Above: A small house I encountered in Sweden
I find Victoria Mark’s insight about improvisation practice inspiring for my practice:
“A choreographed dance is a living thing. It is a place where things happen. When you are dancing, you are alive, you are improvising. A dance is like a house. It’s a place in which things happen. You can go back to the house, but you can’t occupy it in the same way you did earlier.. From improvisations, a sequence grows that comes out of the original logic and reality of relationship. These are not decorative embroideries, but homespun stories based on real relationships.” Victoria Marks
I am forever searching for music and astonished by the power the soundscapes. It immensely helps my creative process to think and to create a textural environment which allows my dancers to explore their feelings and states of the presence.
“Based on my memory of a supremely flat landscape, and one therefore in which the sky and earth seemed held in perfect balance, I narrowed the list to airborne species (ie: birds) and to rooted or rhizomatous species (ie: plants), and from these, chose five of each to work with. I then compiled a list of local and folk-names for each species, producing a text ‘score’ which can be realised simply by being read.” Richard Skelton
Skelton created a number of phrases printed on cards, to be interpreted by a group of players in order to realise his piece musically.
Robert Walser / All This Can Happen
“Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.” Robert Walser
I was fascinated by the nature of camera and how time is framed and sculpted in films. I was intrigued by the way choreographer Siobhan Davies and filmmaker David Hinton used the choreographic techniques in the filmmaking to create a rhythmical composition of time using the archive materials storytelling the daily lives of the city, children’s games, the war and early cinema.
“All This Can Happen takes a meditative walk through the everyday, following in the footsteps of the protagonist from the short story The Walk (1917) by Robert Walser. A series of small adventures and chance encounters take the walker from idiosyncratic observations of ordinary events towards a deeper pondering on the comedy, heartbreak and ceaseless variety of life.”
“What interests us most of all is counterpoint; creating different rhythms and meanings through the juxtaposition of one thread of imagery against another. We want to show how observation and fantasy, memory and specualtion can all co-exist in the same mind at the same time, so that we create a ‘psychological 3D’ or ‘cubist’ portrait of a mind.” David Hinton
Mircea Cantor
I encountered the work of a Romanian artist Mircea Cantor at the Castello di Rivoli. His video called Sic Transit Gloria Mundi is a powerful work that represents a ceremonial ritual using images of composed bodies in relation to the camera. Hailed bodies offer their hands into a circle where we as the spectators witness the line of fire travel slowly across each hand.
Sic transit gloria mundi is a Latin phrase that means “thus passes the glory of the world”. It has been interpreted as “Worldly things are feeling”. The phrase was used in the ritual of papal coronation ceremonies between 1409, when it was used at the coronation of Alexander V, and 1963. As the newly chosen pope proceeded from the sacristy of St. Peter’s Basilica in his sedia gestatoria, the procession stopped three times. On each occasion a papal master of ceremonies would fall to his knees before the pope, holding a silver or brass reed, bearing a tow of smoldering flax. For three times in succession, as the cloth burned away, he would say in a loud and mournful voice, “Sancte Pater, sic transit gloria mundi!” (“Holy Father, so passes worldly glory!”) These words, thus addressed to the pope, served as a reminder of the transitory nature of life and earthly honors. The stafflike instrument used in the aforementioned ceremony is known as a “sic transit gloria mundi”, named for the master of ceremonies’ words.
Mircea Cantor artist website
Image as seen on Yvon Lambert Gallery
jurinishi 