The 19th Step

2008-09-12T18:50:00.001+01:00

"I love his work because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or an attribute of the universe...because his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures"
Italo Calvino on Borges

The 19th Step and Virtual Worlds?

2008-05-05T23:25:00.006+01:00

I've been with my avatar (a digital character) Fraser Fonda on Architecture Island in Second Life. We have used SL as a kind of studio and discussion space sometimes during the project. Working there made me think about different types of images existing there, the avatar, the digital model, the photograph, an animation. It reminded me that when Marcus talked about dimensions beyond the 3rd he said that the 4th wasn't just time as many of us think, but the dimension consisted of information, eg the stock market figures, or the temprature etc. A virtual world allows us to embed text and links to other webpages in the digital objects. At the moment this version of the 19th step dance floor in SL has the address of the 19th step webpage embedded as a rolling text, Marcus's mapping of the library of Babel is repeated and animated in a digtal model that cuts through the space, I could also add sound files, animate avatars to dance, give out note cards, and video extracts as well as holding live events in real time.

response to 9th April performance

2008-04-18T09:56:00.007+01:00

from Simon Ellis

My experience was wonderfully dominated by the sonic. I felt part of - or immersed in - some huge rumbling organism, struggling for breath, reverberant, and inhabited by sibilant half sounds. This experience was quite different from any theoretical notion of the'finite but unbounded' ... the bounds of the conventional black box, its traditions of 'removal' from reality seemed at odds with an unbounded finity.

The mix of pre-recorded and live audio was deeply engaging.

I was often drawn to a notion of 'the unfinished' - of letters devoid of words, of partially completed sounds ... about mid way through the materials this sense of the 'incomplete' within the work felt quietly ecstatic.

Within the more formal conventions of the work - its location, use of light, crafted entrances and exits - I was excited by the presence of the 'unmanaged' ... when books fell, when one of the dancers dropped a book in the standing sequence, in the misshapen and subtly warped blackboards struggling to be aligned by the performers, in Marcus dealing with compass, ruler and ladder against a mobile blackboard.
The intrusion of these moments seemed to infect what was described as an oscillation between 'order and chaos' - as if I was occasionally reminded of just how much potential for the unplanned, the disordered there is in the act(s) of performance. These infections seemed to roughen the edges of the formal characteristics of the work (right down to their waistcoats etc).

This next thought is a little more uncertain - or incomplete. It has to do with embodiment, and with my memory of the act of solving mathematical equations at high school and university level, and now similar experiences in writing code. It represents a sort of collision between how 'mindful' those activities are, in which I
often approach a strong sense of the 'disembodied' ... they are experiences in which I find it hard to reconcile the dissolution of a mind-body split. And yet, seeing Marcus 'release' a solution onto the blackboard was extraordinary (his sense of embodiment was strongly contrasted with seeing the performer engage in that 'solving'conversation - she was so clearly writing something 'learned', not something 'experienced'). This tension - between states of (dis)embodiment - seems a difficult line to tread ... how much of the processes and conversations so clearly present in the development ought to be made transparent to viewers? (an old question I know but it seems to assume greate importance in a work 'about' mathematical concepts). At the same time, seeing Marcus write the solution disconcertingly reminded me of how Hollywood has portrayed the
'mathematical genius' (inevitably flawed) ... Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind ... it's as if there is a kind of romance in the depiction/representation of this activity that is utterly opaque to us mathematical mortals!

Music, mathematics and embodied knowledge.

2008-04-16T10:50:00.009+01:00

For a musician looking at the relationship between mathematics and music is like, having lived in the world of shadows and reflections, to then turn around and examine the objects creating those shadows and reflections, and the light that connects the two worlds. When we compose, perform or listen to music, we are engaging with number and geometry on multiple levels, consciously and unconsciously. The mathematical ‘data’ in music is understood and interacted with as musical phenomena - from how we count metre or hear pitch to how we comprehend harmonic motion or structure a fugue - as musical gesture and form. The mathematical knowledge we acquire or apply in learning music – counting, calculating, transposing – is embodied knowledge that we approach from a musical perspective. It becomes intuitive to us as musicians - a part of the way we are ‘musical’ rather than the way we are ‘mathematical’.

If mathematics is embodied within musical phenomena then its transformation is via the body. Musical gesture and form must make sense physically, on a human scale, in order to be perceived as music (though the boundaries of this perception are continually being challenged and extended). The mathematics that is manifest in music has a relationship to the ways our body perceives the world: both in terms of immediate sonic phenomena – scale, harmony and duration – and structure on the level of musical gesture, phrase or sentence, as well as the architectural dimensions of form, proportion and symmetry.

I am interested to investigate the embodied knowledge I possess as a musician in terms of the mathematics that underpins it, in order to extend and intensify my understanding of music. Because of the essential connection through the body, interacting with mathematics ‘live’ through performance facilitates the transfer of knowledge on deeper somatic and sensory levels. Choreography and sculpture both serve to underline the vital link with the body and senses by building connections with the music and with each other as well as the mathematical content. In this way our access to embodied knowledge becomes multi-sensory and multidimensional.

The 19th Step Third and Final Research Performance at Laban

2008-04-13T14:56:00.004+01:00

Yesterday, Saturday April 12th, The 19th Step research performance was performed at Laban in the Studio Theatre. This was last performance during this intensive development process.
The image below show the performers and Carol and Dorothy discussing notes at Laban. The image below shows the start of the performance experimenting with different projections which was accompanied by text read from the Aleph.

Some of the audience stayed after the performance for a post show discussion.

The 19th Step Second Research Performance at Boundstone College

2008-04-12T08:48:00.009+01:00

Yesterday April 11th the 19th step research performance went to Boundstone College in Lancing, West Sussex. We had an after show discussion.
Setting up the space in the school hall. Kim up ladder sorting the lights.
Opening moments on the red curtains in Boundstone College hall.

During the performance Dylan and Marcus chalk hexagons on the blackboard dance floor.

The 19th Step First Research Performance

2008-04-10T10:44:00.017+01:00

Wednesday 9th April the first public research performance of The 19th Step 7.30 took place at the Michaelis Theater Roehampton University, with a talk after discussing the process.

During the afternoon we had another dress rehearsal, and Oliver a professional photographer took images during and after, this pic shows him at work.

This image captures the opening moment of the the performance.

The 19th Step Development Day 13, run through, lighting and dressrehearsals

2008-04-09T09:44:00.010+01:00

Yesterday the 19th step research performance began dress rehearsals, we also had a walk through so Mike could plot where the stage lights should be and tried out some ideas for costumes.
The musicians chalk on the mic blackboard which amplifies the sound of the drawing.
The three couples, Rose and Marcus create the hexagon inside the circle, Marina and Dylan trace the shape of the hexagon and trace circles in their dance movements as Sarah and Scott create musical hexagons and circles in their duet.
The trio Sarah on flute, Marina and Rose draw their made up alphabet shapes.
Scott, Marcus and Richard in an equation trio, Marcus caught mid circle.
The final moments Rose supporting two triangles constructed by the performers from the dance floor boards, an idea of the Aleph or a false Aleph? This clip from the 19th step research performance shows couples Scott and Sarah percussion and flute, Marina and Dylan dancing and Rose and Marcus drawing circles and hexagons, also trying out for some costume ideas and lighting cues.

This clip shows a part of the trio, Sarah, Rose and Marina performing the column books part of the research performance.

The 19th Step Development Day 12, run through

2008-04-05T23:23:00.005+01:00

Today the performers had a run through of The 19th Step Research Performance
Richard and Dylans duet.
Dylan and Marina dance while Scott and Richard mark the chalk board which is amplified.
Sarah, Dylan, Rose and Marina sounds and following shape of hexagon
Marina traces the hexagon
Sarah on flute Marina and Rose trio

The 19th Step Development Day 11, exploring books and the idea of the Aleph

2008-04-04T23:51:00.006+01:00

Carol and the dancers explored using the books, stacking, making a column of books and the Marina and Rose as columns. Trying out ideas for costumes.

Using a column of books as part of the Aleph idea, how to use the projections.

The clip below shows the dancers walking the shape of the hexgon with their books.

The 19th Step Development Day 10, Marking out the performance

2008-04-03T23:48:00.011+01:00

These two images capture the trio between Sarah on flute and Marina and Rose performing their hexagon tracings and spelling out words from their alphabet.

Scott, Richard, Marcus and Dylan develop the equation duel.
Dorothy exploring ideas for percussion with Scott
Ideas for using the two triangles may be this is the Aleph point and becomes a screen for two projections?

The performers practicing their a voice piece.
Books gradually being covered in 'maths book yellow' begin to inhabit the space. This clip shows Scott and Richard on Percussion and Horn exploring sound ideas for the equation duel developing with Marcus and Dylan.

The 19th Step Development Day Nine, Navigation through Hexagonal library, books, projections

2008-04-02T22:06:00.014+01:00

Marcus maps out the hexagonal library described in Borges story the Library of Babel and discusses with Carol, Dylan, Rose and Marina how to navigate through it. This is then fed into the development of their movement in the space.

"The Universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries ..............one of the free sides gives upon a narrow entrance way, which leads to another gallery, identical to the first and all the others"

Borges, The Library of Babel

Rose and Marina working with the books.

Ideas for projection, a series of quickly changing images onto the books stacked to create a screen, thinking about the Aleph, past, present and future.

The 19th Step Development Day Eight Dancers and Marcus explore shape and pattern of the hexagon and the circle

2008-04-02T00:02:00.011+01:00

Carol worked with the dancers Rose, Marina, Dylan and Marcus, drawing shapes with the body. Marina and Rose trace the sides of the Hexagon, and develop shapes creating a hybrid language.
Marcus and Dylan continue to develop their equation moves.

