Month: February 2016

Last week I was working concurrently at Artsadmin with emerging artists from MA courses at Goldsmith’s ,and Jamie McCarthy,  and with the community group, and Ellie Sikorski at Mulberry School for Girls, on the theme of thankfulness to the body. It was fascinating to transfer ways of working from one place to the other, and to get new ideas. With both groups we created the outline of  a person on the floor, (nicknamed Mavis) on whom to put our stories. With the group at Artsadmin, we had a big pile of lovely found objects, and people placed their little piece of text with an object. Then I asked them to bring more objects to represent the stories that they did not want to voice. The

atmosphere changed  and the figure filled up with potent images. The group created short solo movement pieces of all the stories, told and untold, and then thought about how much or little they wanted the audience to know what the stories were about.  Should they point and say “Uterus” ?, said one of the women.  This balance between the told and the untold stories is also present in the community group. At the moment all the stories they are telling concern the extremities – head, hands, feet, neck. One of the volunteers spoke about

keeping her hands warm by sticking the under her thighs, and it suddenly felt as though the human territory had expanded.  As facilitators I would guess we all feel more concern and feel more responsible within the community group – these are women from 14 to 80 odd who have only just met .  They are not seasoned performers.  We don’t want to push anybody to either tell or even visit what might be difficult moments that concern theri bodies. At the same time, I know that the moment at Artsadmin when ‘Mavis’ began to fill up with untold stories (that didn’t need to be voiced) , we deepened the process, and this is something we wanted in both groups.

The workshops for ‘I live in it’ are slowly moving from games and explorations to building pieces of choreography.  Ellie and I worked on a simple structure, where standing in a circle, each person turns to the one side to do a short sequence and then to the right, alternating between two partners.  The little sequences came from work we had done thinking about parts of the body we felt ‘friendly’ with.   Ellie and I had taken some time to sort out this question. If the question was about what parts of the body we ‘liked’ then straight away it became about judgements “people always say I have lovely hair” for example. We thought about this different way in because we hoped it would elicit different responses, and it did.  We heard about loving to have your hair brushed, the help that hands have given, the joy of twining your hands with your toes in the bath…the reliance on hands for a fiddle player.  These turned into simple gestures and duets, and Ellie chose from them to create the circle dance. One of the older woman, turned each time she had had her hair ‘brushed’ in the sequence, to say thank you to her partner.  It is fascinating inhabiting other people’s gestures. It is a reminder that in movement work your are sometimes expressing what you feel inside, and sometimes you experience a feeling or a sensation because of the movement you take on.