There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.

 

Yes, it's a long title (as Ieuan, Jane's ten year old son tells us). So if you can’t make it to see our film on Sunday, July 3^rd in Cardiff, here’s a preview.  It's best to watch it with decent sound, if at all possible. Feedback is very much appreciated.

Or if you prefer, here's the link direct to its Youtube home (my Youtube channel in general is linked at the top right of the blog, under my profile, if you'd like to see more dancing).

This performance for the Wales Dance Platform is suddenly much nearer than I realised - which is slightly alarming.  But then that's the nature of these things.  If you care to click on the link, you'll see the pictures advertising the platform, which look nothing like what I will be doing.  But that is also the nature of these things.

Both works I'm involved in will be on Sunday, 3^rd July (which also happens to be Jane's birthday).  Both are happening at Chapter in Cardiff (ignore the variously mistyped dates and forgotten names; it really is all happening there).  

Wonder of wonders, it looks like I have found some rehearsal space for next week, thanks to the nice people at Volcano.  So it's time to say hello again to La Blanche.  Remember her?  And see how she is faring since her last outing in Bangalore in January 2010.

 

The script and sound will stay (though shorter, due to Dance Platform requests) but after my work with Nancy Stark Smith and Mike Vargas last January and Kirstie Simson and Adam Benjamin a couple of weeks ago, the plan is to let the improvisation have its say for the rest.

Let's see what's been percolating all these months.  And how I hold Nancy's question of how we bring the essence of practice into performance.  And how I terrify myself with another step into the void.

So if you're in Cardiff Sunday after next, please come.  I'm pretty sure the 12:30 film screening is free.  La Blanche is showing in the evening (18:00) in what seems to be a series of triple bills.  She is not (free, at least, not in the gratis sense).  But I promise to make her worth it.

From Lucy, with love x

Be Like Water

I can’t say I underwent any great epiphanies at Kirstie Simson’s and Adam Benjamin’s workshop in Plymouth a couple of weeks ago.  But it was affirming and I was glad and grateful to be there.  I’ve heard Kirstie described as “a force of nature” a few times now and really, it’s accurate. One of the many wonderful things about her is that while she taps into that sense of power and connection in her own dancing, she helps lesser mortals like myself touch it sometimes too.  

the crack at Pwlldu

Adam’s work is more heady and we head-butted quite a bit (me and my questions…).  I found him very generous, and ultimately, the whole experience was affirming, both of myself and what I do.  I’m not sure if that’s because of or in spite of all the things that get in (that I put in?) the way.

I had a day’s birthday grace after I got back to Swansea and then went straight into filming with Jane Hosgood.  I met Jane after my return from Earthdance last January, when I was looking for something tangible to do to tackle some of the physical questions that had come up after Nancy’s work.  Jane runs the Gower Aikido Club with her husband Steve, a convenient five minute walk down the hill to the sea from my grandmother’s house.

When she’s not teaching Aikido, Jane is a film maker.  Some time last spring, she emailed me.  She’d had a dream about an improvised dance Aikido film.  Did I fancy it?

Well, there was no way I was going to turn that down.

Perhaps it was Kirstie’s elemental influence or the preparatory discussions and moving with Jane over the last few months or just the beauty of the location (Pwlldu Bay, which translates to “black pool” but bears no resemblance to the northern English town of the same name)… but the whole experience felt very Earth Mother, Shakti, Prakriti... the Goddess everywhere…

Or perhaps it was all that wet moss and sand between my bare toes…  At any rate, filming was fun, and in such a beautiful place, I thought of Adam’s “ghosts” and Nancy’s “states of grace” and Kirstie’s descriptions of the underlying vibration of our bodies and everything else and Mike’s “transcendence”.  I thought that essentially they are the same thing and when the wind whispers in leaves above me, moss cushions me and the sea sings to me, it is easy to touch them, if only fleetingly.

Our working title, which we’ve never got round to changing is:

There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.

(with thanks to Leonard Cohen and a book I’ve been reading on dealing with grief, fear and despair, inconsequentially).

We filmed and edited the whole thing in a week, and a day after dropping the DVD in the post to the Wales Dance Platform, I still feel square-eyed from long, long days in front of Jane’s computer, her dog and three cats curled up nearby, as we worked out how to piece our footage together over innumerable cups of tea.

But it’s pretty much done, bar a few probable tweaks.  For anyone not coming to Cardiff to see the screening on July 3^rd, I’ll post a link to it once it’s online.

 

All pictures in this entry are stills from our film footage.

And here's a lovely, if not always convenient, old dog who was determined to split up any perceived fights and be part of the first day's filming:

I had an email from my brother shortly after my birthday.  I’ve been swallowing my envy this last month of his current trip around Southeast Asia (I had my turn, I know). He and his girlfriend were in Kampot, exactly where I was, exactly a year ago, when I was dancing with the lovely people at Epic and eating Cambodian mango birthday cake.  I love these random coincidences, how they bring people, places, experiences washing back into immediacy…

From Lucy, with love xx

Moving Movies

It has been a mission of mine for some time to join the world of the twenty-first century arts professional and get some of my work onto the internet.

This sounds very simple but implementing it took many months (if not years).  It involved such minor quandaries as getting ten year old video footage onto DVD, and then converting that into something a programme could edit.  There was the small matter of more DVD footage travelling from south India to California to find me, and then completing its circumnavigation of the globe until further conversion and the lending of a computer (from Switzerland) that could actually do the editing (thank you, thank you, thank you Simone) was possible.

There were more logistical conundrums, but you get the drift.  Just because I was bored silly by them doesn’t mean you should be too.

The inherent frustrations came to a computer-hazed apotheosis last week, semi-sleepless, reducing me to a state last experienced during the self-inflicted essay-crises of undergraduate days.  I’m not sure the results bear fitting testament to this struggle.  Dance never films quite as I would like, not unless it’s been specifically designed for it.  And film is not my medium of expertise.  In the end, it felt more important to get the thing done at all than to worry too much over any intrinsic artistic merit.

So here we are.

I find it pleasingly appropriate that each of the three films comes from one of three different continents.

This first is called On Your Island Does the Night Fall Later? (The title comes from a poem by John Berger.)  It’s some straightforward footage of a performance in Cape Town in September 2001, performed by Malcolm Black and Nicola Visser.

Next come some excerpts from the group piece I made on six dancers in Bangalore just over a year ago.  It was very much a work in progress, lots of new ways of working for all involved.  I called it The Spaces Between and it is performed by Nayana Bhat, Pia Bunglowala, Charan C. S., Marjory Dupres, Sowmya Jaganmurthy and Vibhinna Ramdev.

And finally, the solo, La Blanche, I performed on the same evening.  I am still mulling over it and considering ways to re-work it.  My long-suffering brother accompanied me to one of the beaches around Swansea one morning last autumn to film some ideas from it.  The movement material isn’t quite what I would like, but some of the themes are probably clear…

 Or if you prefer, here is the link to their home on my Youtube channel.  

More words and stories will follow soon, probably also on dance, as that has been the theme of the year so far.

from Lucy, with love x