PREPARED SPACE
note: Jennifer Lacey has been letting participants in her workshops "prepare" each other for dancing through touch/manipulation and sound/language, possibly using found material as props. After absorbing a usually overwhelming quantity of impressions (physical and otherwise), the person brings their "prepared body" into movement. Lacey's pun is that the body is "préparé" like a steak tartare which the waiter will mix for you in your plate.
Such a method to fabricate a body reminds of Body-Mind Centering as well as Skinner releasing Technique in its making of complexes of information for physical organisation, albeit in a wilder form.
This practice also connects to Lacey's love for Lygia Clark's later work, which found a beautiful form in the performance Soins Esthétiques (I heart Lygia Clark), 2010.
NOTES by Alice Martucci
My experience is that this score entails a shifting in the concept of time or cause and effect.
If we are preparing the space we act very much in the present, following the hints we perceive in the space and in the group, but we do it to facilitate an unknown dance to happen in the future. We work to create the best environment for a very particular dance to happen, but we have no idea about how the dance will look like and we don’t have a plan for the preparation either.
There is an intention of starting something, like provoking a movement, a shift, that will settle in the space to be found by the dancing group. It’s a work of intuition, of following the leads that emerge between us without necessarily seeing the whole picture, in the sense that we may not understand what we have been doing to the room until we see the dance.
If we are dancing in the prepared space we are also very much in the present of the dance, but with antennae ready to catch the signs and the paths that the past actions have left in the room. There is an intention to be open to receive informations we don’t fully understand and to commit to be as clear an truthful as possible to something ungraspable. It’s like discovering the dance step by step, being held and guided by the space, listening with the whole body and going through the dance with a certainty that is not the contrary of doubt but its companion. As well as the dance requires an individual commitment, it’s also the result of the whole group and therefore we dancers need to constantly check in with each other: the guidances to fulfill the dance come from everywhere.
We imagine forward in preparing, we imagine back in dancing, we imagine together and side by side. The imagination expands the times we are present to. It's not an imagination that dictates what we do, in fact it works through movements and actions, to then include every layer of our being if we allow it to.
We found ourselves in a place that is not a measurable space, in a time that is not clock-time. It’s not a sequence is a gathering: collecting actions in a present that contains diverse pasts and futures.
PREPARED SPACE
note: Jennifer Lacey has been letting participants in her workshops "prepare" each other for dancing through touch/manipulation and sound/language, possibly using found material as props. After absorbing a usually overwhelming quantity of impressions (physical and otherwise), the person brings their "prepared body" into movement. Lacey's pun is that the body is "préparé" like a steak tartare which the waiter will mix for you in your plate.
Such a method to fabricate a body reminds of Body-Mind Centering as well as Skinner releasing Technique in its making of complexes of information for physical organisation, albeit in a wilder form.
This practice also connects to Lacey's love for Lygia Clark's later work, which found a beautiful form in the performance Soins Esthétiques (I heart Lygia Clark), 2010.
NOTES by Alice Martucci
My experience is that this score entails a shifting in the concept of time or cause and effect.
If we are preparing the space we act very much in the present, following the hints we perceive in the space and in the group, but we do it to facilitate an unknown dance to happen in the future. We work to create the best environment for a very particular dance to happen, but we have no idea about how the dance will look like and we don’t have a plan for the preparation either.
There is an intention of starting something, like provoking a movement, a shift, that will settle in the space to be found by the dancing group. It’s a work of intuition, of following the leads that emerge between us without necessarily seeing the whole picture, in the sense that we may not understand what we have been doing to the room until we see the dance.
If we are dancing in the prepared space we are also very much in the present of the dance, but with antennae ready to catch the signs and the paths that the past actions have left in the room. There is an intention to be open to receive informations we don’t fully understand and to commit to be as clear an truthful as possible to something ungraspable. It’s like discovering the dance step by step, being held and guided by the space, listening with the whole body and going through the dance with a certainty that is not the contrary of doubt but its companion. As well as the dance requires an individual commitment, it’s also the result of the whole group and therefore we dancers need to constantly check in with each other: the guidances to fulfill the dance come from everywhere.
We imagine forward in preparing, we imagine back in dancing, we imagine together and side by side. The imagination expands the times we are present to. It's not an imagination that dictates what we do, in fact it works through movements and actions, to then include every layer of our being if we allow it to.
We found ourselves in a place that is not a measurable space, in a time that is not clock-time. It’s not a sequence is a gathering: collecting actions in a present that contains diverse pasts and futures.