La goccia del giorno/The drop of the day: OTTO/EIGHT

“. . . all partners need to recognise the limits which the existence of a rules-bound system imposes on any attempt to archive material requiring a rich meta-narrative, derived through collaborative intervention, if its complexities are to be understood by an eventual user” (Melrose, 2007, p. 21).

Today we approached site-specific, immersive, collaborating devising in a section of the Enna River in Sottochiesa, Italy. Thinking about spaces transitioned to doing in spaces: a gritty, challenging task for dancers used to neat, square studio places. The intention was to respond authentically to the sounds and movement of a body of water, constantly in flux and flow. This attempt was limited at times by our own choreographic habits, by the desire to protect the body from harm, by the disruptions caused by filming, the limitations of our bodies, and by the complexities of individual approaches to generating dance material in a ‘rules-bound system’. Our deep yearning to create dance (not just moving phrases) through heightened sensitivity to the environment required a deeper interrogation of what is dance, how we might make such dance collectively in response to a site, and what is the role of the camera in curating these raw and fledgling attempts at site-specific dance-making?

*Documentation of dancers Lucinda Coleman & Katie Chown filmed by Ellen Avery in Sottochiesa, Italy, 2018. Used with permission. 

Reference: 

Melrose, S. (2007). "Still Harping On (About Expert Practitioner-Centred Modes of Knowledge and Models of Intelligibility)" Paper presented at the AHDS Summer School: Digital Representations of Performing Arts, National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh.