I am just laughing at the blog title, it sounds like quite the easy read :) which begs the question, should I try harder to create catchy titles? I struggle with titles- I go with ones that do what they say on the tin rather than obtuse phrases hinting at the contents.. I tried being pedantic with this title but maybe I will add a few words at the end to make it more interesting. Anyhow, that is another conversation about the utter inaccessibility of highbrow art speak that I read in reviews and journals, which can be for another day..
I had been thinking as the week goes on about the way I make work- as a direct reaction to the extremities and intensities of parenting a kid with special needs. Often, there is little to no control over outcomes and zero control over how people react to your situation. You can only control your own behaviour and implement your own modus operandi. My performative output is influenced totally by the experience of parenting and caring- making physically strenuous actions which require control and willpower as a response to situations that cannot be controlled.
I wanted to bypass the reactive action to caring, so to speak, and instead embrace the caring action as the starting point. Try and explore caring as an action, rather than responding to the rigours of caring by doing some strenuous task. Use the modus operandi as the work!
So the movements I worked with as my starting point are the movements I make every day many times over as my role of a carer, kneeling down to put on socks and shoes, sitting down to help with dressing, pulling out the support chair out to help them sit down and get back up, picking things up off the floor when they get dropped, walking up and down the house endlessly to fetch things.
I wanted to use these actions in a sequence to see how they felt to carry out, in a different context. So this is what they, the movement sequences, are about.
I went to the studio in glór, who are very good about letting me use their space when it is free. The studio is dark and has no windows, so for this reason I decided to make it even more dark and like a cave. I turned off the lights and put on a spot light.
I was having an anxious dark kind of morning when your thoughts crowd into your head and are like seagulls pecking at a piece of bread, if the bread was your mind..
So my head would not allow my body to move freely, I was only able to tell it to move, not allow it to. I had been discussing conscious and unconscious movement with my mentor Inma Pavon, the contemporary choreographer and Dancer, and I knew that today, making these actions, there would be no unconscious movement. My brain was too crowded with stuff for that to happen. Inma recommends certain exercises to do to help with this busy mind situation, so I need to start implementing these.
The first one encapsulated this idea of conscious movement. I thought of it as a response to not being able to allow myself to do anything else. Paralysed by over thinking. It happens and sometimes the only cure is the knowledge that your time is limited.
I like repetition and it features in my performance work. I am very interested in ‘the flow state’ defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I am always amazed by how a flow state can be achieved through pushing yourself physically. I find by doing the movements repetitively to see what they yield, they always yield something.
Also this one,
I messed with the graphics and cut out the background (and now they weirdly look a little like 11 in the upside down world pool scenes from stranger things ) as my intention was to remove all visual distractions from the scene. So it looks almost like a tutorial, or a memory. I will make more of these and see what they yield.
