Hands

Young articulate hands expressing solitude and rejection.
Hands that truly believe in the self and in the artist.
A pair of hands that at moments equal angels. 

10 long fingers that have artistic autonomy to think and create. 

Young used hands that stop me from walking down London to wonder about the circumstances I find myself in.
Hands have never been so significant.

The exercise of not using the spoken word to deliver a thought allowed my hands to flourish an idea. The latter as repercussions in the body that allow the choreography to immerse in the theatre space. 

Ezekiel Oliveira

Q4

http://vimeo.com/31306051

The angels

The angels appeared to me, William.

The angels aren’t representative. They exist and they have a very distinguishable essence and purpose.

William and the angels communicate; they inspire creation and open the mind to perceive the surrounding world in a poetic manner.

Those that see angels are ‘privileged’ and perhaps experience the world in a more intimate and sensorial way.

I wonder how Catherine lived with William, his visions and the angels.

To accept what you can’t see, to trust on your beloved. To be so blindly in love that acceptance becomes the norm and you find yourself living with the angels that you can only imagine.

Blake is now an emotional turmoil for me.

The emotional turmoil happens due to an availability to sense the surroundings in the work.

The different emotional states are rooted in each counter point.  There is no stability in the action, and the latter is constant for over one hour.

The very interesting experience is to listen to the all ensemble on stage. The story is written on the set, in our faces and damaged bodies, the references to William and the angels, William and Catherine, William and his parents and finally William in the world as an artist are spread everywhere.

I can now see the work, even if it is bouncing inside a specific frame waiting for the time to settle in a more concise form.

The sense of being an individual with a generous personality is settling in everyone, and alongside this personal experience the ensemble is together as a whole.

Experience is this ensemble of personalities that speak Blake’s world, visions, desires, frustrations and passions.

 Ezekiel Oliveira

Us must trust us

Dear Quang, Dear Kirsty, Dear Zoot, Dear Paul, Dear Audrey, Dear Ezekiel, Dear Anna, Dear Morgan,

This is for you, company.

I  am writing this here because it feels private (!) (Is anyone reading this other than us? Welcome, whoever you are.) And  because reading gives you more chance to absorb and respond. It is general, so it wont be specific to you, your job is to apply it to every scene you're in, every transition you're in, every letter you build and see what you need and where this is useful and where it isn't. 

Company, thank you for sharing some startling visions yesterday. You made my heart leap. You made our guests' hearts leap. As we all know, there is greatness in the room, as we all witness, it ebbs and flows. Our task is to capture it, and manage the energy of the piece so that we can build the journey. Your task is to make every detail great. ("Well, I will make everything great when I know what I'm doing" you cry. 

"But you do know what you're doing" I reply. 

"And when you don't, if you don't, the specific scenes where you know you don't; it is your job to make a decision on how to play it. Decide you will try it this way or that way or from this angle or from that. ""But how will I know which way to play is the right one?" 

"You wont know it in your brain, you will feel if it is authentic." And it your sensitivity isn't yet attuned, I will feel it for you.

"What does authentic mean?"

Authentic does not mean we stay friends in the group, and we all get along, and treat each other onstage as if it were real life. Authentic in the performance zone is different to authentic in the real life zone. 

This morning I will be in the Laban cafe, sculpting the structure. Know that all that matters is the performers. Truly. What else is there? Isn't going to watch something onstage an acknowledgement that we as audience want to understand how the performers feel so we can understand how we feel?
 Your energy, your emotional truth. Is all that matters. It is the beginning of the story, the end of the story.

The rest is window dressing.

If you are real in a scene (Kirsty asks Quang, what do you mean 'Real"? Ezekiel thinks "What does real look like?" Quang thinks, what is real is the imaginary box I'm squeezing, and the cigarette I smoke after will also be real") then the scene can come at the beginning, middle or end of the structure.

There will be a slight change in the order and the sketches that are most thin will be cut so we can work on what is major.

