Quotes from Jonathan Burrows during Friday’s Elders Project rehearsal: A friend from the theatre once gave me a note about speaking on stage: The audience will hear you, if you want them to hear you, no matter how quietly or loudly you speak. So imagine you’re on that…
Why am I doing this?
Originally posted by Kenneth Tharp on The Place website on 25 June 2014 (link): Today (25 June 2014), eight and a half years after my swan song, and after nearly seven years working behind a desk, I’m back in the studio… as a dancer. Why am I doing this? Late last year, I had a lunchtime…
The Memory of Movement
Why keep a record of rehearsals, when ultimately it is the performance that matters? Why make public that which is often necessarily kept behind closed doors? These (and probably many others) are questions that any account of a creative process must address in some way — and perhaps especially…
A post from Geraldine
Like Kenneth, I was asked to take part in this project by Jane Hackett. Having watched Pina Bausch’s elders project, which I found exciting, I believed that taking part in a similar experiment would be a huge inspiration. It is! Working with Jonathan Burrows is a joy and opened areas of dance…
A post from Anne
This post follows our second batch of rehearsals. It is in many ways a surreal experience juxtaposed with the feeling of familiarity. A quiet confidence exudes from within the studio walls – that of knowing ‘our-selves’. With this experiential knowledge and as the rehearsals progress, we find ourselves delving into different…
Human Subjects
Although I’ve been watching the rehearsals for a while now, it took some time for a final clearance from Queen Mary’s Ethics Committee to come through, allowing me to publish any thoughts about them. In any situation where academics observe or work with ‘human subjects’, this kind of clearance is…
Company
There’s a lot of laughter in these rehearsals. Laughter at mistakes, at moments of recognition, or failed memory. There is laughter at dancing that is funny, because its cliched, wrong, or just soooo right for that particular moment. And there is laughter at notes, at gossip, at anecdotes and indiscretions. There are even jokes. Laughter…
Vitality
Given the extent of the collective and individual experience at play in this project, it perhaps comes as scant surprise that I’m led to note the significance of the ‘presence’ of these performers. This is a a slippery term relative to performance, but I like it. At the very least, it’s a useful shorthand for describing the energetic relationship you feel…
The Ordinary You
As well as watching rehearsals last week, I was able to conduct a series of on-camera interviews with the dancers, extracts of which should begin appearing on this blog in due course. Watch this space. In interviewing them, and in observing the rehearsals over the last month, I have been struck by the degree of cross over between personal…