Celebrating my 50th post with a small blogging holiday...

Pina Bausch died last week. I unfortunately never got to see her perform live, but as a practitioner focused on the body in performance she has of course been a constant presence in the background of everything I have done, never understood or known except through clips on You Tube and bits and pieces read in performance books.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this but I was reading this article on her in the Guardian and it pretty much summed up for me why, in terms of my own practice (which still has a long way to go) she was important to me.
Sanjoy Roy writes: “She was real with movement, too, making you notice the panting, the sweat, the bruises. Take the finale of her Rite of Spring (the only version I know in which the choreography actually matches the force of Stravinsky's music). The stage is covered with peat, and the entire cast is smeared with soil and sweat. When the woman collapses at the end of her harrowing solo, you sense the exhaustion is real enough. Notice also the man lying behind her, his arms outstretched for the whole dance. He is still, but you feel the ache building in those arms.”
Here is the clip:


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While we’re on influences, I’ve found myself looking at a practitioner in a new light lately.

I had never considered myself to be particularly Grotowskian in my approach. I read about him extensively at the beginning stages of my MA degree and I remember reading a textbook on Grotowski that stated that the performers had to literally transcend the normal experiences of the body, which seemed to contradict my own ideas on the body in performance (I’m not big on the idea of the transcendental, unified performer). Anyway, I came across this recently, which has made me see his techniques in a new light (from ‘Fifty Key Theatre Directors’ by Shomit Mitter and Maria Shetsova:

“The purpose of performance was not to play a role but to lay bare one’s self in the presence of the audience…(Grotowski) embraced the idea of theatre as reality”
“Only by facing situations of immense physical and psychic difficulty do human beings generate the self-respect required to shed social masks and genuinely be themselves” (page 108).

And then later, in direct response to my earlier worries that a transcendental approach was alienating to the spectators:

“the sheer physical virtuosity of their performances alienated audiences by giving them an example they had no means of following…The via negativa is the application of the principle of Poor Theatre to the art of the actor. Just as Grotowski’s stage was bereft of sets and props, so also his actors had to shed their arsenal of skills and tricks so as to lay themselves bare in all humility – as simple human beings.” (Page 109)

How did I miss the obvious links to FP the first time around? I have to re-read all my Grotowski texts!

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In other news, I’m taking a short break from the blog for the time being:
1) I need to ‘regroup’ as they say (whoever ‘they’ may be) – get back into reading, watching, thinking, and let it all stew in my mind without disseminating it all into blog format (although it is incredibly helpful in ordering my thoughts, I want to give myself more time and actually take the project in a new direction rather than re-tread old ground…as well as the Grotowski revelation I’ve also found a few other things that passed me by when I first worked on the project and that I would like to investigate (including the philosopher Paul Virilio, the Japansese concept of ‘Wabi-Sabi’ and Tehching Hsieh) in order to start the developing the project in an even deeper way.
2) I need to focus some attention on some new projects that have been brewing in my head for a while now.

That’s it. Only two reasons. It’s also probably slightly due to the fact that I find this blog a massive challenge to write in and that since I am essentially talking to myself I don’t feel like I am breaking off a dialogue that can’t be continued outside of cyberspace.

I’ll write again
a) If and when I have news regarding the project (i.e. a performance coming up, or a breakthrough in the direction of the project)
b) Possibly if I find a nice video I want to upload onto the blog (relevant ones, I promise).

But until then, see you soon, folks!

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P.S. I sometimes wonder if the blog is a good thing… am I running the artistic illusion by talking about, dissecting and documenting everything? Am I making it too accessible, ruining the mystery? And then I think: I hope I am! What makes me think I and my work are so sacred that they can’t be touched or accessed by other people? Why create an ‘artwork’ where the process is invisible, as if the performance just appeared out of the clear blue sky?