Let's make everything real and build this great show, together. One of the myths of making work is that the Director has power and the performers are the servants.
We all see the visions.
I am in your hands, and you are in mine.

Fleur

'method' dancer

'Method' dancer

Questions...How deep? is it going to be cold? is there anything on the bottom? will you come in and get me if I don't come back up? Then I can jump with real commitment. The less information I have the harder I find it to let go... Are we going somewhere or is this just friends? Do I like you more than you like me?...art imitating life/life imitating art. I get the impression Quang's had enough of my questions! Nurse. My face turns green and pale. Watch from a distance. Stand in the background while you play.  

Kirsty

go back to bed - zoot lynam

The pressure builds up.

We find things. We lose things. I get tired out.

I fluctuate between worrying about how the show will turn out and fizzing with excitement for how amazing I think it's going to be. The dancers are amazing. The music is amazing. The source material is amazing. The vision is amazing. But... can we pull it off?

Sometimes I think we might be being too ambitious. Maybe we should just stop pretending and go back to bed. (At least then I'd get some rest!)

Today we did a first draft of a run through. The complete structure. Mostly I had no idea what I was doing. I had some great flashes of inspiration for what I could be doing. And I learnt that there's some things I can't do. Like be in two places at once. (though I would very much like to).

So many question marks linger over us at the moment, and it is getting so close to our first “performance”. Although it is intended only as a preview, a showing of work in development, it still feels like a lot of pressure.

I am here to serve the work, the piece. My last entry in this blog may have given the impression that I was precious about my role in it – I am not. I was just wanting to explore some immediate feelings to let them out and move on. I am here not as an inner child driven ego wanting all the toys and the box they came in. I am here with that inside, and a higher self who knows that the body of work we are creating is going to be far greater than any of us imagine.

And I trust us to get there.

21.26pm Monday the 24th

21.26pm Monday the 24^th

  

Writing this blog somehow became an exercise to focus and put in words some of the personal issues I had to deal with in rehearsal.

I have realized that sometimes the most interesting material or contribution happens when I distance myself from the original task. For example, Fleur asks me to develop material around a subject and a situation but when I perform it and follow my mistakes to a new universe, I end up discovering something new and eventually that will replace the old material.

I wonder sometimes if I distance myself to much from the subject matter…

Today we explored the riots in Blake’s universe and it proved quite difficult to make a riot inside a dance studio. Let’s just say that the dance studio seems too clinical of a space to riot. But eventually words came out of our brains and the spoken word alongside the dance made the riot quite something new for me.

There is a feeling of liberation and being heard.

Blake is disclosing himself to me bit by bit, the other day I was reading the paper on my way to the studio and I fond myself staring a David Hockney picture and wondering if he could be Blake this days. It served me as an image to work with in the studio but by the afternoon I had already changed my mind about Blake.

By the end of the day I thought that I might look like Blake.

The revelation for me was to understand that Blake is a free spirit and a content and satisfied person. He made work from the visions and he made work because he wanted to make work, regardless of the feedback from the communities around him.

I am working on playing Blake as a free spirit. Witnessing the environment and producing material that I find relevant today. Not material that is beautiful or fits in, none of that.

 It’s Monday night, 21.57 and Patti Smith still makes me wonder about Blake and London in my bed.

Ezekiel Oliveira

Arses, Elbows and Angels by Paul Bradley

October races on, sun unaplogetically shines, we aim to make the show.

My weekend has been multi-locational and fairly dizzy: Friday night - back to Bristol (home) for a demanding, entirely-unrehearsed, but very satisfying gig, playing tricky music.

Then: Sat. 5.30, up for 6.30 train back to London; for a Saturday rehearsal. As it turned, this scheduled children's and families' workshop got cancelled, in favour of an even longer day's hardworking rehearsal. Goalposts: move.  Still, we were professionals., and undertook the noticeless re-adaptation with aplomb.

