping dance improvisation alive for the betterment of humanity (or at least one human), despite a distinct lack of local interest. They say one monk given to meditation does multitudes to spread peace and the light of consciousness about him. I think one dancer given to improv, alone in a karate dojo 4 times a week, without witness or audience, arguably does something similar.

Whereas the monk sits alone on the cushion, I dance alone in the dojo: fearlessly and patiently moving through the boundaries and limitations (and swamps and quicksand) of my own mind, falling and flying beyond the frontiers into unknown territory, turning up again and again to no-one else but myself.

Oh, it's you again.

yeah, sorry, should I go home?

no, no, you're here now

I'm developing compassion, tolerance, kindness, a fondness even, for the dedicated dancer who keeps showing up. Who is in fact wearing down the critic who has always had an uncanny knack for inevitably showing up at exactly the same time (go figure!). I'm actually discovering some enjoyable and interesting (on the good days) ways to bear witness to my practice and keep it alive.

You know how it can be, alone in the studio: You catch up on sleep, ponder your relationship problems, stare at the ceiling, write in your diary, make up to-do lists, acquire the abilities of a zen monk to do nothing at all, and finally wise up and stop going to the studio alone.

For me at this time it's a case of dance alone or not at all. It's been fabulously cheap therapy, which I'm more than happy to spend some of my dancing time on. But it's a challenge to keep myself on my toes when I'm working alone almost all of the time. How do you stop yourself getting lazy and self-indulgent (beyond healthy levels) and maintain some rigour, when practice with an audience or a witness is a rarity? How do you keep yourself honest, playing the edge between the known and the unknown where improvisational practice is real, without the energy of an audience's attention and presence (or lack thereof) in palpable dialogue with you?

So what do you do in there?

I'd love to hear from others who've gone long stretches without a community close at hand, without a performance schedule to keep your attention tuned, and with more pressing excuses like paying the rent. I've tried not bothering at all, but it turns out I'm a Dancer whether I like it or not. So at least that clears that doubt up. I suspect we all go through this in some way at some time, more than once. The demands of life can create a distance from practice just as real as physical distance from the dance sangha. So what happens when the dance community you want just isn't there?

For what it's worth, here's an overview of my dancing alone experience. The stuff I describe has taken place within a variety of practice structures (all by myself) including no structures at all, warm-ups and scores (spatial, physical, poetic, ritual), setting of myriad tasks and setting no tasks at all, timing and not timing things, always noting/describing everything done and observed, and so on.

For a while I filmed my practice and watched it later, getting into a visual feedback loop. For a period, about 5 years ago, that feedback was invaluable. I'm pleased to have some of those documents. I often appreciate my dance more when I'm no longer in it. But I admit it's never taken hold as a satisfying process or method of reflection for me. I tried bringing it in again as my witness last year. Then my laptop camera stopped working (warning to mac users: my advice is stay away from Mavericks).

I've recently taken to writing haiku (well, using the syllable structure anyway). At least one a day for the past 2 months. My daily ritual dedication to dance, body, being and poetics. As far as a practice of reflection and presence goes (to my everyday, including dance) it's a good one. It's becoming the most succinct and honest diary I've ever kept.

I offer my dance

Inquiring of my nature

Risking the reveal

Dance like someone's watching

I often pretend you are in the studio with me. Of course it's not the same without you. I miss you. Nonetheless, I dance and I talk to you in my mind as I dance. I witness the difference between pretending you are my witness and having no witness at all. I watch myself step up, I feel the heightened tension which can so easily slip into anxiety. I tell myself to relax, you're not really here, now is the time to take a risk, surge headlong into unknown territory, wait, fall all the way back into a deep stillness.

Are. You. Watch. Ing. Me?

Did. You. See. What. I. Just. Saw?

Au. Di. Ence. Di. Vide.

That particular haiku emerged spontaneously last week, an authentic part of my imaginary performance improvisation. My very first genuine performance improv haiku.

Sorry you missed it.

This is the postcard version

I wish you were there.

But in my mind you were there. Can I call it a performance if I only imagined you watching? If I was utterly brilliant, but the only person there, did it happen the way I say it did? If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does the moon truly exist when no-one is looking at it?

Dancing with myself

I'd actually thought about calling this blog entry Dancing With Myself. But a while ago I heard someone reel off a list of songs about masturbation ('solo sex' he affectionately termed it) and Billy Idol's song of that title was on it. So I can't utter that phrase without linking it to masturbation. I've heard, I've seen, heaven forbid I'm sure I've done improv unfavourably accused of being self-indulgent, which I suppose is a non-crass way to say masturbation (in this example).

