| January 2010 Excavations I |
This is the first month of the choreographic fellowship and it has been a time of laying down plans - blanketings of snow - investigating possibilities - ice - gathering materials - meltings - and meetings. A time of preparing the potential for the year or even years ahead. A fortuitous event – a one day Art and Archaeology workshop - has brought me into contact with a group of archaeologists based at the Orkney College – Dr Jane Downes (Head of Archaeology at Orkney College); Julie Gibson (County Archaeologist) and Antonia Thomas and Dan Lee who both work with ORCA (Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology). This has stimulated a dialogue about the practices of archaeology and contemporary performance and how a collaboration could flourish between these two methods of enquiry. In this meeting I have found the main direction of the fellowship period. Excavations I is a bringing together of my initial surface thoughts.
Excavations I Archaeology Choreography Archaeology and choreography are process based, investigative methods of enquiry. The archaeologist deals in remains, in traces, fragments and shards. In incompleteness. The remains of dance are found in documents and artefacts; in printed programmes and posters, costume designs, music scores, choreographic notes and lighting plots, scribed in a review; in a dress, a shoe, an object, in the body memory of a dancer, in the recollection of a viewer. None of these singularly or collectively are the performed essence of the choreography. They are only the residue.The archaeologist must bring the mind and imagination to bear on material evidence, on artefacts. Dance is mindful action and embodied thought.The materials, the evidence of archaeology are brought to the surface through the process of excavation. Excavation is a series of activities: digging, scraping, sifting, sorting, and accumulating. Choreography is a series of activities. It digs into ideas, accumulating, sifting, sorting and arranging movement material and bodies.Themes central to archaeology include, time, decay, absence, memory, layers, materials, space, place, and architecture, recording and documentation.The dance exists in an emerging present and decays on the out breath. In the suspended moment the dancer creates and captures time. Dance can exhibit absence and presence and may express the presence of absence. It concerns memory, the memory of the muscles, nerves and skin. Embodied memory.Archaeology concerns dwellings and inhabited spaces. Choreography creates a dwelling for the dance and the dancer inhabits space. We are concerned with mappings and spatial relationships, with the between-ness of things, with transitions and journeys.Choreography is structured in layers of movement, bodies, light, text and sound. It is textual and contextual. Archaeology concerns presenting, interpreting, representing and re-contextualising materials and images.Both disciplines result in some form of display. Both are interdisciplinary. Archaeology is a search for beneath-ness. The archaeologist excavates in order to under - stand. The dancer stands from underneath. S/he stands in the ground, the floor, aware of the spaces below the feet and above the head. Digging down make ‘rising’ a possibility.A plie allows the dancer to escape the floor.The ground supports our understanding. It is shared ground between two communities of practice. mergesubmergesubterraneanterrain
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