Marina and Dylan develop their dance of circular shapes.

Clips below show Marina as she traces the shape of a hexagon joined by Rose who traces her own hexagon shape. The final clip show Rose and Marina devloping an alphabet which will be accompanied by Sarah on flute.

The 19th Step Development Day Six and Seven, Equations, Sequencing, Patterns and Yellow Paper

2008-03-31T18:57:00.012+01:00

Dorothy works with Richard and Scott to make music to accompany Marcus as he creates an equation through dance. Marcus showing the performers his moves which show an equation through his body.

These two pics show Marcus teaching Dylan the body equation moves.

Below are two photos showing the performers practicing their 12 body positions.

The clip below shows ideas developing the opening of the piece.

The 19th Step Development Day Five, Workingsout Sounds and Sequences.

2008-03-28T23:47:00.011Z

Dorothy worked with the musicians, dancers and Marcus to create soundscape from controlling their breath, starting with their pulse, using books as instruments and repeating the beginning of certain words in order.

Rose workingout her 12 moves and Amy discusses with Marina and Scott the 12 positions Carol has asked the performers to develop.

This video show clips from the development of a duet by Richard on Horn and solo by Dylan

" He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality." Borges, The Circular Ruins

This clip shows Marina and Dylan practicing moves where they draw circles with their bodies in the shape of a hexagon, this will happen while Marcus and Rose draw a diagram of the shapes on the blackboard.

The 19th Step Development Day Four, developing each strand

2008-03-27T12:48:00.016Z

Today we are all working on various parts of the project separately.

Below are some videos beginning to collect material to create an idea of the Aleph?
Just been listening to this programme,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/discoveringmusic/pip/5056m/
you need to listen to it by Sunday 30th as the link will run out. Its about Tango and one of the contributors just said "Borges describes Tango as a heart dancing on four legs" this made me think his short story the Circular Ruins.

Marcus explains irrational numbers.

Here are some pages from Marcus's sketch book a lot of the diagrams show him trying to workout how to navigate through the hexagonal rooms of the Library of Babel.

The 19th Step Development Day Three, Patterns, Shapes and Tango

2008-03-26T22:57:00.009Z

"Musically, the tango is not important; its only importance is what we give it. This reflection is correct, but perhaps applies to everything."
"The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still guards, as does all that is truthful a secret"
Jorge Luis Borges, A History of Tango.

Today Marcus our mathmatician had his first ever tango lesson. Using the shape of the circle the dancers and Marcus improvised moves drawing circles on the floor inspired by tango.

Marcus drew the diagram of the dance moves he and Rose had developed. Inside the circle the 6 triangles make a hexagon, the shape of the rooms in Borges story the Library of Babel.

The 19th Step Development Day Two, Building Vocabulary, Notations and Blackboards

2008-03-26T00:17:00.012Z

Musicians, Dancers and Marcus, Dorothy and Carol discuss ideas about notation building the space, and exploring the space and sounds of the blackboards.

Discussing notation and sounds made by drawing on blackboard which Dave had attached a contact mic amplifying the sounds of the chalk drawing. The musicians created different forms of notation which the dancers used as a starting point to develop their own notation for movement.

More ideas of notation using text, music and geometry using blackboards and performers as part of the architechture.
Creating geometric spaces with the boards the performers formed a Hexagon.

Marcus drew an equation showing the 7 performers of the 19th step. S1= Sarah, Flute, R1 = Richard, Horn, S2 = Scott, Percussion, R2= Rose, Dancer, D= Dylan Dancer, M1 = Marina, Dancer, M2 = Marcus, Mathematician.

The 19th Step Development Day One Primordial Space Thinking of Borges The Circular Ruins

2008-03-24T21:20:00.007Z

Mappings of the Primordial space, empty except for the body and the sound of our own pluse building the performance and sound, exploring the books as building materials. Video shows an exercise with the dancers Rose, Marina and Dylan navigating between coordinates 01,10,00,11, controlled by the sounds made by the musicians Richard, Sarah and Scott.

Dancing is Drawing

2008-03-23T17:41:00.004Z

Scroll down
http://users.pandora.be/Tango-E-Vita/tango/Caminar.htm

Flute and Tango

2008-03-23T17:20:00.005Z

Astor Piazzolla used flute with guitar tho the guitar is used like percussion?...
Heres the sheet music
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89087/Tango-Suite-Flute
and a snatch of the music played
http://mp3s.sheetmusicplus.com/soundclips/4789935_01.mp3

Tango foot work

2008-03-23T16:13:00.005Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTht1-bRh3Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWHvvWdKCj8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgF-2P1XPwk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4FmTlZ97Ck&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLARbY3TH9g&feature=related

Making Tango

2008-03-23T10:12:00.007Z

I’m interested in assembling a library of tango tastes, colours, residues. I was intrigued by the way Molloy was talking about the 'hum' in her head of fragments of tango words and melodies. I’d like to compile a lexicon, a dustpan of bits of rhythm, melodies, gestures and artifacts from tango. There is a sense in which Tango already revels in this degree of distillation and a language of suggestion.

Making Form

2008-03-23T09:50:00.003Z

It’s helpful to think of a dramaturgy inhabiting each of three Borges writings in turn. These three states are in a spectral relationship to each other: from the formless, chaotic state emerges action, pattern and line; as this scenario heats up and starts to ‘cook’ residual energies, colours and momentum emerge. Each state creates the justification for the next. In relation to creating opera, Birtwistle talks about ‘earning the right to sing’ – of creating the justification for singing to emerge out of the particular formal conditions one creates.

By separating these performance states into scena derived from the Borges texts we can address each ‘state of being’ in turn and focus the strategies for shaping them.

Notes on Dramaturgy

2008-03-22T20:26:00.003Z

Each performance inaugurates a language of its own. But what is the 'language' waiting to be born with The 19th Step? Reading through our blog to date there are a multicplicty of deas, images and themes. Given we have a relatively brief time together to develop these research materials into a preliminary performance I would like to propose a dramaturgical shaping as a preliminary way to think about the overall gestalt of the work. Dramaturgy can be considered as a writing of the 'text' of the performance, its sequentiality of images and content. Dramaturgy is also about the creation of atmospheres and the overall rhythm of the performance; in particular, how one figure or performance state reverberates against another. I am thinking of the three stories which have mostly informed the history the project as a way to shape the dramaturgy.These are 'The Circular Ruin', 'The Library of Babel' and 'The Aleph'. Each story carries its own image of the universe and of dreams and reality but each, to my mind, shapes a vision of how we could potentially organise the array of materials we are exploring. The Circular Ruin explore the formless, chaotic state of dreams, of bare life and the pulse of nature: "he dreamt of a beating heart, in the dreamer's dream, the dreamed one awoke". I see this atmosphere as the opening state of the performance. This is the primordial state of the performance, a state which recognises rhytym as a foundation of biology. The second state or scene is the one where we 'build' the idea of a culture, through exploring the relationship of words to bodies, of bodies to instruments of sound/music/voice and language, of a library around us through the use of the books, of vocabularies of movement and music, and of construction of walls and floor (the architecture for the body takes shape and is shaped by the language of performance its vocabularies becoming more complex). The final state or scene relates to the atmosphere of the Aleph and is a precipitous dizzying, hallucinatory state of overwhelming complexity in its simultaneity of times and spaces. This is the atmosphere of the dizzying dance of tango or other dance style which takes hold of one's reason and powers of knowledge and twists this into new configurations through multiple processes. The three performance states relate to three different spaces: an exterior ancient ruin; a densely configured hexagonal library; an architectural fragment in the form of a staircase. Each of these architectures suggests a different atmosphere and relationship to time and space for the performers, as well as performance language. Can we 'map' a different 'mathematics' for each space, spatialisating the configurations of performers through this and creating a dramaturgy of place, of where you are in each moment of the performance?

Primordial Space-Time

2008-03-19T09:05:00.003Z

Following Marcus' comment on primates and discussions with Dorothy about the intention to create a 'primordial space-time' as one of the states for the work, I am dwelling on some recent writing by Elizabeth Grosz on the relationship between the history of culture and evolutionary nature and how this gives a perspective on some of Borges writings. For a history of culture cannot be conceived outside of or autonomous from nature. Evolutionary nature produces all environments and all bodies that are sustained in and by those environments. Grosz claims, 'it is nature that requires and accomplishes culture, but nature conceived as richly open in possibilities rather than rigidly determined in its outcomes' (2006, p187). She goes on to describe the primordial moment of the artistic impulse as a making of one's body other than what it is: 'One we can see in the products of culture - its technological, political and scientific achievements - the exteriorization of this primitive artist's impulse, the directing outward of this primordial body art' (p.188) How do I make my body other than what it is? For, following Spinoza, we do not know what a body can do. This is a choreographic question I propose we address in one of the first workshops and that the building of our babel comes from this primordial space-time. In The Nothingmess of Personality Borges describes an 'unintelligible cacophony persisting in time and wearing out space' (, p.5), that 'the self does not exist' and 'my body is a phenomenon among others'. So from 'somebody to nobody', 'I am like everyone else'.

Grosz, Elizabeth 'Naked' in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (MIT 2006, pp187-202).

Borges, Jorge Luis, 'The Nothingness of Personality' in The Total Library Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Penguin 1999, pp3-9.

Catalogue

2008-03-18T07:27:00.005Z

There is an interesting issue of the catalogue for the library. How would you summarize which book you are referring to? Is a title enough? What would the title of the book be? One starts to run into difficulty because every possible book is in this library. Since titles are generally at most a couple of lines long, you'll end with many of the books with the same title. In fact is there a way to uniquely identify books in this library? Beyond reproducing the whole text, probably not. Some books you will be able to write a short programme which will reproduce the whole text. For example the book with MCV repeated continuously has a short programme which can be used to reconstruct the book: just keep repeating MCV.

