#j.burrows

Writing Dance. Jonathan Burrows Masterclass at Tramway was a day packed with interesting discussions and practical choreographic work. The workshop was really good and I would like to clarify what that is.

Interesting is a word that kills the art. If you say something is interesting, you are implying that there is some value in it, however you are not going any further, you are not arguing what that value might be. So I shall take that word out of my vocabulary, and define what interesting means in the context of this workshop.

Burrows proposed a few things about choreography, or about how a choreographer makes work, that I would like to discuss:

1) Subconscious. The subject of performance is the subconscious of the performer and the spectator (this is an idea from Spångberg, apologies for the lack of referencing but I haven’t tracked this idea down yet). This takes me back to the first few scenes of The Show Must Go On, when the stage is empty and the subconscious of the spectator is all that is left to make the work happen. Polina Zioga, an artist and researcher, is also addressing this issue in her new work ‘Enheduanna - A Manifesto of Falling' Live Brain-Computer Cinema Performance for which I am creating the choreography. Zioga is working with wireless devices to connect in real time the brain-activity of the audience and the performer, bringing the subconscious of both performer and spectator to the core of the event itself. This notion of the subconscious as the core of performance work implies a return to the primary origins of performance, or theatre, or dance, or art, or what have you. It becomes about working with primary elements only: the artist/dancer/actor/performer and the spectator/viewer/participator. This relationship is all that is need. You may get rid of everything else, and still, this relationship would still remain.

2) Memorable Moment. A memorable moment is defined by the friction with the moments that come before and after the memorable moment, and not necessarily by the moment's content (see Stockhausen Lectures on YouTube). Friction is the keyword here. This relates to the notion of choreography as the induction of change, as proposed by Klien (2007). By inducing a change, a shift happens in the situation, therefore creating memorable moments: the shift is what makes them possible.  

3) Potentiality. The expectation that something will happen is more interesting that something actually happening. There was a moment in the workshop that two performers did something and eventually came together in their proposition. Following this, Burrows proposed they tried the same thing, but this time, without the “coming together” moment. The two performers left all of us hanging in the possibility of the “coming together”, which never happened in their second sequence, but which we as audience could foresee, and therefore, the anticipation that they might come together, became much more captivating than the actual moment of “togetherness”. It is almost as if you are being shown a candy but not been given it. You will still be thinking about this candy afterwards. 

4) Action/Inaction. The role of the dramaturge is to “attend to the action of the inaction" (an idea from André Lepecki, which also needs tracking down somewhere in my email box). That is, the accidents in performance are often where the essence of it lies, and the director/dramaturge should be alert and open to listen to these and incorporate them in. This proposes that a large chunk in making work in performance has to do with intuition, and the ability to listen to that intuition in the development of the work.

The subconscious, memorable moments, potentiality, action/inaction, makes me think about processes of making work that attend to these aspects of creation. If I had been to a workshop by a different choreographer, other aspects would emerge, and I would probably be considering other formats to produce work. For now, I am quite interested in exploring – within my own practice, and through the choreography of Zioga’s performance – the notion of potentiality, the creating of memorable moments, while being aware of the actions that happen in inaction.

Bibliography

Klien, M. (2007) Choreography: a pattern language, Kybernetes, Vol. 36 Issue 7/8 pp. 1081 - 1088

Performances/Exhibitions

Bel, J. 2001. The Show Must Go On [performance viewed 23 May 2015, Tramway, Glasgow].

Workshops