Then, i.e. now, happily holed-up in East Molesey (nr. Hampton), seeing my wife and the younger two of my four offspring. This eve I'll train it back to Greenwich, where's there's no laptop, no internet. This is my chance to blag a friend's computer, to tap my happy hexes to, whoever's reading?

Weekends like this one let me feel more keenly my solitariness as the sole team-member who doesn't LIVE in fecking London! But what not kills me, makes me potenter...

Through all this delirium I keep reminding myself that I'm working, fulltime, in music, in art, being spontaneous, collaborating. As my saner shell crumbles off with the shakes of the madder musicgenerator within, I feel FULFILLED!

Come on Monday!

zoot lynam demoted

This is pretty tough.

As an actor, coming into the world of dance, I am not sure of my place.

I am unfamiliar with the process.

For the past weeks I've been flailing. Disconnected tasks and exercises to try to bring something alive - Blake as he was aged 8; or me as I was aged 8; or me today - without much sense of where to begin, nor how Fleur sees these excerpts being used in the show. And Fleur is clearly a choreographer not a theatre director.

I can sense I'm not giving her what she wants. I feel as unsatisfied with what I'm doing as I imagine she is, but neither am I getting a clear enough sense of what is wanted from me.

At one point I felt I started getting somewhere. Although I'm not a dancer, I worked on a rather lovely little movement sketch with a ladder. Simple. Beautiful. Poetic. I enojy it.

But today the weather has changed. I've been demoted as actor. For now.

It's hard not to take it as a knock on my acting abilities. Hard, I guess, because I know that it is. I know I haven't been doing it right. I just don't know what “doing it right” is for this show.

I would prefer to be told straight up - “We're not happy with what you're doing. Here's why. And here's what we're doing about it. What do you think?”

Whether that is actually what Fleur thinks, I don't know. My inner 8 year old pipes up: it's because I'm no good and mummy's been desperately trying to get rid of me, but not knowing how to tell me. Not wanting to hurt my feelings.

I'm sure it's partly true, but I also fully trust that the decision is in the best interests of the show.

My insecurity is only temporary. And minor - I'm not having a career crisis. I know that I am a good actor. (Of course, I also know I can improve. Always.)

So. now I'm just in the music corner, with Paul. It's been difficult to know how to join in with Paul – the music he makes is great, but I've been intimidated by what seems like a very confident man doing his thing with loops and pedals - not really knowing what I can do to fit in. Today, however, we really made good music together.

And it felt great.

Q3

Hello all,

another intense, strange, productive, wierd and at times frankly bonkers week has come to pass. We've soared in celestial paradise. Rioted like filthy horny pigs. Crashed and burned to the raging resignation of "hey ho". There have been some radical changes (BTW, I love hyperbole as u may of gathered) with Tanya (writer) and Lou (dramaturg) coming in and landing some heavy-weight punches..... as if we weren't battered, bruised, bludgeoned enough already!!!. It's also been a week of birthdays (the jolly good fellas being Anna and Kirsty) What's for sure, is that this is most definatley a coming of age experience for most of us (at least the more melodramatic ones anyway)
However, amidst the chaos, the adult arguments, the delinquent chatter, the bull$(!% sound and fury, Angels of resplendant beauty seem to be emerging. And it's up to us to keep them partying.

Kirsty

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAqUNJGKjCQ


Last weeks never made it up...so this blog is a little overdue...today is a link, the song popped up on my ipod a few days ago....this affair with Blake is encroaching into all corners of my day to day.


Last week....