This gets into interesting issues of measures of randomness and complexity. There are ways to measure randomness by looking at the shortest programme that can reproduce the sequence. I wrote an article on issues related to this and Memory in the recent issue of Drawbridge. It raises the question of which books do you pick out as having meaning and which are just random nonsense. The issue of music and noise obviously relate to this. But equally which mathematical proofs do we mark out as special and worthy of note and which are boring and tautological? There is a aesthetic judgement being made in the choice of mathematical pathways. I could get a computer to churn out theorems for me but which are worthy of me sending off to be published? The monkey and the mathematical typewriter.

Here is a link to the Infinite Monkey Theorem

Borges and Tango

2008-03-17T20:52:00.007Z

Borges uses tango and tango uses Borges. He grew up in a house filled with English books in a suburb called Palermo. His house was gated, iron rails separated his garden from the neighbourhood. 'I was always behind bars' he states. Home is the endless English library and Borges was the prisoner watched over by a female guard who kept him from the street. Later, when he returned from Europe he identified not with the closed interior his mother sheltered him within, but with the rough, Palermo of knife and guitar and milonga. He defamiliarised the house of English books and made a vernacular landscape for his writings in the tango community outside. An 'imaginary homeland'. Into this mythical homeplace he introduces music - a barrel-organ and a piano banging out tango tunes. For more check the 'Borges-tango' video lecture and the 'wallflower' for writing/performance on this site

Could I invite Dylan and Kate offer an introduction to the tango walk, the quadrangle floor pattern, the figure of 8, the rocking and displacements of tango?

harmonic series

2008-03-17T16:22:00.008Z

If I add all the fractions

1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+...

all the way to infinity, how far do I get?

The series is called the harmonic series because all the different harmonics of a string have these different wavelengths. So this series is almost like hearing all the harmonics of the vibrating string.

The question of how big this series is can be expressed physically too. If I have infinitely many books and I start stacking them on top of each other, how far can I get them to overhang? In the picture above I've used CD cases (Dorothy will be more interested in which CDs are being stacked probably - there was some Schubert, Shostokovich, Puccini, Stanley Turrentine, Elvis Costello, Dvorak and My Bloody Valentine.) In the picture, the top CD is completely clear of the CD at the base of the tower. As one descends the tower, the distance that each CD can be pushed so that the thing still balances is given by the harmonic series. So the reason the first CD is clear of the base is because the overhang of 4 CDs is 1/2x(1+1/2+1/3+1/4) which is bigger than 1. But how far can you go if you keep stacking the CDs or books?

Well, it turns out that I can actually get as far as I want. This is because

1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+... gets infinitely big.

The first proof of this was given by the fourteenth century philosopher Nicole d'Oresme.

The proof is not too difficult but clever. I might give it in another blog entry if there is popular demand!

How far can we get with 19 steps: the top step will be 1.77387... units away from the step at the bottom. Although the series goes off to infinity, it takes a very long time to get there. How many steps do we need for the top step to be 2 units away? That takes 31 steps. And to go 5 units...that requires 12367 steps.

This paper explains some of the maths behind stacking books.

Making a hexagon

2008-03-17T14:59:00.004Z

One thought is to use the giant set of compasses to create a perfect hexagon on the floor. This is a construction that the Ancient Greeks discovered.

There is an animation on Wiki which shows how the construction is done. The point is that you can't measure anything. You can only draw a straight line or a circle with the compass.

It is possible to draw a pentagon but it is impossible to draw a 7-sided figure with this equipment. In fact if the number of sides of the shape is N then the shape can be constructed if and only if the odd primes dividing N are Fermat primes, that is primes of the form 2^2^n+1. The only Fermat primes known are 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537.

As a 19 year old, Gauss discovered a construction of the 17-sided figure. His discovery prompted him to begin a mathematical diary, one of the most important documents in the history of mathematics. Here is his construction of the 17-gon.

Maths quotes

2008-03-17T14:41:00.004Z

God created the integers, the rest is the work of man. Leopold Krnoecker

Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe. [A reference to the creation of a non-euclidean geometry.] Janos Bolyai

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. GH Hardy

An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God. Ramanujan

We can conceive of a chemistry that is different from ours, or a biology, but we cannot conceive of a different mathematics of numbers. What is proved about numbers will be a fact in any universe. Julia Robinson

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper. David Hilbert

Performance thoughts and props

2008-03-09T12:35:00.010Z

Just been helping write a brief for a performance project at Reading came across this

"One of the most well known Happenings was Theater Piece No.1, 1952 a performance at Black Mountain College by John Cage (one of Kaprow's teachers). Cage stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played scratched phonograph records, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced. All these things took place at the same time, around the audience rather than on a stage."

Wondering if a step ladder could be used prob no money for umpire chair of my dreams....

Added pic as I like the idea of using tube of paper and also enigmatic 13 written on it...

Was thinking shall I bring 19 bagels Marcus? or more maybe 100......?

I remember you mention bicycle innertubes, may be get some inflatable rings again, plastic hoola hoops?

Above is pic of the chalkboard compass can only get it in America and they won't ship it over here anyone see something similar? It can draw circles up to 63" in diameter.

I'm looking in to bamboo cane for long chalk stick, have an aluminium strip about 2metres that would make a good straight edge if needed?

Shall I also order A1 stacks of paper?

Another website and interesting video

2008-03-09T11:54:00.007Z

http://www.temporarysite.org/index.htm I like this website one too for its simple design and noticed this video on it which made me think of the performers manipulating the boards? It was made in 1964 by the sculptor Robert Morris the text and voice of William Burroughs reading from Nova Express. It made me think of a few things, he's using light weight sheet ours is 1cm thick much heavier will need 2 people to manipulate, could we have some lighter sheets too...... its really interesting how he disappears and reappears goes from 2d to 3d, he is wearing gloves, we need to film performance in sections to create a video of it rather than try and do it as audience member.

thoughts about the website

2008-03-09T11:33:00.004Z

Had a look at http://www.piccoloteatro.org/infinities/index.html which is great I like the way the videos open up and I like the cube photo button, but over all I feel the design is a bit too over polished in terms of how I imagine the 19th step should be I favour a more paired down approach. (But am willing to be convinced otherwise if you all love it:-) Here are some links to pages to give an idea.... I wondered about a photo of chalk text on a blackboard, or open maths book?, as opening page each word linking to a section? similar to this http://fionabanner.com/
http://festival2008.lovebytes.org.uk/ get past the blobby opener page I like the objects linking to pages.
I like the simplicity of this page http://www.signhear.net/ imaging small giff of dance, musician, marcus??
I like the idea of the website being as work in progress as this blog has been but with a way for the viewer to add text, questions and images.

Design for back of publicity card

2008-03-07T09:30:00.001Z

Design for front of publicity card, I think this could be the one??

2008-02-27T16:48:00.003Z

hello this is my favourite any thoughts....

Also some Tango imagery

2008-02-23T19:19:00.004Z

We discussed using Tango clothes too here's some images of them any thoughts...?

Ideas for costumes

2008-02-23T18:47:00.008Z

Here are some ideas for the type of clothes, I was imagining black and white for dancers thought black would be interesting as it would become dusty with chalk as performance progresses. Imagined Marcus in much more colour like he usually wears maybe braces?

Maths Moments II

2008-02-05T21:26:00.002Z

Shapes and the nature of space
(a) A collection of triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, septagons and octagons. How can you put them together to cover the floor? If all the shapes are the same then only triangles, squares or hexagons will work. But what if you mix them up?
(b) What 3 dimensional shapes can you build with the flat shapes? How many are there if the faces are all the same? Plato proved there are five shapes. Their symmetry makes them perfect as dice. Plato associated the shapes with fire – tetrahedron; earth – cube; air – octahedron; water – icosahedron; and finally the shape of the universe corresponded to the dodecahedron. If you mix shapes then Archimedes proved there are another 13 shapes you can make.
(c) What are the shapes of the universe? What is the shape of the library? If the library only has one floor, then it is like a flat universe. The library could extend without limit in all directions, the hexagons just tiling an infinite flat expanse. But more interestingly it might fold up on itself. It could be like the surface of a sphere or the surface of a torus. But how could the librarian tell which shape he lives in, stuck as he is on the surface of this universe? On a sphere if you draw a closed path, a loop, on the surface, then it is possible to continuously morph the loop until it vanishes to a point. On a torus there are loops that can’t be shrunk like this. These loops are like closed journeys on these surfaces. The way the hexagons are arranged and the doors going from one to another, it looks like the floors of the library are actually like torus shaped universes. As you travel through the hexagons you find yourself returning to the original hexagon from which you started. But what are the other possible shapes that you can use as plans for wrapping up the floors of the library? Poincare proved at the beginning of the twentieth century that any library can be morphed until it either looks like a sphere, or a torus with one hole, or a torus with two holes and so on. Perhaps you could see the librarian going through the proof of this projected up onto the walls.
(d) But the library is many layered, it is a 3 dimensional universe where you can go from one floor to the next…a third dimension. So how can this universe be wrapped up? Now we are having to wrap up a three dimensional universe in 4 dimensions. If we head up to the higher layers of the library we suddenly find ourselves returning to the layer we started at then the library is wrapped up into a higher dimensional bagel or torus. But what other shapes are possible? This is what Perelman answered in his solution to the Poincare conjecture, possible one of the greatest achievements in mathematics in the last century.
(e) There is also the interesting issue of whether the library is a Euclidean geometry or possible a non-Euclidean geometry. In non-Euclidean geometry, triangles have angles that don’t add up to 180 degrees. Consider triangles drawn on the surface of a sphere. See this link for an interesting article: plus article
(f) And what about fractals? Could the library reflect in some way some fractal characteristics?

maths making theatre, music, dance

2008-02-05T21:03:00.003Z

So the challenge here is to see how these things can be encapsulated and conveyed within the flow of a piece of theatre. There's the need to distill concepts to become characterisations, images, motifs. What is the character/s of infinity? What texts can be drawn on to shed light on that character? What images? What events and moments can be created as analogies? (see Carol's post below re dancers counting; Kate's whirling devishes)

Maths Moments

2008-02-05T10:23:00.001Z

My intention was to carry on the little narrative I began with the librarian faced with the two piles of books and to tell you what happens in the next room. But perhaps in preparation for our meeting at The Hope I'll record some of the things I was thinking of including.

