MAP

Research Week Two

Lets do the same but differently: Improvisation let loose in a specific way.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Everyday we improvise our lives and manage each moment in conscious and sub
conscious ways, and this daily improvisation falls appropriately into structures we have
somehow come to agree upon (with some good direction from mother nature and
biomechanics). We sleep at night, we eat breakfast in the morning, we do things during the
day that are normally geared towards our survival in financial terms, we play, engage in
leisurely activities or support groups (drinks after work, a yoga class, a training course),
we come home, work some more (kids home work, emails and unfinished business) and
then eat, look at devices or TV, read stories and then sleep again. Come the weekend it is
fairly the same but with extra sport or artistic activities, perhaps more work and probably
a bit of shopping, and often a venture out at night with friends to indulge in another
environment and its entertainment.

This is a fairly standard lifestyle break down for people living in a contemporary society
like ours in New Zealand, with no doubt an array of variations and deviations from the
above script of daily life. But for now lets say there is a commonality and a regularity of
sorts. In an online documentary, Pierre Bourdieu spoke of the role of the sociologist as
trying to establish laws, grasp regularities, recurrent ways of being and to define their
principle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9PCp9oKPRw). For this choreographic
process towards a performance event that reflects on the social being in the social place
and attempts to recreate a quasi-society (quasi meaning to a certain degree or extent), my
aim is not to define principles but to seek out the regularities and try to establish a few
laws to contain the action, not just as a means to control or limit but more importantly to
set-up for possible disruption or irregularity to occur.

Last weeks sessions asked the participants to play within a certain spatial limitation
whilst thinking about their respective fields and how they behave or feel inside them, and
this weeks Tuesday research followed a similar pattern in order to engage each new

participant joining (I scheduled 2-3 people for each week) with a common ground of
starting points for the purpose of the masters research beyond this series. Here I must
gratefully acknowledge the participants who are on this journey until the performance
event in November, and how truly fascinating individuality can be with such modest and
almost rudimentary beginnings to the practical research. This is why improvisation
astounds at times with a depth of interpretation that can only be explained by the
uniqueness we all have to offer in any moment. And within that uniqueness reside the
qualities we inhabit, our habitus, the way we do things, how we deal with situations and
the energies or forces that are being employed to do so. This body ambience (as I call it) has
intrigued this research and persuades me to analyze this as a choreographic source rather
than fixing particularities in the actions (although actions are crucial to the ambience we
emit, and vice versa).

So given that Tuesdays continued with a pattern of sorts, the Wednesday evening, (Dinner
Party #2), began with a long guided warm-up with bodyweighting - qualities and actions
from the tool bag of dance methods I tend to move with, and then shifted into a long
improvisation with a directive to simply play with physicality in the regions placed in the
space. Although this sounds quite open, I still feel the discussions around the research and
the set-up in the space with rather functional looking tables and chairs and the taped
areas, still gives off a particular approach to what is being studied and explored.

After half an hour of improvisation with 8 individual agents, I was full with many images
of sincerity, hierarchy, solidarity, isolation, struggle, helpfulness, nonchalance, happiness,
strangeness, serenity and chaos. There was no compositional assuredness but a series of
unfolding and unexpected statements of the body and its relational potentiality with
others and the objects at hand. Many choices ignored the taped areas, many choices stayed
alone whilst others sought contact with another being. Some made themselves heard and
some quietly stood behind another. Whatever the choices, I couldnt help thinking how
reiterate of life it all was. And then wondered is this the dance theatre work I am looking
to cultivate? Where is the dance?

I dont need that answer right now and did not expect those involved to dance (in the
phraseology of dance sense). It is more an acknowledgement of the next line of questioning
and proposition for the research: where to now? How can I capture or recapture this
quasi-society? And coming back to the area needing more investigating which is the
public space in between the fields, how do we signify the habitus of the fields within the
body when it steps outside of its supposedly defining circumstances? Is there a change of
weight, state or perspective? To be continued

we tend to take for granted the events and processes that
structure our everyday life. Often the things that seem familiar
and common sense on closer inspection turn out to be quite
strange and anything but common or sensible.
Shore, 2015, p.24

Reference
Shore, C. & Haggar, S. (2015). Mundane events, big issues: Exploring everyday life in Auckland. Auckland, NZ: Research in Anthroplogy and linguistics.