-dancing like me is proving harder than one would think. As an improviser it is perhaps unthinkable to have few sneaky traits or (hushed tone) 'moves' ready to throw in a dance of which the sole essence is the here and now...?right? But good intentions aside...video evidence supports that yes there are a few dominating features that tend to occur throughout my dance. Pin pointing those into set/choreographed material has been my challenge. I could argue that finding my 'signature way of moving' occurs in the search for something else. I walk like me when I am walking to the bus stop, not when I am walking like me with the intention to walk like me. I have a movement quality but my aim is to shake it off/up, not be confined my it...to be accessible...Is it OK that I don't like the movement stereotype of myself...? Perhaps my ego is reluctant to acknowledge I have one...the ability to appreciate, utilise and even change the intuitive patterns of human action, can be what create the opportunity for creativity...A dancer who has a heightened sense of awareness of and over the actions of her body, has access to faster and potentially more intelligent decisions during improvisation... perhaps why setting material whilst dancing 'like me' feels like myself just settling for the obvious decisions at the moment...

-which leads me to the second question Fleur brought up in the studio yesterday.... When to set, when to improvise. A challenge I find often occurs for me. Sometimes set material sucks the life out of an otherwise interesting idea, by containing it, diluting it into a series of forms and shapes...and sometimes the here and now in a performance situation has the potential to distract from the interesting idea if a dancer is too concerned with the audience. Dance set material as though it could be improvised, and improvise as though the movement were set. A friend/colleague of mine mentioned this idea of a sliding scale- 'set in stone' at one end, 'completely free' at the opposing end. How much of a memory of movement we 'solidify', or how closely we 'rein in' an improvisation, depends on where we place it on this scale.

On a lighter note...a morning session with 4year olds (we are researching for the matinee performance) is definitely a great way to start the day...I lost a contact lens and Ana got hit in the face...instigating chaos in a nursery does not come without consequences... 

William, Sophia and the Lamb.

Monday the 16th of October.

Mondays are quite mental in the studio. Today the piece started coming together and I could only observe my body trying to figure out how to put all of this material and experiences together.
It seems like Fleur has a very clear idea of how the different materials will work together but honestly my brain was melting over my body as the day went by.
I can now recognize sections of the piece and they also have names, very funny names such as the virgin floor material. At this point in the process light illuminates different avenues that the work could follow and I try to keep myself open to all of them.

Today I had a chat with Blake and Sophia. I am the lamb, the loved one that died at young age and keeps showing up on Blake’s visions. Innocence and kindness were the sentiments manifested in that particularly scene with Morgan (Blake).
The Lamb has had quite an intensive life and I am working on understanding who he was and who is he this days. I, Ezekiel the lamb.
The investigation seems endless and very fulfilling and as I walk across London I keep seeing Blake everywhere.
Here’s some pictures,

Ezekiel Oliveira

An early idea.

http://vimeo.com/29229222

Q2

Sunday, reflection day. Saturdays are usually a perfect storm of memory loss, broken information, frustration over unfinished tasks, overwhelming relief that things have come to a temporary pause- a chance to step away.
It's been an emotional week.
I struggle to recall exactly what has been achieved, but I know that barriers have been broken (for the better and for the worst) and a richer palette of colours has become available in the creation studio. The process has opened us all up, exposing unexpected strength as well as unintented vulnerability. We've pull together not allowing anyone to slip away. We've sworn at each other in the name of Art and not so much- "you dirty crack whore, get the $%&* out of my face", "it's not all about you, you nutter! How about me!!" We've carried on making merry work. There's plenty of satisfaction, inevitably accompanied by bouts of cold panic.... Blakean binaries, maybe. Maybe it's all just nonsense. We push on, get high together, through the dance, image-making, and other tactics. I'm glad it's Sunday. Tomorrow will be more drama. "Everything is an attempt to be human" the poet once said.

Audrey on the process

Hello everyone. Audrey Speaking.

Should I introduce myself? Okay, so I have a green watch, a pale skin, a macbook, long hair, secrets, two brothers, good friends, a critical mind, massive boobs, an oyster card, dreams and idealistic ideas. What else? Mmmh... I would love to jump in a pond right now but maybe I should start building my own house first. If i have enough money at the end of the month I will consider buying a sail boat, (although a bicycle might be enough), and travel to South America. I wish my brain could be empty sometimes, it would probably help me to look more natural when walking with high heels. Voilà.


