Sunday 5 August 2012

Sunday hard work




Day One – Sunday 5 August

Day One – Sunday 5 August

I arrive in Eastleigh with a fuzzy head after a party in Brighton. Aurora flies in from Poland with a slipped Disc, leaving her kids behind for 5 weeks. Alex flies in from Costa Rica with Andrea and little Liuba, jetlagged and with bad knees. Janusz arrives after a 3am start from Posnan with a beer in one hand,  a fag and a packet of crisps in the other. Nik  arrives looking exactly like he did 2 years ago on our US tour. Dom arrives clutching a coffee on one hand and a revolting looking high energy drink in the other. Nigel and Elaine – our new intern – have brought a van load of stuff down from my warehouse in Sheffield and slept over night in Eastleigh to help us out today .

We lay two dance floors, build a wall, paint it white, upload graphic software, stabilise a piano, construct a sound system, project images, set up video cameras, hang costumes, stack boxes, hide flight cases, open a bottle of wine, collapse after 12 hours of sorting and fiddling and fixing and moving stuff around. I clean the floor last thing at night when everyone has gone to bed. It's a ritual that I have repeated for 20 years that marks our arrival in an empty space that we will fill and erase and refill and repaint and re-order and wash down again and again, until something sticks.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Facilitation Research Week Leeds March 5-10 2012

MOTHERLAND is VDT's major project for 2012/13. It is a middle scale production offered in conjunction with innovative programme of events, discussions, practical workshops and classes, civic and cultural debates curated by VDT around issues raised in the work. VDT will work in advance with host venue managers and education / outreach gatekeepers to programme a series of events that will engage diverse audiences and encourage participation by those who may not usually attend ‘ contemporary dance’ at their local venue. From 5-9 March as part of Charlotte's curated programme JUNCTURE at Yorkshire Dance - http://www.juncturedance.com - the cast of Motherland worked with Charlotte and Dramaturg Ruth Ben Tovim all week to look at how we might devise curated events on tour that performers can have ownership and be responsible for. Questions we asked were -


How to devise participation work?
How to research engagement?
How to invite performers to facilitate curated events on tour?
What thoughts and approaches and ideas would we like to share?
How to move away from what we already know to find new languages to articulate our practice?
How does collaboration across disciplines shift our own practice?
Can we build a list of core principles for this work?
How to invite people in as creative equals - not us as 'masters' or 'teachers'?
What is our enquiry - for the production? For the curated events on tour?