More on Friday's growing pains

The past couple of days I’ve been submerged by domestic events so haven’t followed through on our aim to write, even if only a little, every day. So now, on Sunday, I’m thinking back to Friday.

First thing Friday morning, Lisa and Vicky go to the market to buy fabric for an idea we want to try and I arrive at the studio early. The chairs, screen and table we used the day before are still in the space, and inspired by work I’ve been doing with visual artist Chris Crickmay (most recently 3 four hour long performances at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, England, with composer Sylvia Hallett) I arrange, add, and rearrange, so when Lisa and Vicky arrive, they enter a different space than the one we left the day before, and when we begin Lisa’s marathon structure, we’re located in and among an installation that includes furniture, colored yarn and cloth. I enjoy moving with the objects, relating to the others, considering our accumulating tasks - this day’s included: it’s ok to be pedestrian. However, later in the day, during one of our many discussions, Lisa mentions how, during the morning’s marathon, she had determined to consciously hold herself to her original 'heightened energy' score because she felt that we were shifting away from the physicality of dancing ‘in an active and expanded way’, and getting too involved in other activities. I’m reminded of Jonathan Burrows, when he observed, during his recent ‘3 x 3’ workshop at Findhorn, that we get virtuosic very quickly, urging participants to remain focused on the material in order to prevent ‘getting carried away by excitement’.

In the afternoon, driven by the desire to see how what we have might begin to fit together, we decide to make scores - three of them - so we each take pen and paper, settle ourselves in the space, and work alone for some time. Not surprisingly, our scores are as different as the way we move. Lisa’s score, devised through chance procedure (another homage to Cunningham?), and using the elements of task, people and music, produces some recurring activities, sometimes with different ‘casts’; Vicky’s score looks at what could work with what, how transitions could happen gracefully, and attends to detail and subtlety; my score has few limitations and holds unlimited possibilities. Our run of Lisa’s score is messy and unsatisfying, but we all agree that it was a useful exercise.