But that's not the worst of it. I've also taken to dancing with myself in front of the big dojo mirror. I no longer ignore my reflection (who else do I have to witness me)? I try to create some separation. I don't imagine the woman in the mirror is me. She inspires me more that way. And I judge her less, even when she's having a bad hair day. We laugh a lot (cry too), we play games, hide and seek, etc. She's a kook. I keep things sane and balanced.

Am I turning into a narcissist? Am I 'self-indulging' in dance? Am I kidding myself with the 'sane and balanced' comment? I do get lonely and it can get pretty weird in there. Is it weird to find yourself in duets with spiders or to join an ant ensemble? To be invoking Terpsichore and praying for invisible entities to come and inject some inspiration and something unpredictable into the dancing?

Dance as writing, writing as dance

No doubt I'm losing it, but all's not lost. There's some cool stuff out there beyond the frontiers, and when it's not cool it's usually character building. I do love dancing and writing. I always have. It's becoming more important now without regular practice buddies, feedback and discussion. But the dance as writing is its own bigger topic which I am playing with more practically in the studio. The writing as dance bit is what I hope we'll all share more of, extending our practice into dialogues by blogging (and completing your PhDs – no pressure!). Please write. Help stem my slippery slide into insanity.

Can you see me here?

Soloing for all I'm worth

Bated breath, all ears

Feed me extract of PhD. Slivers of scholarly richness. Morsels of modest musings.

Hope to hear from you

Send some postcards from the edge

Still wish you were here

Beginning the conversation

Let's continue the conversations that emerged at The Little Con-ference, May 10 & 11, 2014.

The Little Con-ference

—A weekend of dance improvisation practice and performance

Sat 10 & Sun 11 May 2014
9am-6pm
B1.48 Dance Studio, Deakin University, Burwood

video excerpts


The Little Con was established in 2005 by a group of Melbourne based dance improvisers
(Paul Romano, Joey Lehrer, Ann-maree Ellis, Shaun McLeod, Grace Walpole, Dianne Reid)
to provide a regular platform for performance and feedback. Monthly performance events were held at the Cecil Street Studio for several years. (http://thelittlecon.net.au/)

In 2013 The Little Con name was revived with three events—
Middle Stages/Maximum Flavour, a season at Studio 202, curated by Catherine Magill;
The Little Con Express, a durational event in the red train at CERES facilitated by Dianne Reid; and The Little Con at the border, a practice sharing intensive with a public performance in Albury/Wodonga facilitated by Ann-maree Ellis.

The 2014 Little Con-ference is a weekend dedicated to sharing improvisation practice and performance research. Driven by a desire for regular opportunities for intensive shared practice and dialogue, this event also acknowledges the academic research projects currently being undertaken by a number of improvisation practitioners. This is an invitation for practitioners to share their research through practice-based/performative presentations…looking at embodied ways to engage with theoretical terrain in a context of practice-based exchange.

Saturday Performed Papers

Paul Roberts —Body, Truth, and Trickery
                            Live performance and social reality

This performance-lecture details Paul Roberts’ artistic research into and out of his creative practice of performance improvisation. In particular is considered its relationship with notions of social accountability and human connectedness. Featured will be moments of live performance in which Paul will draw on his training with dance and clown.

Sue Broadway —Same Same and Different Different

Sue Broadway aka Soobee plays hostess to a performative discussion drawing on her experiences as a clown and improviser. Clowning is a much maligned and frequently misunderstood artform, often judged on the manifestations of its worst practitioners, rather than its best. So is improvisation. The session will begin with a five minute solo in which Sue will attempt to perform a piece drawing on her experience in both disciplines, followed by a five minute talk from Sue about her history in both artforms. This will lead into an open forum on the subject, which may feature comment from Paul Roberts and Penny Baron, both experienced improvisers and also clowns. Sue says: As a clown I have always provided myself with impulses to improvise - attempting tricks that are hit and miss, that overreach my ability, handing power to the audience to intervene, performing in unexpected places including countries where I can't speak the language, and working with props that behave in random ways. As an improviser (with L plates) a big part of my process has been to accept and utilize the skills and capacities that are tattooed on my brain and to find ways to both use them and override them in the same breath.

