'field'
'Nature is not a gentle force' - Alan Sonfist
presented by
Coriolis Dance Company
Michael Baker and Fiona Gillespie
with
Ian McDonald – Kupu/Words
DJ SG1 aka Grayham Forscutt - Soundscapes
and
Patrick Schroeder – Live Camera feed
(Paula Cunniffe - Camera assist )
Contents
1 Statement of Intent
2 'Other Ways to Fall'
4 'Absolute'
6 'Other, Private Winds'
8 'The Fear'
9 Cellular Improvisation
11 Artists' Profiles
12 Coriolis Dance Company
13 Bibliography and References
14 Coriolis Dance Company Performance History
1. Statement of Intent - 'Physical States rather than Steps'[1]
'field' is a multi-media installation realised through Contact Improvisation dance, Authentic Movement, sound and poetry.
As an event, 'field' was performed in July/August 2003. As a group of artists assembling apparently disparate intelligences in the installation space, we nevertheless planned to risk the possibility of harmony - still, dissonance was also good. We sought to forge complementary alliances - although solo excursions were welcomed. We aspired to listen attentively to one another – and gave ourselves permission to ignore each other with equal care. This was the essence of the improvisation we tried not to plan … which was unashamedly altered in real time, by the needs of each moment.
This non-structure informed our joint and separate responses in the media of our choices - wherever we were led by our predilections. Dance was one medium. We intended to omplement the physical installation by inhabiting the space, allowing a 'state' of motion to emerge.
We wanted to engage the audience with dynamics which are unique to a live experiential event: Real urgency. Commitment to the moment. The wrong trousers. Risk. Fear. Wonder. For both of us dancing, 'field' as a physical space, with its attendant and related themes, centred on our personal experiences of the contradictory elements of 'home' and diasporic displacement.
Throughout the week the ongoing investigation of these issues was pivotal to the manifestation of 'field'. This enquiry was realised through explorative approaches based upon an amalgamation of soloing, dueting, stillness, observation, drawing, silence, writing and reflecting. Through this approach we hoped to facilitate the emergence not of formulaic steps, but a state of sentient presence-in-the-moment. Thus equipped, our aim was to navigate our way through terrain which lay outside our existing set rhythms and patterning.
“Improvised performance doesn't unfold over time. It unfolds, but while it does it also feeds back on itself and therefore is like a three-dimensional image rather than like a sentence, which you understand the more you listen to over time.”
Philipp Gehmacher – choreographer [2]
During this process of discovery we suspended time and space, (relatively speaking) focussing on subjective experience and physical interaction - on a dynamic involvement with and in the moment of experience. To the viewer, the movement we articulated may not have obviously or easily described or explained what we were 'doing'. While physical mumbling was not necessarily desirable (although a distinct possibility), ambiguity ensured that there was room left for interpretation, flights-of-fancy and questioning.
For you, as the audience, we did not anticipate or necessarily wish that you saw what we saw, feel what we felt or understand all of our movements, but rather, appreciated the ongoing performance process for what it said about other, yet strangely familiar land and soundscapes and peopled intimate distances …
Ref : 1 & 2 'Not whole, but holes' by Martin Margreaves. Inteveiw with Philipp Gehmacher, Dance Theatre Journal Vol 18, No 1 2002. Fiona Gillespie and Michael Baker 22.7.03
2. 'field' … other postures, hidden places … other ways to fall
Not only being upright …
'When we started this project … we wanted to include every astonishing thing we had seen throughout the years spent watching these inhabitants of the grasses, all the times we had abandoned our dignified postures as bipeds to return to the habits of our childhood, dropping down on all fours to explore a corner of a meadow. The first thing we learned was immobility. Our outsized bodies gradually became concentrated into the tiny area of our eyes. We were nothing more than what lay before us. For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but wild grasses, a dull blue-green light, a maze of supple and long strips of leaves … golden clouds of pollen and flights of feathered seeds …'[1]
field … other languages, other scores
Sometimes in our human processes of thought and movement we may chance upon or even go searching actively for an encounter with a strange land, recognising and acknowledging signs of intimacy with hidden places and their inhabitants, on the edges of the spaces we like to call -
'our world'
field
The sensation of such contact can be memorable and may have a profound and lasting effect upon the child or individual who cherishes such peripheral endeavours – cultivating not necessarily the desire for study but simply perhaps, a state of immersion in a liminal space on the borders of sight, sound and feeling. This is a place of 'open score', well known and inhabited frequently by artists, a place entered by some in a spirit of genuine enquiry but with judgement suspended – coloured simply by the desire to explore through improvisation and to explore improvisation itself – to dance in a space of reassuring uncertainty, revelling in an 'other' language. We find out how to be more by reducing ourselves – we seek to deconstruct our description of the world and our patterns of doing, to progress from merely an upright posture to one which fosters a view of more elastic horizons; to lean, to connect, to invert and roll, to slide, to lie, to be still, to fly and to fall, to arrive – in short, to witness ourselves eventually in a new land, tucked in with the locals
fieldt
The external trappings of our day usually draw us back and away, child or not, although once visited, this other place and its inhabitants, temporary companions, are no longer lost in an inaccessible land with a foreign language – we have traversed a little way, enough to see – there they wait. If we allow them - allow ourselves enough time to arrive, these spaces and their contents may fill our lives with questions. A key to the universe resides within each glimpse.
