Collaboration

Oh I am so lucky to have so many intense and beatific collaborators at the moment!  Just allow me to share the thrill of it all with you....

There is The Berlin Project.  Rosa, a former student of mine from Cambridge who is now living in Berlin, is organising and developing this one.  Rosa studied with me, taking everything I taught, for two years in Cambridge.  She performed with me in Circles of Light and was key in developing the Grief section. After she graduated she went on to study Butoh in South America and Japan, and is now working as a freelance artist and writer in the bohemian capital of Berlin.  Shaleigh, a phenomenal artist who worked and performed with me in "Body Stories", anchoring an authenticity to energetic and spiritual components within the piece, is joining us from North Carolina.  We are each rehearsing on our own, in studios and in our living rooms, and sending the footage to each other.  Rosa is guiding the explorations, giving us tasks, pushing our boundaries.  Our personal selves are embedded deeply in the rehearsal process and we are simply honest and real with each other and the material.  Our material derives from our recent journeys: Shaleigh to Israel, myself to Ecuador, and Rosa to Japan.  We are taking photographs and writings and embodied memories as beginning points from which to locate distance, temporality, and memory within ourselves.  We will use paper, photographic paper, ink, light, and nakedness to expand develop and disrupt the frames caused by photographs.  As bodies, we will re-inhabit the spaces we have been to, discovering the traces we have left there, and locating the traces these spaces have left within us.  We are all academic and articulate, and our process and performances promise to be rich sacred and deep.  Wouhaha!

at home

Then there is The Festival Piece.  Matt, a wonderful bright DJ and Musician in London, and James, a delightful Music Maker and Promoter also in London, are co-creating an event based in the fusion of technology and the sacred.  Matt and James are just opening up Abstract Studios for digital mixing and mastering in London, and it is so exciting for me to share the joyous clumsy flapping of my own takeoff with the beginnings of their adventures!  Inspired by and brining all of my most beloved forms of dance and play: whirling, belly, ecstatic, and performative, I am living integration and fusion through this piece.  I will have 10 dancers to work with, and we will just move and flow and flock together within the event space.  We will not be set apart on a stage, but will inhabit the masses of moving bodies around us, streaming with them and through them and they through us.  There will be moments of coordinated dance which are highly unified, and moments of free love in motion.  The event space here is reconceptualised as a space where we can all soar into the depths of ourselves side by side, practising ascension, embodying it, if only for a few hours.  What makes it different from other festival events is the intervention of the sacred.  Using traditional sacred music as a base and a frame, Matt and James will sample many other musics over under and top of these powerful sounds.  Techno beats and a pull toward the sublime will thread the moments of fusion together.  Spoken word and poetry will be looped as well, in part to educate concerning the traditions at hand and the sacred nature of them, and in part just for beauty.  We are working with chance and are developing story boards.  The stories which will develop on the night/s of the event are ever-changing, nonlinear, and spontaneous.  Following the crowd and the dance and the feeling of the moment, the boys will mix and play live, and who knows what can happen?  It is infinite, it is up to the sacredness of life to direct, and us to follow.  mmmmmmmmm.  

And then there is The Central St. Martins Project, which I am deeply implicated in.  According to Robin, the organiser and conceiver of the the project, I am the inspiration of the whole thing, and that's sort of a big weight to bear.  Yet I am bearing it joyfully, because it is so damn fun!  Robin is a professor at Cambridge whom I have been connected to for over a year now.  We met at a conference in Cambridge and found we had so much to talk about and so many intersections in our work, and events just seemed to pour out.  First Robin staged a night with dancers from across South England at Robinson College, and I shared an evening with a Kathak dancer from Oxford.  I whirled and spoke on Sufism and she danced from the Sufi tradition in India.  Then I organised and staged a symposium event centred on the performative last June, and Circles of Light was shown in its wonderfully re-concieved format in The Judith E Wilson Studios.  From this The Central St Martins Project has sprung.  Bringing together faculty and students from across the schools of drama and design at Central St Martins and the schools of Italian and English at Cambridge, we are all busy bees with lots and lots of small collaborations going on inside of the larger project umbrella.  We are all working with mystical experience in some form or another, seeking to push the boundaries of performance in every way we can, and drawing much inspiration from resulting discourse and rehearsal practices.  And Robin, taking flight in his own beautiful way, is travelling all over America right now lecturing on the  importance of performance and the performative for any depth of research in the humanities to come to fruition.  We will collectively stage a symposia in July and again in October, coordinating with The Festival of Ideas in London.  We will perform and present at both locations, Cambridge and London, in a variety of ways.
There are 3 major and other unforeseen minor collaborations within this project which are nurturing the process of my soul.  One is with Caroline B, head of textiles at CSM, and is the start of a much longer and far reaching collaboration that this project can contain.  We are making an enormous skirt meters and meters wide with many layers and methods of fastening and unfastening which is itself the performance.  I will "whirl" and we will play with light, directed focused light, and with what is not lit, and flutter and flight and weight and balance and proportion.  Caroline is a real diva, a total expert in her field, and I am humbled and delighted beyond belief to be collaborating with her!  Another one is with Jeremiah H, wacky and wonderful curator for The Judith E Wilson Studios at Cambridge.  Jeremy and I first worked together in the restaging of Circles of Light last year and found that we had a resonant and immediate understanding of each others working methods.  We are playing now with Butoh and text and multimedia/multidimensional performance processes in order to coalesce "the infinite" into some sort of shareable form.  We are honest and real with our bodies and ourselves and each other, and I feel that there is nothing we cannot do or explore or share within performance.  Like the project with Caroline, this collaboration will have ripples and waves and a life extending further from the presentation with CSM.  And finally there is my work with Jeremy T, a composer and musician here in Cambridge.  Jeremy is an exemplary musician of great skill and thought.  In his quiet way he is very open to radicalising processes, and we have begun working through skeleton structures.  We give ourselves a few parameters, put on some recording instruments, and play.  We talk to each other through the music and the dance, and it all gets recorded, and we return to it again and again, and never look at the tapes or listen to them either.  We have no idea what will be shaped, except that some portion of it will be shared with The CSM Project and a further development will be staged on its own in an evening replete with brilliant costumes, breakage of the fourth wall, fascinating acoustics and true mastery/breakage of our forms.

Beyond this there is even more....whirling for a Sufi musician from Turkey for a couple of concerts this summer, writing a children's book with my sister, reading and developing theoretical thought and an argument for my Phd, steady practices and ceremonies with the lovely lovely London dervishes, cycling forever in a week to get the kids to school and swimming lessons and play dates, and sleep.  The main discovery of the past week for me is that not only do I need sleep, I actually desire it.  I have never desired sleep before, but dreams are swiftly becoming a major part of my waking life.  I must needs dream, or I cease to be, and somehow, somehow, my dreams this year are intricately linked to my creative process...and this desire for sleep/dreams is intricately linked to the ayahuasca journey...it spirals together in a lucid state.  

I hope that this post is an inspiration and a joy to you, and that it does not come off in any way as gloating or self congratulatory.  Inspiration is divine!  All that fighting, sorrow, giddiness, newness, glory, expansion, cramps, pain, the leaving and the coming into, I desire to share it!  May that sweetness come through and through now, in writing, and also in the performative act of living the life which the universe has so thoughtfully and beautifully gifted to me in this breath.  

with fabric for The Festival Piece

To paraphrase one of my favourite quotes from Mevlana Rumi: "Dance when you are broken open, dance when you are in pain, dance with blood on your feet, dance when your bones have crumbled to the floor, dance, my darling dance, when you are perfectly free!"      ~In Endless Gratitude~