Beginning of a Choreographic Process

Beginning of a Choreographic Process 29/4/13 Air Fahlb leis na h-èoin /Away with the Birds Hopefully before beginning a journey there is preparation. Packing your bag with all the necessary things needed for the road. As an artist, I feel departure is the starting point for each new creative process or journey. Journey is a process of discovery and in this case a choreographic process of discovery through Hanna Tuulikki’s project Air Fahlb leis na h-èoin. The process began with material and ideas that sprung from talking to Hanna, Suzy Glass and Daniel Warren. I watched documentation of a field trip to the Isle of Canna and preliminary concerts from Hanna and her vocalists. I referred to Daniel’s footage as a way of mapping the territory, seeing what had come before to get an idea of where we might be going collectively. The essence of the work existed within the performance of Hanna’s vocal composition for three women. The compositional elements were deconstructed and shared with me via files and discussions. The sonic qualities were wrapped up in the voices of Hanna and her vocalists Nerea and Lucy. It was their voices in this first composition, the song that had inevitably called me to begin explorations in connecting movement and sound. With this material I could begin to find a way in to the work with movement. The pathway I found was through breath: breath as a meeting point between movement and sound. I began improvisational tasks with another dancer, giving ourselves ways to connect our breathing and movement by first becoming aware of the breath that moves us. As a vehicle for flight, up currents of air rushing through feathered wings I initiated explorations of movement through the connection of arms into our centre into the floor. How the way that a limb cuts through space can define a quality, direction and form. How can it be functional and useful? These explorations are only just beginning, simultaneously trying to find a sense of oneness – awareness as a group questioning just how does the body as a resonating chamber effect movement? What information can we take from studying animal and specifically bird behaviour that can be useful in relation to this sonic material? As breathing, sound and movement emitting beings, what are our behavioural patterns and can they be defined or redefine a choreographic/thematic task? Questions like these presented themselves but were thankfully grounded in Hanna’s composition. The sounds of Hanna’s score which later I learned belonged to particular types of birds and specific Gaelic words had meaning that brought new connotations to the musical score. These stories, words and meanings intrinsic to the material, the land and the stories of peoples of hundreds of years ago are finding their ways into the work. So far choreographically we are only just touching the surface but these stories are there. Waiting to be uncovered. Upon getting together at Tramway for five days Hanna and I took some of the movement connections I was finding and defined them as choreographic content. We called them fragments, with associated sound fragments that belonged together and were components within the larger composition. With limited access to rehearsals with the vocalists we focussed on teaching them the score and began to gently introduce these possible connections between sound production and movement production. The interesting discovery was that most of the time, opening the body up for moving also opened up the voice for singing and once the performers felt comfortable with the material then the delivery of the score was enhanced not just visually but sonically. This might be an obivious statement but to feel the result was quite remarkable. For me there is this beautiful place that the breath enables us to access whereby a meaning can take formation in the voice, in the body or in both simultaneously. And within the context of this stage of our research, it feels we were looking and touched upon this possibility for a visual music to exist as well as an audible music. Daniel documented the movement connections, fragments and group experiments we tried, echoing and engaging in this process through video. The result was an interaction of sound, bodies and image that became an assemblage of the explorations discussed in this piece of writing and grounded compositionally in Hanna’s score but now expanded into a work for six vocalists, one film maker and one dancer. Suddenly the boundaries between these mediums became more expandable. An example of a task from the initial choreographic research can be found below. More choreographic research can be read about on my blog: www.rosalindmasson.blogspot.com and the choreography will hopefully be developed and supported with Dance House and Creative Scotland in July this year. In standing, feel how breathing - the actions of inhaling and exhaling animates the body. The lungs expand and as they expand they also move the ribcage. Since the shoulder blades are resting on the ribcage they go for a ride on the breath. They are attached via the collar bone and sternum to the ribcage but free to glide across the back, moved by the breath. You can initiate movement from any part of the, try different points of initiation and pathways. One of the things I found most interesting was the potential energy connecting right down to the floor as I lift my arm perhaps above my head. It made sense at first to work with the restriction of having my feet in one place. By Rosalind Masson