These spaces and their tenants occupy worlds parallel to our own and filled with equal import. We can occasionally reach them through fragile passageways. The world of countless small entities is one of the most remote of these non-human worlds. It lies somewhere at the edge of our perception. We can choose to enter these worlds but must be prepared to set aside our most firmly defended postures and beliefs
3.
feald 'Proper posture is a way of blending with gravity …'[2]
Through discovery of these entities, different eyes and time spent in-situ, we can begin to sense physical forces which lie beyond our understanding. On a human scale, gravity is the ruling force – (def: Gravity; 'Attractive force by which bodies tend to centre of earth …')[3]
It is gravity which aligns our bodies with the earth`s centre, dictates the volume of our muscles, guides our movements and endeavours to truncate our aspirations toward a longing for flight …
we tend to reach for the space – and fall
fealdd
When an insect-mass falls from a sky height, it lands as if on the softest of down beds. Even when flight is relinquished, falling occurs with consummate grace and only a passing nod to gravity. Size does matter … Oh, to be like this! To be indigenous to a world where flight is a right - not a fleeting, ephemeral rite-of-passage within a dream! Run to the edge of the horizon and cast yourself off, into the void. You could do it! 'In a sky full of people only some want to fly … isn`t that crazy?'[4]
Sometimes you can enter a far-off place, carried by its aroma borne up on an errant breeze … the only way to travel
Dragonfly – def; Order, Odonata. Neuropterous insect with long slender body and large wings usually spread when resting' '… having four membranous wings with reticulate neuration …' Chimaera – def; 'Monster with lions head, goats body and serpents tail …' [5] 'Compared to those of other insects, the techniques used by dragonflies to overcome the tyranny of gravity seem outdated. The first questionable point in their flight technique is that their wings do not beat in unison, which is a rather offhanded approach to the laws of aerodynamics …(one set of wings moves up while the other moves down – phi centred).”[6]
350 million years ago, there lived a Dragonfly called Meganuera, nearly 75 centimetres across – seagull size. Today, dragonflies are much smaller, yet almost identical – a success story yet a paradox; the imago, a beautiful glittering airborne jewel, attaining speeds of up to 50 kilometres an hour, with the freedom to fly in any direction or to simply occupy a stillness in space – has a dark side … the nymph,aglide in a very different medium, insouciant in a world of slowly waving weeds, waits with a secret – brown in the brown ooze for now, feasting on unwary polliwogs.
As children, we could never capture an adult in our fields, in flight or at rest – after a while, we gave up wanting to. Surely, to catch only fleeting glimpses should be enough? Our glass jars always remained empty; a small, clear space reserved for a wish a little more earthbound, a little less glittering. We could perhaps momentarily leave the ground behind - Once this was accomplished, we would have to find other ways to fall …
Ref:
1 Microcosmos, Claude Nuridsany & Mrie Perennou
2 Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior,
3 The Concise Oxford dictionary,
4 Seal
5 The Concise Oxford dictionary,
6 Microcosmos, Claude Nuridsany & Marie Perennou Michael Baker , Fiona Gillespie, Nelson, NZ 15.7.03
4. Absolute …
When I was a child (about 3) I remember roaming fields* with my brothers and our neighbours. I have strong associations with those times as being a part of a strong and unified 'family' group: intense and absolute belonging - with no query.
*Fields of long grass fenced in by immense oak trees which seemed to me as large as Gods. I remember horses whispering warm breath on my small cold hands, climbing lichen & moss covered fences and gates to cross seemingly endless vistas of grass.”
In a new home years later these childhood meanderings developed into solitary excursions. Rather than 'safe explorations' buoyed by my extended family, they became a search for 'haven', escapism from the mundane repetition of everyday routines and a recapturing of the state of being previously taken for 'absolute' - sense of belonging. Now our whanau has dispersed & fractured, each alone.
Seeking hope and a place to belong (even Turangawaewae) I ran through the long grasses and delved into observing the neighbouring fields and the lives played out in them. Thousands of hours I spent lying perfectly still on my back (trying not to scratch at the itchiness of the grass) watching the clouds skid across the sky, drinking in the 'bigness' and seeking answers to the question I had: were others feeling this same sense of aloneness?
… Diaspora.
Can you see that I am alive?
Beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty above me, beauty below me, beauty within me, beauty all around me – can you see that I am alive…
… this is where I find the dance.
A quick trip across the back fence into the limitless horizons,
no expectation or routine, freed from responsibility. An entire field
to hold my aloneness so my wholeness could fill the sky,
with no thing to impede it…
Fiona Gillespie, Nelson, NZ - Aotearoa. 6 July 2003.
5.
Our planet composed as it is of carbons and fertilised by oxygen, is floating in the carrier ocean of hydrogen gas that fills all space.
