Making Form

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.

Another website and interesting video

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.

Dodecahedron

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 ??

19th step Performance Sketch 3

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?

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...??

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

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”