Third week in the studio. Time flies.
The working space feels like a home and I love the fact that I can spread my mess and let it grow bigger as the weeks goes. The atmosphere is vibrant. This piece is about movement and people and this is exactly what I was looking for.
Little by litte William Blake is giving away his secrets and do my best to understand him better. The walk in central London last thursday definitely helped me to get a glimpse of Blake's world.
My role in the piece seems to take a new direction...'Here we are Mr. Blake! Hope you can accept me as your beloved wife, because this is what I am going to be. Don't worry, you will learn to appreciate me'.

Enough words. Let's see what the next days have to offer.
And don't forget! When lost or in doubt... Just open your ears. Paul's wonderful music is the answer.

Good night.

Q's blog entry

Words. I'll give it a bash. Where do I begin? I guess offically this project is merely 15 days old, but it's been over a year since Fleur and I began tentative discussions about 'Blake'.
Since then we've experienced a wild and joyous R&D week in Bristol......... Talked through ideas under trees. Put plans into action matter of factly. Screamed at each other over the phone. Sat in awkward silence together disbelieving the other person's point of view. Exchanged rueful smiles across the studio. Witnessed beauty created by the cast doing their thing. Put ourselves through the necessary contradictions that is ballet class. Stood alone on the dancefloor not able to move. Driven to move by the glory that is dance. Unable to form a sentence just when it is needed the most. Allowing the body in motion to cast it's spell. Shaking off colds and stomach bugs, dehydration and unanswerable questions. Swaying with the magic when it finally arrives. Dropping the ball. Pointing the foot. Not making any sense. Having a laugh. Being a luvvie. Enjoying the company. Touched by the generosity. Firing blanks. Feeling the love. Not understanding stuff. Doing silly handstands. Pissed off with the exhaustion. Living the passion. And using words.

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.

A Radical Pedestrian - the Blake Walk (Zoot Lynam)

Today we went on a walk. 

The first thing I wanted to do before starting on this project about Blake was contact my friend, Niall McDevitt. He's an expert on Blake, and I've always wanted to find out some of what Niall knows. This was a perfect excuse to ask him for a lesson! 

He offered to take me on a walk of Blake's London, but we didn't manage to coincide our schedules until after starting rehearsals, so he extended the offer to the whole company. And today we all went.

We met on South Molton Street, outside the only property that Blake has lived in which still stands.

As we approach, Niall leans casually on the window ledge leafing through an old and dusty copy of Blake's writings - like he was placed by the director of the film of this moment. I know this is going to be good!

I love London. Every knook and corner harbours strange and wonderful stories. Today's walk opened my eyes to a few more of them. Like the building where composer Handel once lived, right next door to where guitar legend Jimi Hendrix once lived. Niall enacted a possible dispute between the two “Keep it down, with your wretched noise!”

(He believes Blake would have preferred Hendrix!)

Scurrying about Soho and central London, I feel I'm getting slightly closer to Blake. I can see Niall is there with him already. As we struggle to keep up, with half of our number around the corner and over the road, without apologising he says “I am a radical pedestrian”. 

I can imagine Blake saying that. 

Day 7

Day 7

Hello, Fleur here.

I am really pleased by this blog. I hope some of you are reading and that being sat here at my kitchen table, hitting the keys, after a 13 hour day, is going to create some kind of meaning for you, reader.

I was last in the studio in August 2010, researching Blake. Then came a really long winter, of being in other people's studios, or being at a desk, or trying to find an office to put the desk in... of searching for the right collaborators. At times, the Blake Diptych felt like it would slip away.

I wanted then, as now, to create a show that could span an audience from 0 -100 years. I met with producers and venue managers and tried to articulate the vision, with this show, this unwieldy object, as a bit of an obstacle between us. It would be much easier if it were a children's show, or an adult show... but both... asking for trouble...