I think the maths moments I hope we might include will focus on two topics
(1) number and infinity
(2) shapes and the nature of space

This post will deal with the first one.

(1) Number and infinity
(a) I quite like the fact that you can calculate exactly how many books there are in the library given that the number of pages is limited. It's a large number but one can also calculate from this the number of hexagons.
(b) But it's still possible to make infinite books by combining the books in the library. So for example given ten books numbered 0 to 9, any number could represent a new book where I read the ten books in the order given by the number. For example 134115 means the book got by reading Book 1 followed by Book 3 followed by Book 4 followed by Book 1 again then Book 1 again then Book 5. It’s almost like using the first library to build a second library with infinitely many books.
(c) But then perhaps you come across a third library where the books are all labeled with fractions. Does this library have more books in than the second library where all the books are labeled with whole numbers? This was Cantor’s great discovery that actually these two infinities have the same size because there is a way to pair up all the books in each library. It’s called Cantor’s diagonal slash. There is a very graphic way to show how to pair these numbers up which I’ve done in one of our workshops and I’ve also done with the workshops I’ve created with Complicite. I wonder if one could explore also using the audience as books. The Cantor argument depends on arranging the fractions in a big infinite two dimensional grid. Here is the script I’ve written yesterday for the TV programme I’m making:

Cantor needed to count all the fractions in a systematic way. To do this he started by arranging all the fractions in an infinite grid. The first row contained all the fractions with 1 on the bottom. [See these fractions being laid out] In the second row came all the fractions with 2 on the bottom. [Next see these fractions] Carrying on like this, the 6th row for example would contain all the fractions with 6 on the bottom.

Every fraction appears somewhere in this grid. Where’s 5/7…go to the 5th column of the 7th row. [See this being lit up] But how can we count these fractions. How can we pair up the whole numbers with this infinite grid of fractions. [Perhaps see the whole numbers appear along the top of the screen]

Cantor’s snake is the key. Imagine a line snaking back and forward diagonally through the fractions [see the line running through the fractions] then by pulling this line straight we can match up every fraction with one of the whole numbers. [Now see the fractions being pulled up by the line and aligning with the whole numbers. We can even have the whole numbers running off the screen to the left so that we gradually see more and more fractions pairing up.]

So the fractions are the same sort of infinity as the whole numbers.
(d) But then there comes a library with books labeled with infinite decimal numbers, like pi=3.14159… or e=2.71828… Each library could even have its own librarian. Almost like the librarians showing off to each other about whose library has the most books. It turns out that this librarians library has an infinity which is much bigger than the fractional library or the first infinite library. There is a nice way to show this physically as well, an exercise which I’ve done before with us and Complicite.
(e) One of the big mysteries of the twentieth century was: Is there an infinite library with strictly fewer books than the infinite decimal library but strictly larger than the infinite fractional library. The problem to sort this out was called the Continuum Hypothesis. In the middle of the twentieth century a rather surprising answer was reached: Both answers could be true. There was an entirely consistent mathematical world where there was such a library. And an equally consistent mathematical world where no such library existed. It was a discovery that was almost as shocking as the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries.

overall architecture

2008-02-04T18:18:00.001Z

Main Structure
A 'backbone' construction of dance and music will form the main thread of continuity upon which everything else will hang. This will be devised collaboratively during the two weeks’ development. Musicians and dancers will navigate a network of hexagons according to a labyrinthine scheme. Dancers will work with sound and musicians will be choreographed. Hexagons are spaces in which events take place. Events include movement patterning, rhythm/sound patterning, recitations/readings, improvisation, solos, duos, ensembles.

Singular events
Events that occur singularly, either within the continuum as it goes on, or interrupting it; or emerging/morphing from it; things that have been constructed/prepared separately then sewn in.

These are, e.g.:
Marcus events – speeches, games,? (within the flow? interruptions? happening from ‘outside’ looking in?);

the Crimson Hexagon – what will this be? (is it a ‘warp’ in time/space; things have heated up, become intensified;

focus shifts to film/camera/mirror world (in the flow?);

a pre-recorded sound event;

Musicians
The musicians so far include flautist Sarah Bennington and percussionist Scott Wilson, both very exciting young players who’ve recently graduated from The Guildhall.

I am characterising each musician (based on archetypes - not specific to the people):

flute – poet; virtuosic but subtle/delicate; sonic dancer of patterns/solos composed from syllables; exchanges flute for alto flute to become more tactile; flautist also doubles on voice and percussion; flute will need safe place(s) to reside when not being used

percussion - primordial figure with a certain mystique; keeper of the syllables, numbers, patterns; a 3D hexagon made for him that is membranes, shadows; some fixed percussion will need to be given its own space; some portable, hand held; also uses voice

Marcus
Marcus will be our mathematician-guide. We need to become clearer about the content and various modes of delivery. What are the main mathematical points or concepts? What is the main one of these? How are they delivered? To whom is he speaking? Use of other texts? Games? Motifs?

Text in general
This needs some thought and choice of sources (perhaps this is for our second meeting at The Hope)

Design
The main element of the design we will work with on this round is the blackboard floor. Kate and Carol are to discuss how this will work.

Video
During rehearsals/development Kate will capture video and stills of aspects of the working process as well as each of us talking about the nature of space in our particular medium. This video will be important for the website and DVD but can it also be used as an additional public engagement element in the form of a documentary that’s shown at the start, as a montage or other kind of presentation, separate from the flow of the piece?

Membranes (again)

2008-01-28T17:02:00.001Z

Now that I know we will have a percussionist I am starting to envisage some of the possible scenarios. One that's very strong is the idea of the silhouette of player moving inside one of Kate's translucent hexagons - or the dodecahedron of course. If the instruments could be hidden that could be interesting - the gestures would seem to be into 'sonically live' air.

Empedocles and perception

2008-01-28T17:00:00.001Z

Empedocles' (5th Century BC) theory of effluences is one of the first to speak of the distinct organs of perception. He believed that different objects could only be perceived by their respective parts (a bell ringing by the ear) because the object being perceived gave off certain effluences. These effluences were a certain size and shape and only the correct sized passageways could perceive them.

'Shibboleth'

2008-01-23T08:55:00.000Z

The other day at Tate Modern I found myself walking the entire length of Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor ('Shibboleth'). Later I looked down on the whole from the 3rd floor. It's extraordinary - I was in a sense being a good host to my sister and nephew, I wouldn't have bothered to actually walk it if they hadn't been there - however the residue of that experience clearly had a profound affect as it is something that I keep referring to in my memory.

The power of the continuous line. Infinity is indicated by the way the crack 'continues' under the partition so we can't see its end. The embodiment of the memory of physically tracing the whole line, then seeing the whole from above. What is it about the continuous line in this way that is so primal and attracting for us?

Musically: patterning that implies infinity; or 'noise' - continuous streams of data; or long,continuous melody.

scribing and scribbling notes for dancers

2008-01-21T21:09:00.000Z

Six focal points in space. Each focal point triggers a movement series. The movements are devised through assigning a gesture/action/behaviour to each of the letters of Borges' library (22 plus period and comma). Mappings: "All solid bodies are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes" (Borges). Extracting words from the story - aleph, babel, sphere, tongue - these words are inscribed through movements assembled from the assigned alphabet/lexicon of moves and placed within a hexagonal grid. The density of hexagonals creates a honeycomb labyrinth which dancers (and musicians) negotiate. Pattern becomes explicit through chants - the chanting of numerical series by dancers - given their histories this is both familiar and strange. Dancers often 'chant' numbers beneath their breathing, trying to embody and make natural that which is learnt. Augmenting uncommon letters and mapping these to points on the hexagon. Language pines for the body, its lost object. The body becomes a figure of language, its collective presencing, a pattern. Writing the alphabet left to right and right to left. Accumulation, de-accumulation, re-accumulation.

The Book of First Things

2008-01-15T08:14:00.000Z

Turning around the idea of 'the first book', is there perhaps a 'book of first things'?

triangularity

2007-12-29T20:28:00.000Z

Picking up on Marcus' mention of '1,2,3,lots...' and triangles, I woke up thinking about the triangularity we will have with our 3 dancers and 3 musicians. Three is the minimum number with which to produce a meaningful dimensionality of sound in an ensemble but with three you can start to approach a sense of 'lots'.

Put the two ensembles together and we have...lots, and with Marcus that makes... more lots. Then with mirrors and projection...lots and lots...

Amongst the ways I want to deploy the three musicians, one is to place them spaced apart on three sides of the periphery of the space, essentially forming a 'triangle'(but perhaps conceived more as a 'circle'), to get a sense of a dynamic spatialisation of the sound. Syllables flying across the space. The challenge in scoring this is that the performers need to have some independent means of rhythmic organisation if they are to produce a tight rhythmic structure without being conducted. I would also like to do this vocally, with all the performers: in this case using each performer's pulse rate to achieve multiple tempi - a real sense of lots can be achieved this way.

