Means Without End

Project Berlin is taking shape, and fast.  The concept is amazing: 3 women, 2 musicians, 4 different home countries, 3 journeys abroad, video capture of individual rehearsal processes in our own homes, sent online, developed over the past 2 months, feedback to the musicians who warp our words and artefact their sounds and send us images of the music, feedback to each other in endless email dialogues, more rehearsals, more posting of video footage, and unbelievably, an incredible sensitivity has developed.  
It feels like that last sentence, very stream of consciousness, very embodied, very feminine and emotional and real, very keyed into technology, playing a lot with what is communicated through an online presence.  We feel each others bodies.  We hear each others breath.  We visit the spaces the others have been too and pick up on the traces they have left.  Our own traces re-emerge and shape us in the now.  Trading materiality, pixels, soundbites, and waveforms, we pass traces of the jungle, the desert, and island mountains back and forth.  We will meet for the first time on the performance day.   

early workshopping photo 

The concept began when Rosa contacted me and said, we have both been on huge journeys this year, myself to Japan and you to Ecuador, and we could create something about temporality and traces and do it online.  Do you know of a third person who would be good to include?  And I said, ooooh I would love to be a part of this project and Shaleigh, a phenomenal dancer in the states, has just been to Israel, also for an extended period.  Can we get funding to bring her over, to bring us together?  And Rosa said yes, and she wrote up the workshops, and wrote for the funding, and piece by piece, trusting the outcome would indeed  manifest, it is here, and it is lovely indeed.  

As women, we enter the process fully.  When the musicians began to work with us as well they brought male energy into the mix.  We are fully ourselves and yet, common threads, in sound and movement and image, have clearly emerged.  We have tracked and witnessed each others journeys, and it has been touching beyond belief.  
The night before my first rehearsal I cried.  I tried to rehearse, but I laid on the floor and cried, and so I emailed Shaleigh, and she emailed me back, and we went back and forth, and the next day, boom, an amazing rehearsal happened.  And so it has been.  We are busy, lots of projects each of us, and there is really no time, and then boom, we all upload rehearsals in some sort of distance keyed rhythm and shazam, an incredibly rich montage is before us.  Here is a link to a cut up of some of our workshopping from the last two weeks. Workshop III

And here is some of the text directive for workshop three.  If you are up for it, read it aloud, record it, play it back to yourself, and move/dance.  It is cathartic, freeing, binding, elusive, embodied, full of friction, cascading with release.  The full workshop runs to nearly 40 minutes, however this should give you a taste...

"There is no earth, only water. The world has been flooded over many millennia. The water has solidified over millennia. The world is a shining orb of solid water. The tiny articulate outlines of creatures and plant life are locked beneath you. The world is a spherical egg of solid water patterned with a memory of life. There is solid water under your feet.  Extending in all directions from under your feet, which are not feet but the apex of an egg. You are an egg poised on an egg of solid water. Poised in unpredictability.

Dance as a spine extending wires into the surface of a melting earth. Really see with those wires the precise details of creatures and plant life. Bring to mind a recollection of a creature or plant you have seen. Bring it into the now moment with precision.  Sketch with the wires the contours of this plant or animal being. Sketch its surface image with your whole body, and deeper sketch its inner form. Take a journey with your body into this other being.
You are moving through bodies and no longer water. The water is draining. The bodies are moving and generating dry land. The bodies are breathing and drying the liquid collected around them. Individuals peel from the mass.
A hand is twisting in your core. A face in the distance emerges. Another face you have seen yourself wear. It is floating light in a sea of heavy heads.

Another voice arises and effaces the previous one. Your body adopts the new set of expected postures and motions. You go through the many shapes and actions. Your body moves faster through the descriptions, moves faster through the expected actions. Break each expected action in its moment of formation.  Each movement acknowledges its alternatives, and the chosen movement expands with the power of possibility. There is power in reserve. Stasis as the neatest analogy to light’s speed." by Rosa  

The final piece will make use of multiple projectors working live time, still shots which accumulate, two movable screens, use of the entire gallery space-including the ceilings and corners, mirrors, paper, implicit/explicit audience invitation, prepared piano, laptop synthesising of sounds live time, spoken text, bodies, breath, touch, and awareness.  It is crafted in the most detailed way, and left open in the most streaming way.  We are in situ, however it expresses, with a rich tapestry of traces to guide our path.  

Performances are at Serendipity Gallery, The Berlin Occupy Biennial, and the park, Berlin.  Residencies at K77 and Glogulair, Berlin and then residency and performance again at Cambridge University, UK.  Full details of times and events, as well as more in depth writing on the process, can be found on our blog: Traces Collective  and like us on Facebook: Traces Collective