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

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 Four, developing each strand

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.

A version of the Aleph?

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.