At the other extreme, I want to place them close together and facing in, to perform a variety of 'games' that signify dice-throwing in different ways. One of these is permutations of three points. Another is a kind of 'paper-scissors-rock' idea that produces endlessly permutating chords. These will be potentially infinite. They will just start and stop spontaneously. We can play with ways to vary and mutate them.

Other ways of conceptualising and organising 'three': two musicians, one dancer. Two dancers, one musician. Marcus on trumpet makes four musicians.

one two three...lots

2007-12-26T11:46:00.000Z

Two piles of books sit on the stage. The librarian moves over to the first pile and starts to stack them one on top of the other. He counts them as he stacks "One, two, three, lots, lots, lots, lots". When he finishes he moves over to the second pile and starts to stack these books counting as he works: "one, two, three, lots, lots, lots, lots, lots." The piles look the same size. But are they? He pushes one pile of books towards the other until they are side by side. He then counts up the sides of the piles using both hands: "one, two, three, lots, lots, lots, lots." After a while one hand runs out of books and the librarian keeps counting "lots, lots, lots" up the bigger pile. Happy that the second pile is a bigger sort of lots than the first, he picks it up and staggers through to the next hexagon.

The first book

2007-12-26T10:32:00.001Z

Dorothy asked me some time ago what I thought was the first book in the library. A strange question. I found it very difficult to answer. I wasn't sure why. Then I realised that it was because my image of the library was very continuous. It was a shape without a beginning or an end. This is a universe without a boundary. You can't hit up against a deadend. I can keep on journeying through one door into the hexagon and out the opposite door. Or climb up and down between the layers of the library. But the library isn't infinite, just without a boundary. So if I keep on journeying I will eventually come back to where I started.

But as I thought a bit more about the first book and the beginning, I realised that the story of the Library Babel mirrors the two first steps we make in navigating the world around us: to count and to explore the space around us. I believe that animals are almost programmed by evolution to be mathematicians. Counting is essential for survival. To assess whether there are more of you than there are of the enemy will inform the decision to fight or fly. To assess the the nature of the space around us allows us to judge whether we are out of range of our prey or our predator. Those that can count survive. As Plato wrote across the top of the Academy: Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

So maybe the first book contains the numbers 1, 2, 3,... and pictures of triangles (although the books have no pictures...or do they?)

Galileo's famous quote: The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.

Walter Zimmermann

2007-12-21T21:30:00.000Z

Nicolas Hodges played piano music by Walter Zimmermann at Huddersfield this year. I was struck by the way he made the piano multidimensional. His piece was based on text and there was actually a lot in common with the way I've been working the last few months. But I'm telling you about him particularly because I've just been looking at his website and there's some stuff there about the way he uses primes. Here's the
link if you want to have a look (scroll down to get past the German).

Sound File Library

2007-12-21T21:21:00.000Z

I can't put sound files directly on the blog at present but have started a library of links on the right.

Stravinsky

2007-12-19T12:41:00.000Z

I found a few quotes of Stravinsky really relevant in relation to the act of creating mathematics:

“The creator’s function is to shift the elements he receives from the imagination, for human activity must impose limits upon itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free… My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes contstraint, diminishes strength. The more contstraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”

I also like this quote from Stravinsky:

“The musician should find in mathematics a study as useful to him as the learning of another language is to a poet. Mathematics swims seductively just below the surface.”

Guess whether the following is a quote by a mathematician or a composer:

"To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations. Invention is discernment, choice. . . .The sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor."

That was Henri Poincare, one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century. Perhaps the word inventor gave it away but Stravinsky always insisted on calling himself an inventor of music rather than a composer.

Bergson, consciousness and infinity

2007-12-14T16:57:00.002Z

'It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that the absolute is synonymous with perfection. Were all the photographs of a town, taken from all possible points of view, to go on indefinitely completing one another, they would never be equivalent to the solid town in which we walk about. Were all the translations of a poem into all possible languages to add together their various shades of meaning and, correcting each other by a kind of mutual retouching, to give a more and more faithful image to the poem they translate, they would yet never succeed in rendering the inner meaning of the original. A representation taken from a certain point of view, a translation made with certain symbols, will always remain imperfect in comparison with the object of which a view had been taken, or which the symbols seek to express. But the absolute, which is the object and not its representation, the original and not its translation, is perfect, by being perfectly what it is.'

'It is doubtless for this reason that the absolute has often been identified with the infinite. Suppose that I wished to communicate to someone who did not know Greek the extraordinarily simple impression that a passage in Homer makes upon me; I should first give a translation of the lines, I should then comment on my translation, and then develop the commentary; in this way, by piling up explanation on explanation, I might approach nearer and nearer to what I wanted to express; but I should never quite reach it. When you raise your arm, you accomplish a movement of which you have, from within, a simple perception; but for me, watching it from the outside, your arm passes through one point, then through another, and between these two there will still be other points; so that, if I begin to count, the operation would go on forever. Viewed from the inside, then, an absolute is a simple thing; but looked at from the outside, that is to say, relatively to other things, it becomes, in relation to these signs which express it, the gold coin for which we never seem to be able to finish giving small change. Now, that which lends itself at the same time both to an indivisible apprehension and to inexhaustible enumeration is, by the very definition of the word, an infinite.'

from Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (translation T.E.Hulme)

Infinity Dance of Carols made me think of Whirling Dervish

2007-12-11T13:47:00.001Z

Remembered seeing Whirling Dervish in Cairo apparently Dervish means Doorway

As explained by Sufis:

At the beginning of the Sema, by holding his arms crosswise, the semazen appears to represent the number one, thus testifying to God's unity. While whirling, his arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, ready to receive God's beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth.

Quoting From Marcus
"In the essays in my addition of Labyrinths there is an essay by Borges dedicated to The Fearful Sphere of Pascal. It traces back how the sphere has been an important symbol for many philosophers. Parmenides: The divine being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere whose force is constant from the centre in any direction. The music of the spheres. Kepler's model of the universe as interconnected spheres."

Dodecahedron

2007-12-11T11:19:00.001Z

Found these images on Wikipedia am enjoying the shape of the Dodecaheron, would be interesting to make one that would be human size from some light material, plastic or hardboard that would be hinged, (maybe covered with blackboard or a wipe clean surface that could be written/projected on) that comes apart to create the 2d flat shape, joined to create the 3d shape while the performance adds the 4thd ??

Greek feet as syllables

2007-12-07T13:09:00.000Z

I have been using the archetypes of Greek poetry - called 'feet' - to define my syllables. They are defined as combinations of strong and weak beats in 2s and 3s and there are 5 of them. I have 'composed' them in different metrical versions. I numbered each set and then added my own additional archetypes of a 'dislocated pulse'; a 'dislocated anacrusis' (upbeat); a tremolo or trill as a symbol of infinity. 9 is 'unknown', a kind of wild card that I use to make an additional space or that's open to being used in different ways in different contexts. 0 is a space but where it there are infinitely repeating 0s I decided that an understated pulse would help to signify this repetition. The image is my current 'stock' of feet.

dodecahedron

2007-12-06T21:13:00.000Z

The dodecahedron has 12 faces...one for each note in the chromatic scale. Has the shape ever been used to create music. For example rolling it as a dice? Or even something more structural like using its symmetry somehow to generate lines of music?

My new book is written as 12 chapters, one chapter for each month of the year. I used a spinning dodecahedron at the top of each chapter to keep track of the chapter number.

Repeating decimals

2007-12-06T19:37:00.001Z

Here's something that I find rather amusing about fractions.

Write each fraction as a decimal:
1/1 =1.000000... Repeats in 1
1/2 =0.500000... Repeats in 1
1/3 =0.333333... Repeats in 1
1/4 =0.2500000... Repeats in 1
1/5 =0.2000000... Repeats in 1
1/6 =0.1666666... Repeats in 1
1/7 =0.142857142857142857... Repeats in 6
1/8 =0.1250000000... Repeats in 1
1/9 =0.111111111... Repeats in 1
1/10=0.1000000... Repeats in 1
1/11=0.09090909090909.... Repeats in 2
1/12=0.0833333333333... Repeats in 1
1/13=0.076923076923076923... Repeats in 6
1/14=0.0714285714285714285... Repeats in 6
1/15=0.0666666666666... Repeats in 1
1/16=0.0625000000000... Repeats in 1
1/17=0.05882352941176470588235294117647... Repeats in 16
1/18=0.055555555555... Repeats in 1
1/19=0.052631578947368421052631578947368421... Repeats in 18

The point is that if p is a prime then
1/p expressed as a decimal will have a repeating pattern of
length N where N divides p-1.

[More generally if a number n=p(1)xp(2)...xp(k) then 1/n written as a decimal will have a repeating
pattern of length N where N divides (p(1)-1)(p(2)-1)...(p(k)-1). See for example 1/14.]

The interesting question is: which primes p do you get expansion where the repeating pattern of length N is equal to (p-1), the maximum length of a repeating pattern?

In the examples above this happens for 7, 17 and our prime 19. One reason I like the 19th step. Some of the primes after this for which you get this maximal repeating pattern are: 23, 29, 47, 59, 61, 97, 109.

Gauss made the conjecture that there are infinitely many primes for which this is true.

This is still unknown. We know that if the extended Riemann Hypothesis is true, then there are infinitely many such primes.

