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

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.

Primordial Space-Time

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.

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

hello this is my favourite any thoughts....

Aperghis' 'seul a seuls' at Huddersfield

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.