Patti Smith and William Blake

The second week of rehearsals was pretty intensive.
In the studio we had the all creative team, actors, musicians and dancers collaborating and investigating Blake’s visions.
The artistic exchange has opened new channels of communications and music started speaking in the blank gaps of the dance.

I discovered the 3rd body. The one that exists between my body and the fellow dancer. I worked towards making this 3rd body visible, and allowing it’s presence to be seen on stage became a compositional ‘awareness’ that I kept in the back of my mind while creating and investigating new material.
The 3rd body could be ‘seen’ towards the end of the week, I think the musicians also picked on that subject but from a different angle. Perhaps they saw it as gaps of silence in the material and through sound they made them more visible.

On Thursday afternoon the company went on a Blake walk around London with a Blake specialist, and this experience has opened my eyes to perceive London in a more intimate way.
I have acquired new references to Blake’s life via the city I live in. London.

I have been a fan of Patti Smith’s work for a long time and in the last couple of days I have realized how close Patti is to Blake’s work.
The album ‘Horses’ as led me to believe that the poetry in Blake Diptych can be delivered in an intimate simple way. I can see a parallel between Patti’s poetry/ performance, Blake’s visions and the way I practice instant composition.
In this practice I dance as I look for an idea that is very theatrical and that visually interacts with other elements in the room such as music, other dancers and props.

The simple objects inherit a different personality and I play with them and integrate the latter in a set that physically doesn’t exist yet, but that is very clear in my mind. So I played with different ideas. I develop material around the 3rd body with other dancer while delivering a poetic message that is sometimes abstract to me.

I have developed a keen interest in not showing the structure of the material in one dance piece. So I try to devise it and perform it in a way that the material becomes the piece and the narrative takes a place where it can’t be seen. In this way, hopefully the audience can experience the work from different angles and let themselves think rather then go home with one clear message.

I found very important to allow the audience to think about the work and to not offer a straight conclusion to the subject matter.
Instant composition has allowed me to create this very interesting performance space.

The next step I would like to explore further is to manipulate material previously created and learnt in a life improvisation.
If I manipulate the material in real time and make decisions with the performance environment the material will develop a different content and the 3rd body will have space and time to appear.