“All natural movement arises out of a state of imbalance, of non-equilibrium. Non-equilibrium is a pre-requisite for movement and evolution in all its forms, and a state of equilibrium is therefore impossible in Nature.”
Ilya Prigogine
1917 - 2013
6.
'Other, Private Winds'[1]
When I was a boy younger than I am now, 'home' was with my family
Now I am a man older than I was then, home is with my family
in Devon, England. Sunnyridge was a rather beautiful, happyrambling
in a rather beautiful Devonian-cobbed, Chinese-eved sunny house
house and garden on Dunsford Hill, on the edge of Exeter
on the edge of Nelson in the midland of New Zealand
with lawns, a lustrous copper beech and over the hedge, the 'field'
on a steep grass-clad hillside, the field on the doorstep
Lift my eyes and I could just make out the outlying smudges of Dartmoor
Look up and I see the hills shoulders jostled by the south-westerly wind
High, tawny brackened boundaries under a tumultuous sky
elastic, grassy incline moving up into the layer above the world, on the move
Come back closer and the seas of grass at my feet became my world
This field, a world away from my boyish blinking romance
'field' was apparently endless - a rich, mythic culture curving
with nature then, still stirs me - causes me to run with my son
away and down to the little village of Ide, in the valley far below
hoping, determined to allow our home in his life to have a simple voice
'field' would always accommodate farmer Wykes and his sons
farmers and their sons I do not see here - still wind though,
In the afternoon sun they would toil and then sit and eat bread and drink tea from
restlessly seeking mischievous, beguiling paths through my new hillfield
flasks or sometimes from cracked cups and an old teapot, up against our shared hedge
or in strange fields on drives`south, making me want to leap from the road
and with soft speech, terriers in tow, walk home over the rim under late red skies…
and run …
sometimes I do …
In 'field', all the summers were long and hot and dry
As I gaze out, the sou`wester advances across this field
(so it seems to me now)
and the bay beyond in ordered cadence, perpetrator
the winters`stubble-crisp
still of a coursing horripilation - vistas of panic,
spring and autumn were filled with wind …
despite the desire to continue to enter in …
wind on the hill, wind in the grasses, at the least minutely
This wind on this hill still works, still beckons
atremble, at most, abandoned in swarming groundswell rhythms,
exhaling, arms akimbo,
criss-crossing gusts compelling me to run, throw myself through
inviting me to remember my bare-legged running, my swollen, streaming eyes
this air which was alive, until a great longing would pluck at me …
This 'other' place of fugitive yearning remains
7.
unspeakable, almost synaesthesic - part-sense, part-sight, part-taste,
elusive, shapeless despite its enormity, its potency,
(the shape of things to come …) cellular recollections of my Amah`s arms
its power to hold me enthralled and sometimes wretched
somewhere else, as big, as motion-filled as the curving rim of my field
somewhere else – home in a romany way, perhaps …
moving, moving under a sea of wind
We live at the bottom of an ocean of air …
Awash in a medium unseen
oblivious rummaging through layers of life
indifferent until a stray zephyr touches,
abruptly immersing our perception in ten thousand miles
of solid air one hundred miles high …
'Other, private winds …[2]
There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej,
against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives…
The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust,
dust as fire, as flour… Mariners called this wind the 'sea of darkness'
Red sand fogs were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon,
producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood…
There were some tribes who held up their open palm against the
beginning of wind…' [3] I remember walking as a child shaman
into the middle of a green stillness and with a keen sense of anticipation,
wetting my forefinger and holding it up
Sometimes I thought I could make the air move, cool around my finger.
Sometimes nothing at all would happen …
Every spring the grass would grow long and the wind would come
As I lie here now held in a long sea of wind
… (So it seems to me now) every autumn the grass would be gone, 'field`s edge
from home to home I have found a place
alitter with strange offerings; rusting farm implements, old coats turned inside out
in which to engage with these wrenching moments
In its place, among the browning remnants
these body-mind senses, somatic dance
would lie baled and stacked high over our hedge,
with greening bales, wrapped memoirs
recollections of abandoned flight through waist-high seas,
of a stranger in a land stranger than before
of adventures pursued (between 'elevenses' and lunch)
adventuring in a field far away
with wonder and not a little fear – against all odds,
still full of wonder and a little fear
bound tight against the onrush of winter …
bound tight against the onrush of years …
Michael Baker, Nelson, NZ. 27.6.03 Ref:1, 2 and 3 The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
8. 'The fear'
Come closer, breathe - but don`t breathe in … Lift your gaze into the swaying distance, but don`t rub your eyes … Run, run to the middle, but don`t scratch your legs …
'Hay fever is an allergy, a particularly violent type of immune reaction that is mistakenly directed against a harmless item such as pollen, dust, or food.
Allergic reactions affect only certain people and they are different from other immune reactions in many ways, but in one respect they are the same – they depend on the body specifically recognizing particular antigens. In this case, however, the antigens are often referred to as allergens, to emphasize the fact that they help to cause allergies.