It relates to something called Artin's conjecture. Artin was a mathematician who did his mathematics in the 20s and 30s. I rather liked the following quote I found from Artin:
"We all believe that mathematics is an art. The author of a book, the lecturer in a classroom tries to convey the structural beauty of mathematics to his readers, to his listeners. In this attempt, he must always fail. Mathematics is logical to be sure, each conclusion is drawn from previously derived statements. Yet the whole of it, the real piece of art, is not linear; worse than that, its perception should be instantaneous. We have all experienced on some rare occasions the feeling of elation in realising that we have enabled our listeners to see at a moment's glance the whole architecture and all its ramifications."

I was quite struck by this statement that mathematics was non-linear. This sense of suddenly seeing what was going on is quite true. One might proceed through a linear, logical argument. But then there is this moment when you suddenly see what's going on. Like someone switching on a light and revealing the architecture of the room. Does music have that moment? A non-linear experience amongst the very linear nature of listening to a piece of music?

2007-12-06T16:17:00.002Z

possible publicity pic (from Carols' archive)

pages and infinty quotients

2007-12-06T15:31:00.001Z

With the flute material I have started thinking in terms of 'pages' rather than books. The page torn from a book has a high 'infinity quotient' as there could be any number of other pages. A page taken at random could have any kind or quantity or arrangement of information. There are of course many precedents for this in music, starting with Cage. At this stage for me it is, as much as anything a device to keep the palette 'open' and keep the sense of exploration and responsiveness to the fore.

This opens up the idea that there could be different kinds of material generated in numerous different ways within a piece. I am currently working on pre-composed material but I want to leave space for devising material with performers within the development period, in collaboration with Carol and also with Marcus.

There is an inherent openness then to the possible order of events. The 'generic' and multiple identity of the piece becomes stronger too. Some pages are instrument-specific, some are open to being played on any instrument, others might be transcribed between instruments.

On Friday 14th I will be working with Katie and exploring the 'spaces' made by moving between different fingerings outside the normal 12-note chromatic for which the flute is designed. The timbre becomes unstable and you discover 'half dimensions' in the sound-world. Working with Katie, we will find ways of fingering and refining each gesture to reap full colouristic value from it, a process of mapping the abstract musical gestures onto the body of the flute.

the nineteenth step

2007-12-06T15:04:00.000Z

I'm really enjoying having this image on my desktop. It is the view down the stairwell from the 18th floor of NZ House. The eighteenth floor is the penthouse, where the CD launch was, and so the 'nineteenth step' is perhaps the step you'd take to see all the other floors, as in this image, or perhaps it's the balcony around the penthouse from where you can see the whole of 'the universe' of the west end of London...

Anyway, when I see this now I am thinking about the Library - it feels infinite and vertiginous.

2007-12-06T11:02:00.000Z

Infinity Dances

2007-12-06T10:36:00.000Z

I've been thinking about your provocation Dorothy regarding infinities in other forms. I took this question to Rose and we came up with revolutions, spinning and a maze. It was interesting to compare two different modes of turning. For Rose, with a classical ballet organisation of space, the pirouette and the fouette are about 'flipping' front to back, back to front, whilst keeping a sense of frontality using 'spotting' (keeping your eyes looking to the front until the last moment and swinging them around again). Interestingly, a New Zealander, Rowena Jackson holds the world record for 152 consecutive fouettes. In performing Odette or Odeile the expectation is 32 fouettes. My own experience of revolutions is in spinning within the post-tanztheatre version of this which is a kind of ecstatic turning, taking your gaze around with you until the world swings into horizontal bands of fluid colour, losing the solidity of forms to become liquescent matter, keeping the momentum of spinning going and sustaining it for as long as possible whilst feet step a constant pattern. Perhaps this distinction - between a classical and a contemporary version of revolutions - can be compared to turning the page or leafing through the book, between wakefulness and dreaming. Borges: "Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random to dream." Merging these modes of turning as a way to explore infinity we came up with a skimming turn that travels the perimeter of a triangle and resolves itself in infinite steps in a maze like pattern. The idea is that this material is constant and continuous, the turning suspending a sense of vertical and temporal divisions.

What shape is our universe

2007-12-06T07:32:00.000Z

For me one of the central themes of The Library of Babel and Borges work in general is an attempt to understand the shape of the space that we live in. One of the sentences in The Library of Babel that stuck out for me: The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of the hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. This, Borges declares, is a classic dictum about the library. It occurs at the end of the second paragraph. What I discovered yesterday whilst reading around for my History of Maths series is that this actually picks up on a quote from Pascal:Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It turns out that Pascal's original version had the extra word FEARFUL sphere.

In the essays in my addition of Labyrinths there is an essay by Borges dedicated to The Fearful Sphere of Pascal. It traces back how the sphere has been an important symbol for many philosophers. Parmenides: The divine being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere whose force is constant from the centre in any direction. The music of the spheres. Kepler's model of the universe as interconnected spheres.

But what is an infinite sphere? A sphere is a surface whose points are equidistant from one fixed point. If that distance is infinite then indeed one can take any internal point as a centre. But the interesting thing is that there is something rather unsatisfying about an infinite sphere because that surface - the circumference - is unattainble, unreachable. Even if you did reach it, the curvature of the sphere is such that it is an essentially flat surface. Think of a circle that gets bigger and bigger. The curvature of the circle gets flatter and flatter till at infinity it is really a straight line.

I think most people's perception of the shape of the universe is something like a huge infinite ball with us at the centre.

Interestingly Plato in his text Timaeus associates the dodecahedron rather than a sphere with the shape of the cosmos. The Platonic solids are the building blocks of his atomic theory:
the tetrahedron- fire
the cube - earth
the octahedron - air
the icosahedron (the most spherical of all the Platonic solids)- water.
and finally the dodecahedron is left as the shape which captures the universe.

These shapes are made from triangles, squares and pentagons. Once one gets to a hexagon, you find that the only way to put them together makes an infinite flat surface, like a honeycomb. This is if you are in a Euclidean universe. I'm intrigued to see whether you can get interesting shapes with hexagonal faces in non-Euclidean space. I'll try to chase this up.

But both the universe and the library are ultimately not believed to be infinite but rather finite but unbounded. For example the surface of a two dimensional sphere (like the surface of our earth) is finite but unbounded. Perhaps we live on the three dimensional surface of a four-dimensional sphere. Then we would actually be living on the circumference and the centre would be unattainable.

For me, the exploration of the library leads ultimately to a way to discover what sort of surface we are a living on - a 3-dimensional surface of a 4-dimensional shape. The building block of this surface is the hexagon (or rather a hexagonal box) and the way these are put together, the way they are connected gives us clues to the overall shape, a shape we can never see in its entirety. I'll post later my thoughts on what this shape might be.

This has been the fun part for me of reading the Library of Babel. It's been like a puzzle. Taking the clues that Borges gives us and then trying to find a shape that fits the clues. A lot of geometry recently has been about finding ways to describe a shape from its internal structure. How can I tell whether I'm on a sphere or a torus (a ball or a bagel) just from internal features of the surface.

By the way, I love the idea of the floor being a chalk surface that we can draw on. Also love our name: The Nineteenth Step.

Marcus.

19th step Performance Sketch 3

2007-12-04T17:24:00.002Z

Here's another idea using screens, the screens also spell out MCV an impenetrable book,
"For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators."

I was imagining the M and the C to be made from plastic or paper and could be projected onto. They could be hung or built to freestand. I also had an idea the C could be movable if it was made from polystyrene or the paper or plastic screen could move on a rail. I thought it would be interesting if the V mad a low platform that performers could get onto. I also thought Marcus could draw with his elongated chalk from the platform, onto the blackboard circle at the centre?

19th step performance sketch 2

2007-12-02T20:17:00.002Z

Been thinking about your responses, have tried to simplify and create a more fluid performance space. Just been looking out some photos for Dorothy and came across the images at the Laban in the room with mirror. Thinking about it as I write this I realise the corner would need one plane side and one mirror side. Was thinking about the idea of infinity and how the mirror does this. Also about Carols idea of Marcus describing the Maths of the space is intriguing. I was imagining the 6 corners were like nodes of the space described by the music and dance. But the nodes could also be moved so different surfaces come in the projection light they would also come in and out of focus. The shape of the space could be assembled and altered during the piece. I keep thinking of ways to work with the projected image on to the screen, a screen is a definite screen and the corner screens are really physical things that can be moved around the performance area, they become screens if they enter the light of the projected image. I think I'm trying to make the experience of viewing the projected image to have a physical presecence, although we are dealing with lots of virtual/abstract things like the projected images, maths and music.
Wondering if this may be why I'm still a bit reluctant to use hanging screens as they often seem like a facade where you have to suspend your disbelief, a I think find this a bit difficult to deal with, but I realise the performance space is very different :-)

phasing and infinity

2007-12-01T10:34:00.001Z

Have just listened - finally - to Marcus' first programme for R3 in October, in which he mentions tabla and particularly the idea of phasing cycles as well as referring to Reich and Messiaen.

With Indian music, the dissonance and 'play' in the rhythm is felt because the basic taal cycle has a strongly fixed identity and we are always waiting - though that's not what we are necessarily aware of consciously - for the downbeat of the cycles to coincide. The phasing is usually played out over a small-scale period of a few cycles - always kept within a human scale. This keeps the sense of muscularity in the rhythm and there's never the sense of a mechanistic playing out of a process. John Ball talks about the sense of a balance between stronger and weaker phases of energy in the taal cycle and about the 'space' that the taal makes in which to improvise and play with patterns. There is a sense in which this playing could go on infinitely but it was interesting when I asked John about this that he said there's a point at which you become bored and you never want to reach the stage of exhausting the possibilities. In this way we keep an 'infinity of possibilites' in front of us.