So, I asked for trouble. This is as good a description as any, of being an artist.

We are now at day 8. Yesterday, there were 6 dancers, two musicians, one actor, one writer, one lighting designer, one designer, one production manager and one costume supervisor in the theatre at the Old Laban building. It hadn't occurred to me before this moment, that we would all be together for the first time - with a couple of missing - but still, the company, together.

I thanked them, because them being there made sense of that long, dark winter. And they are so much more vibrant, and interesting that the vision inside my head. And to have them in the studio, and to be in a studio, and to see how these bodies start in a vague way and then we discover something true through movement or stillness - and I can see in the dancers this beautiful commitment - Pina Bausch said it so well to one of her dancers "your fragility is your strength" and with these dancers, I am trying to excavate how they can move, in a way that circumnavigates their brains, and cuts to something true.



Dancing is important. It is a freedom to dance. When you look around and see so much oppression and life being threatened, dance could be misunderstood as a trivial thing. But that would be a misunderstanding. The body longs to sing its own song. It will be here, a tiny piece of life for a short while, in the great stretch of infinity. Like an ant underfoot, that is each of us in our own tiny circle of life. We go through darker periods of non-freedom to get to these moments of light. For me, that  moment is here. Rehearsals. Creation. Touring.

I am sharing this because our culture has this tendency to spin everything positively, and positivity is important. But I want the other choreographers and dancers and dance artists reading this to know, that you are right to ask for trouble, you are right to cling to the idea, to investigate the impossible, to dream and to follow a vision. William Blake saw angels, even as his father swore down he did not. If you have chosen this art of freedom, you will see angels dancing, as I am seeing in the studio today.

Have courage. Pray for me to have courage as I try to shape this thing.

I need to eat dinner.

Kirty Arnold's post at the end of week one

There was no time for awkward 'getting to know you's' on our first week into Blake Diptich. Monday to Friday mainly comprised of just five of us working together in the studio, Fleur, Quang, Audrey, Ezekiel and myself. From next Monday the team gets bigger as we are joined by a fifth dancer, alongside the musicians, writer, actor and designer...

Based this week at Laurie Grove ,we got straight into moving...and spent the time exploring a variety of tasks, each other and the writer William Blake.

Starting the day with a series of exercises with Quang, we then have company class led either by one of us, or Gaga technique (no relation to the popstar!) with the wonderful Chisato Ohno.

This was a week of exploration, partnered with sun-filled lunch breaks (is it really September?!) and alongside developing movement vocabulary Fleur set us a series of challenges both inside and outside of the studio. Me and Ezekiel struggled to recall and set an intimate, improvised duet recorded on video; we went for a walk, we shared our 'to do lists'; we worked on developing movements to a brain-teaser of folk song; we improvised with roles of characters that surrounded Blake and we got naked...well Ezekiel did...more on that to come.

My brain is full of little excerpts that I look forward to developing throughout the process, it has been an exhausting but definitely intriguing first week...

Inside the dancer: Ezekiel's first post 2 Oct 2011

Here are some unorganised thoughts:
1. To witness the moment,
2. To strip to the bones of one idea. At the age of 3 what really mattered was that one kiss on the floor, my world paused for that.
3. Blake is the opportunity to unlock unique moments that have been hiding on the back of my mind for 25 years.
4. The awakening of the first idea with no sense of responsibility, joy.
5. Pants down, see this? I am a man and not a girl.
6. No to shape and no to form, digging the essence.
7. Blake is a new vision.
8. Architecture suddenly became animated in London.
9. To allow the memories left in the buildings and in space to be in the present moment, revealed.
10. A 20 second frame of life where 'bones' speak for themselves and shape or form aren't considered. 
11. Get my pants off as I am tired or running around and want to go to sleep, I will go to sleep NOW, naked.
12. Gaga makes my ' canvas ' available to investigate and present as I go along - uncompromised attitude to creation.
13. Simple is the word. No to complicated.