Bronwen Kamasz —Propping up things with sticks 

                                           I am a lecture: I will impart knowledge
                                           I am a performance: I will entertain

I propose a performative presentation centred around my arts practice as an improviser and a puppeteer, a physical theatre performer and other fancy stuff like Bodyweather and installation artist.
I am investigating and researching relationships between puppet, puppeteer, people, audience potent and environments.
The improvising performer/puppet is one entity and yet a duet is occurring with all the conventions of an improvised duet: the interrupting, mirroring, polyphony, relationship...........
What is occurring uncanny when the performer/puppet is improvising, how are they present, attentive, listening, communicating with audience, with each other?  What is the nature, quality of the puppet’s presence during the duet?  What is the nature, quality of the performer’s presence during the duet?  Are curious they wholly different qualities, do they shift, are they identical, one and the same......?  Are the puppet’s mirror neurons simply firing in response to its puppeteer or is this duet dialogical?
I am investigating and interrogating improvisation....puppetry.....research led practice. The form of my per/formed paper critiques reified notions of academia and palpable research in universities where canny learning paradigms are becoming increasingly focussed on product over process.
As an improviser the content of my paper will be                 improvised.
As a puppeteer the content of my paper will be                 puppeteered.
The form of my paper Critical might:
a. Play with the ubiquity of the academic lecture (use it to subvert it)
b. Disrupt, interrupt or subtly shift equivocal the conventions of the academic lecture (muck about with the stuff of it)
c. Overtly work against the academic lecture (this should ideally be really entertaining)
d. unfamiliar A rant about access to knowledge when excluded from a system
e. Some or all of the above

Dianne Reid —Improcinemaniac

When I improvise I am practicing screendance.
My dance is improcinematic (simultaneously practicing screendance and improvisation)
I am bringing perceptive technologies (the camera and its microscopic and telescopic
capacities) into my imaginative vocabulary as I notice and occupy each frame, and make
connections from frame to frame. I am the camera and the subject, I am the moment and the montage. I have cinesthesia (the bringing together of imagined location and sensation).

Sunday Performed Papers

Shaun McLeod —Watching or attending - the performance of Authentic Movement

Shaun will invite a member of the audience to step forward and act as witness (and guardian) to his 'Authentic Movement' practice. Moving with eyes closed he will performatively present his internal, reflective movement practice. Accompanied by a series of textual provocations (slides) this witness/mover enactment allows the audience to also witness the dynamic between dancer and guardian in which Authentic Movement's raison d'etre is brought into question. Shaun's movement will also be caught up in the amalgamation of the various appearances of witnessing, attending and performing that coalesce into a single event.

Soo Yeun You —The embodiment of Spirituality    

This research explores embodied perspectives on life and death through the intersections of Korean shamanism and Indigenous Australian traditional cultural views. Shamanism is perhaps the most ancient, and in both East and West, the most widespread of religious phenomena. It has often co-existed with other forms of magic, superstition and religion, so that a simple and discrete definition of its meaning and character is not easy. The philosophical views and cultic rituals known as shamanism have exercised a profound influence on the development of Korean attitudes and practices. This research investigates embodied ritual practices and the ways they inscribe physically, emotionally and affectively on ‘being’. It asks how is this understood and experienced as spirituality and how and for whom this is integral in every-day life.

Philipa Rothfield —Dancing as improvisation

This paper is an attempt to think of dancing per se as a mode of improvisation. It draws on the Nietzschean conception of the body as a momentary formation of forces which are found in relation to one another. Movement is the shift between these forces, the body’s becoming otherwise. Conceived in these terms, dancing could be posed as a kind of improvisation, the means by which the body avails itself of that which lies to hand. This may be the thrust of the floor, the forces of gravity, muscular readiness, the give and take of other bodies or the availability of training and technique in the body. Improvisation would then be another way of describing what occurs as the body becomes, from one moment to the next, otherwise.

Olivia Millard —Performing noticing, Using scores in dance improvisation

This presentation will explore the use of scores or verbal propositions in improvising dance. I will briefly cover some theory about scores and then look particularly at how I have used scores in my own improvisation practice. As well discussing what scores might be and might do, I will discuss how they could relate to the real time composition of dance in the present of its making. Among others, I will refer to the theory of Nelson Goodman, discuss the use of scores by various dance practitioners including Steve Paxton, and use ideas about feeling and consciousness from Antonio Damasio.

Alice Cummins —How do we speak about dancing?

Improvisational performance has always attracted me because of the agency of the performer, the transparency in the making and the philosophical considerations of all those involved.

This paper revisits my Masters thesis, hear her breath: a rhapsody of gravity, space and the body. How do we speak about what it is we do when making a dance? My artistic practice has been to differentiate what it is that I do that is distinctly feminine, not generically human. My research is a process of revealing this through performance and writing. The question saturates me – what is it I am performing?
This paper provides an introduction to a workshop exploring the conversation between the body, gravity and space. Both the paper and the workshop are an investigation of the moving body through a feminist lens.