The phasing in Reich by contrast can often take a whole piece to play itself out. The phasing of identical patterns, one of which gets slightly adjusted so the two slip further apart on each repetition, leads to an appealing blurring in the surface of the music; the downbeat becomes completely obscured and the end is usually understood by the realignment of the entire cycle rather than reaching the individual 'point' of a common downbeat. Quite often the patterning (and therefore the entire piece) is understood within the first couple of cycles and it becomes a mechanical process that has to be played out. There is, of course, a halfway point when the two patterns are moving back into alignment after reaching the stage of being furthest out of phase. It is music constructed from straight-forward symmetries. Our mind perhaps reaches a perception of infinity with this music because of the long-term scale of the phasing which goes beyond something we can hold in our head.

The phasing in the piano part of Messiaen's Liturgie is far more abstract and long-term so that one will never hear an alignment; the pulse and tonality are in any case sufficiently obscured that you'd be unlikely to recognise it if it did come along. In this way it is used to signify eternal, divine infinity (and it might as well be infinite).

I think it would be a very interesting point of dialogue to talk about the methods we use in our different art forms to signify infinity. I have used 'unfinished' phasing in a way that is similar, though on a much shorter-scale, to the Messiaen to signify infinity (an example is in the string hocketing in The Structure of Memory). But there are also a number of other devices that I use, that I've begun to realise are about infinity. Almost every piece on the new CD makes some kind of allusion to infinity. Kate and I were also talking about blurring of images as one way visual art can use to create this. Now we've learned through Borges and Marcus about the various different kinds of mathematical infinity this becomes very interesting to consider.

Sketch plan of 19th step performance

2007-11-28T22:04:00.001Z

In response to Dorothy some thoughts on to how the 19th step performance could look???.
I was inspired by the performance at the ICA Ear cinema to have the audience standing at the center of everything. In a way it makes the audience a kind of Aleph.
Also been reading The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artuad The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)1958.
Thought it would be interesting to mark out with tape the torus and hexagon. Part of the hexagon floor area could be painted on with blackboard paint so Marcus could chalk on the floor (was imagining making a really long chalk holder so it could be done from standing) and dancers remove/scuff marks with their moves.
Imagined vast pile of paper (thinking of the idea of all the potential books that could be written) that could be written on that could then be hung on the opposite side of hexagon. Was thinking about Dorothys comments of the sound of paper when moved.
Marcus could be followed by a spotlight changing shape from square to circle etc. I was imagining a series of freestanding mirrors on wheels thinking of Carols post about Anne Hamiltons performance piece and the role of the mirror in the library "I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity....)that and on the opposite side I was imagining 3 pieces of gym equipment that are all about extending energy but going nowhere, all to be viewed in the mirror that detaches us from reality. I was imagining they could be used during the performance thinking about repeation and control too.
Wasn't sure where the musicians should go, thought maybe infront of screen that could be back and/or front projected.
At either ends of the hexagon, would be screens some thoughts on content ...would be great to use the software Seadragon and Photosynth demonstrated in the movie clip I posted recently. Also thinking about imagery linking patterns to control our bodies and natural movement eg tango, wrestling, football etc.. also the avatar of Marcus engaged in a Secondlife parrallel universe?
This are all just intitial ideas feel free to comment, alter etc thanks

permutating syllables on tabla

2007-11-27T07:50:00.000Z

Today I hosted a workshop for composers by our World Musician in Residence, John Ball, who plays traditional Indian music and particularly tabla. This was an excellent opportunity to investigate the rhythmic structure of Indian music. I can now see exactly why it was so relevant mathematically to Ramanujan in The Disappearing Number, but there are also some resonances with the way we are working, with syllables and permutations. Tabla players learn to articulate the rhythms verbally using syllables that each have their own character and correspond with different strokes on the drums. The syllables are ordered according to structures consisting of, commonly, 16, or 12, or 7 beats. A composition will usually consist of a selection of syllables grouped in a certain way; a performer will then improvise on those particular syllables by creating a set of, maybe 30, variations that are generated by permutating the syllables within the given phrase structure. It's a playful process of sorting through the given syllables of the composition. The continual permutation of syllables is close to a tangible mathematical process that is approached by the player with a combination of system and intuition. The apparent simplicity of this process produces a complexity of motion and phrasing that is achieved through the internal groupings (the idea of partitioning that we were exploring on 31 August is very relevant here) that play against the basic structure. This continual state of 'dissonance' between the regularity of the cycle and the irregularity of the groupings is what creates the constantly renewing surface of energy that is so characteristic of Indian music.

2007-11-26T17:28:00.002Z

Saw this today in a copy of the Western Daily Press! Not sure I totally understand how you can inadvertantly nudge the cosmos by measuring...??

Structures for Feeling

2007-11-26T11:02:00.000Z

I keep thinking about what escapes the 'scene' of the library and how to arrive at a primordial state of unbecoming which you have proposed Dorothy as a possible opening (returning my thoughts to the Circular Ruins). Janet Frame in her previously unpublished novel, Towards Another Summer writes from the perspective of Grace Cleave a shy woman writer whose tongue becomes stuck on words and on being invited to listen to a piece of music with her hosts becomes immobilised and distressingly bare. She writes about an experience of listening to Handel (whose composition she mistakes for Bach): "As each note surged within her ear gathering force and resonance like music blown into the secret spiral of a shell, Grace could feel the skin and flesh being gradually removed from her body until only the skeleton (what is a skeleton? The body framework of the body, the bony framework of the body) remained; then a new force from beyond the music, admitting itself in its perpetual disguise, set to work upon the human bones (...) Grace felt her bones changing in material, direction, shape, moulded by the music to one of those metal twists of sculpture set to revolve dancing gleaming in the wind, except that the gallery has forgotten to provide the life-wind; the sculpture is suspended immobile but for the occasional influence of heavy human breathing...Grace drew her arms close to her body, hunching them, like thin green metal frog's feet with her hands drooping webbed in front - bird, frog, woman. Leaning her head on the table she began to cry." (2007, pp188-189). This question of a framework which is a skeleton only beyond or behind which another kind of force of energy moves us interests me in the context of the collaboration. How the 'story' is but a framework for structures of feeling. Previously I have been interested in the idea of geometries as resonating certain states of feeling, how forms generate particular kinds of emotion and this seems to be what Grace is responding to in the music of Handel, a structure for feeling.

(from old blog) for Marcus Feb 2007

2007-11-23T20:28:00.002Z

You talked about understanding the geometry of Borges' library as a one-holed bagel, not two-holed. What is the difference between one-holed and two-holed bagels?

(from old blog) for Carol (2) Feb 2007

2007-11-23T20:17:00.001Z

One of the highlights of the last workshop was the way you took us into the geometry of the hexagon/library through our bodies. What struck me was how similar your way of taking the letters as a way of mapping movement is very similar to what I might try to do at the very early stages of a composition. I’m particularly keen to go back to that moment of 6 people in a room moving in their self-contained hexagons and seeing how we could develop that and similar ideas. The ‘contrapuntal’ aspect was something I’d particularly like to explore further. Like you, I’d like to acquire more bodies/players to work with so we can have that sense of multiplicity.

(from old blog) for Carol Feb 2007

2007-11-23T20:14:00.000Z

You were asking me about instruments and we started talking about flute, bass clarinet, horn/trombone, viola.I was really interested by the way you commented how different instruments have different ways of resonating and that this stimulated a train of thought in relation to dance and movement. I wonder how you’d go about exploring that?

(from old blog) for Kate Feb 2007

2007-11-23T20:10:00.001Z

One thing that always strikes me about the photos we take of a workshop or performance is how the sense of the ‘multidimensional’ is enhanced by the process of photography. I find this tantalising since I would like to be able to achieve this in performance. I’m wondering how/whether that extra dimensional ’step’ can be taken in real space/time. In a sense this is one of our big questions perhaps.

checking in/out

2007-11-23T11:40:00.000Z

On 5-6 May we were using the idea of catalogue cards for keeping track of the performers' activities. I liked that idea of using an artefact from libraries; the idea of checking in and checking out also intrigues me.

Right now in our dept we have a battle with the university library: when we move buildings next year our on-site music library will be integrated into the main library (which is called an 'information commons' and has no walls for hanging pictures, but lots of windows). The dispute is about the instrumental music, which they're refusing to take on the basis that they have no system for checking in sets of parts that belong to one 'item'. At the same time, Dave is working on a system to check out recording equipment by using barcodes and a database. So as I was out walking just now (it's a beautiful clear cold winter's day) I was - for some reason - populated by these thoughts and started to think about that idea of checking in and checking out and its potential as a playful element of theatre. In 'the aleph' and in 'john wilkins' Borges makes extraordinary lists of things to be found in the universe, a kind of catalogue of the library. I started to think about performers checking in and out of the stage area, accompanied by a text description appearing on a screen (person with no name, person with a name beginning with x, person who has climbed the three highest mountains on south of the equator, person who has dreamed the tango, person who has outrun the tortoise, etc. etc. etc); or perhaps a single character that busies him/herself with checking stuff (random objects) in and out, bizzare objects; or perhaps checking in the materials that are to be used to build the set; or all of these.

Anyway this is just to check that thought into the library that is this blog, for the dust to settle on perhaps, or for us to explore further!

virtuosic syllabing

2007-11-23T09:52:00.001Z

I've been composing flute music, working at a high-energy virtuosic solo of 2-3 mins that I want to be one of the 'spotlit' moments of the hexagonal counterpoint. The basic method of construction is around the idea of 'letters' that permutate. The letters in this case are rhythmic patterns/cells each framed within one beat (so when they are strung together it is on the grid of a consistent pulse; however the rhythms mostly are syncopated so you hardly ever hear a downbeat, obscuring the sense of a consistent pulse).

