On making instructions – overlaps between dance and performance art/interventions
I visited the John Cage exhibition when it was at Baltic this time last year, and i’ve been experimenting with drawings lately that are led by processes, mathematics, order rather than aesthetic judgement. Before I left for Schiedam, I expressed my concern that some of my drawings had become less about the movement and more about the context. I wanted to get back to the work being more reliant on interaction and documentation of movement. To give myself some rigour in this aspect I wrote some instructions to myself in my sketchbook before I started each drawing – sometimes I broke them, but in the main I followed the instructions I had set.
I felt that this kept me on track while I was making the drawings – I was less inclined to just stop following someone, or be distracted by another more visually interesting movement while I was thinking about these.
I shared my working process with some of the dancers working on Invisible City and had an interesting conversation with Francesca Bracelli (http://francescabracelli.com) who was performing Adam Nillissen’s piece. I showed her the instructions that I had written for myself and she felt that this could be a way that she would start working as a dancer – improvising from this set of instructions to create movement. There’s two things from our conversation that I will look further into – her comments about Laban (which I thought was a dance company here in the UK, but also refers to ‘a way and language for interpreting, describing, visualizing and notating all ways of human movement’) and her idea that I should attend an improvisation class to develop my ideas in my own work and on ways that I could work with dancers or performers in future.