I am aiming for a sense of permutation, circling, with a continual stream of 'letters'. I want to work with different kinds of streams, different kinds of 'random' from those that are information rich to those that might consist of 3 letters like the book with "MCV" repeated over and over...perhaps. (I am still looking to explore the decimal fractions idea that Marcus has introduced, perhaps within this context; I think of them as little seed pods).

How to set up the algorithm so it produces the right kind of music has been the challenge - that is the challenge of working algorithmically. I've moved away from the notion of pitch (note names) as 'letters' as it places too much importance on pitch and leads to a bland, characterless result.

I have mapped the rhythmic 'letters' to the numbers 1-8 (so instead of 22 there are just 8) and I am using the decimal places of pi to dictate the order (so a random 'permutation'). 9 at the moment is a space, and I like the spaces, but 0 is also a space (there aren't so many zeros early on) and the choice is whether to differentiate them as spaces (e.g. 'comma' and 'full stop') or to use zero as something else, perhaps as a kind of switch for something in the system to change. The digits of pi imitate randomness and are apparently infinite; it signifies the circle and the impossibility of circumference (and perhaps the impossibility of the circumference of the sphere that is the library/universe).

When I arrived at the rhythmic 'letters' (really 'syllables') I started off by using a short pitch series that cycled through strict permutations, each pitch assigned to one rhythmic attack so the distribution depended on the number of attacks in each rhythmic syllable; the drawback with this kind of pitch system for me is that the intervallic consistency (intervals, or the tune, remain constant while the pitch changes as you start one element later each time, transposing from the new starting point) and sense of a closed system starts to limit the music once you've gone around the cycle. For several years now I've used pseudo-random numbers up to 24 (i.e. giving the quarter tonal-chromatic complement) to generate pitch (water mountain was the first piece) and I then craft that 'found material' into phrases, pieces. That doesn't mean the pitch in my music is 'random' but that I don't start with pitch/notes at the centre of the universe I am creating. Likewise with this piece, I think the process of working with 'letters' has made me really consider what might be a 'letter', or 'grain' or unit of composition in my music. So I've switched to generating the pitch with random numbers, distributing them as they come across the attacks of the rhythms, to produce the raw material.

By adding pitch to the rhythms in this way you end up with an endless variety of differently-shaped 'syllables', despite the consistency of the rhythms, and the next layer of composing is to arrange the registration of the notes (i.e. which octave to put them in) and perhaps rearrange the ordering of the pitches or even change them occasionally, file them and sand them down in terms of the way they 'speak' on the instrument and to make them practical to perform. It's almost impossible to compose and interact with material in this way without hearing a 'line' emerging (like looking at a Pollock drip painting and seeing shapes) and the longer you work with the material the more likely it is to result in a process of selection, re-ordering or complete transformation; as well as recycling material inverted or transformed some other way.

Today I'm working with the idea of weaving in a second strand to the main flute line as described above, like weaving in another dimension, so that the flute is at times playing 2 lines, making it pretty busy. My plan is that gradually the second line takes over; the second line (at present) is faster, more erratic and continuous (perhaps there is a signification of infinity here), constructed from a different set of numbers: this time filtered random numbers so that at first it's sparse but later becomes more dense; pitch taken from the first line and inverted, etc. so that it is a kind of dirty mirror of the first. Anyway, let's see how that goes.

A version of the Aleph?

2007-11-22T22:24:00.004Z

prefatory note to Strindberg's A Dream Play

2007-11-20T12:10:00.001Z

[Between now and my last post I have cycled to work (Shef) and passed the window of the Oxfam bookshop. What caught my eye was a book called 'Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook'. So I went in and came out with that + 4 others on theatre. 'Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespearean theatre as metaphor'; 'Devising Theatre: a practical and theoretical handbook', 'Public Performance in the Greek Theatre' and 'Twentieth Century Theatre - a sourcebook'. A random selection - presumably some student's cast-offs but they're all in their various ways mines for nuggets about ways of thinking about the space of the theatre and since that was what I'd just been writing I saw these books as a kind of cosmic gift (that cost £47!). Anyway I will share what nuggets I do find before donating the books back to Oxfam. :-) The first one here:]

'As he did in his previous dream play, so in this one the author has tried to imitate the disconnected but seemingly logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On an insignificant background of reality, imagination designs and embroiders novel patterns: a medley of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations.'

'The characters split, double, multiply, vanish, solidify, blur, clarify. But one consciousness reigns above them all - that of the dreamer; and before it there are no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no laws...'

I love the idea of characters that split, vanish , multiply or blur; and the 'insignificant background of reality'.

simulating set design in SL

2007-11-20T10:32:00.000Z

Now Kate can get video going in SL makes me think about the possibility of brainstorming our set design in SL. Interesting idea for public engagement also. Kate - what do you think?

Aperghis' 'seul a seuls' at Huddersfield

2007-11-20T09:18:00.000Z

On Sunday I saw an extraordinary piece of music theatre at HCMF. 'seul a seuls' There were four performers who each inhabited their own territory. Each territory was a festering and slightly dangerous vehicle for sound-making that they were partially constructing or rearranging as they went (the overall sound-world was very spectral; the whole being a collage of the various layers with the focus shifting between them as the chemistry between them changed; they also used their voices). They were gloomily lit, one sometimes using torchlight. The scene made me think of Delicatessan and The City of Lost Children, that sense of mad characters playing out their obsessions in damp,underground habitats (there was also the recurrent sound of a music box). The 4 territories were each picked up by a camera and displayed on a quarter of the screen (the screen was slightly angled, suspended in the space), one upside down. The really effective thing about the use of cameras was the way they gave views at angles that were otherwise inaccessible to the audience so the stage in a sense didn't have a front (one of the characters was largely hidden, another had her back to us at the front of the stage). The territories reminded me a little bit of the universe we built on 15th January and the way, instead of the projection being a cinematic view, it became part of the texture of the set. The set itself was partly suspended from 2 wires that crossed the stage diagonally just above head height. Someone I was with pointed out the set reminded her of Yves Tanguy but I also thought of Calder's mobiles

I was talking to Kate recently (before I saw 'seul a seuls') about the 15th Jan and wondering whether there's a way to do that in performance, whether its something that gets constructed as part of the performance, or is there all the time. Seeing the Aperhghis has given me some ideas about the way this could work. For a while I was quite keen on the idea of membranes (this was in May when I was thinking about Carol's 3D hexagon and how that could be transposed to sound) and with this set I can now see how you could suspend surfaces that can resonate.

re the aleph (from kate 13/11/07)

2007-11-19T21:02:00.000Z

Reread the aleph again and actually its is the 19th step where it is, he lies on the ground on a sack to look at it.

I like all the descriptions Borges writes as he hopelessly tries to write the description of the inconceivable universe. ....

"Alain de Lille speaks of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere" (must ask Marcus about this? How does it relate to finite yet unbounded?)

"tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persian astrolabe, saw a desk in a draw (and the hadwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved momument in Chacarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my visecra, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the invonceivable universe."

All this and that he ends with "Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting losing, through the tragic erosion of the years the features of Beatriz."

Some thoughts about Borges, Tango......

2007-11-19T10:30:00.001Z

Been reading Borges A History of Tango which is in The Total Library Non Fiction 1922-1986 came across these quotes and thoughts not sure what they have to do with 19step yet but here they are anyway

"Schopenhaur (Welt als Wille und Vorstelling I, 52) has written that music is as near to us as the world itself; without the world, without a common stock of memories summoned by language, there would be no literature, but music does not need, could exist, without the world. Music is will and passion; the old tango, as music, immediately transmits that joy of combat which Greek and German poets, long ago tried to express in words."

“We read in one of Oscar Wilde’s dialogues that music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misadventures we have never suffered and wrongs we did not commit.”

Was discussing with Dorothy idea of Tango as an example of passion and humanness being controlled and tamed through the structure of language, learning steps and routines and nostalgia rather than its original passion Borges describes it originally as The Fighting Tango, which now can only lament for what is lost…………..

Suppose been thinking about the differences between learning ballroom tango and argentine tango, sequences and patterns as opposed to intuition and improvisation and the relationship between mathematics, music and art……..

Dorothy keeps mentioning a primordial state…….do we make sense of this through patterns and geometry?

I keep thinking of the drawing exercise Carol led were we linked the hexagon to parts of the body with letters, which creates a dance sequence, the letters and geometry/numbers take over the body movements.... does it in Dorothy’s score?

Is Borges hexagonal library built to control all our physical and emotional needs?

“ To the left and right of the entrance way are two miniature rooms. One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the satisfaction of faecal necessities”

video and public engagement

2007-11-16T22:30:00.001Z

On Wednesday, Marcus and I talked about public engagement. We both had the same idea, that video could be a way to make our dialogue plainer to the audience. Fragments of us each talking about ways we think in our own medium about space, reponses to Borges and to each other, interpolated/woven into the piece or done at the beginning. We had initially thought about this in relation to Marcus anyway but it seems now to make sense that we're all on film so the film itself becomes a layer of the dialogue and enhances public engagement by making certain things concrete in terms of what we want the audience to see.

We then talked from there about how these films would become part of a website that would exist for public engagement. We could budget in a video artist (Marcus has a good contact for this) to come into rehearsals and capture moments of us speaking then edit these and create the material for us.

I also envisage that there could be fragments of the working process: close-ups of early-stage workings of dance, music, etc. to demonstrate space in a sense being 'constructed'.

Also: video will be a way for Marcus to be there later when it's not possible for him to continue performing in real time. But as well as that we were thinking about how he can develop his part and then hand it over to an 'avatar' to perform.

2007-11-16T22:09:00.000Z

(from Marcus)
while I remember...
http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/~haddock/poems/matthew.html

2007-11-16T21:15:00.000Z

This is the beginning of our blog for The Nineteenth Step project.