Questions of the work of the week stay in our minds: is it possible to create a collage of the material that we’ve been working on? Fusion is not the same as coexistence, but does it become fusion because the space is shared? Where is performance happening in everyday life? Where does the stage dissolves into the city? How much time does it take the body to assimilate certain movements, characteristics, rhythms, and influences that it gets in its immediate environment?

… Feierabend…

What can we do in Flensburg? The urban myth (according to some Flensburgers) is that the life of the city is made mostly out of the students. However, now everyone is on summer holidays, Pech gehabt! Buuuuut, somewhere, in a corner of the city centre, as we go for a Feierabend Bier, we hear a voice, no source found, “Tomorrow there’s party, a house DJ comes to play here…” Alright, see you tomorrow!

Friday, 28.07.2023

House party in the center Kiosk: We dance in this mini space, we meet new people, dance together, flame the mini “dancefloor” with our footwork: work never ends! People watch, dance with us, the DJ gets hyped and plays more: people join, pass by, the flow of our bodies invites people to move inside and outside the space. As the night goes by, and the alcohol flows into people bloodstream the atmosphere gets a bit too aggressive and masculinised for our safety feeling, we say bye, thanks for the music, ciao! But, we do want to keep on moving: what should we do….?

Then we hear it… Not very clear, so we stop talking and start listening: the beat of the drum, a clear rhythm inviting us to dance. Without thinking or talking to each other, we ran towards the sound, there was nothing more logical to do than that. And there they were: a crew of around 10 people, playing and singing at the point of the harbour. When they saw us come in and dance, they didn’t stop, they played and singed louder and welcomed us to their circle. It seemed that we unlocked a series of events to happen: more people who were around the harbour joined the celebration, and they shared their dancing with us, holding hands and stepping together. In this night, we found a group of people who shared our understanding and ways of being and coexisting, even when we don’t speak the same language. The week unfolds into rehearsals taking place outside on the harbour space, if the weather allows it – summer here seems to be non-existent this year. What is people’s reaction to our dancing outside? Will they want to join us? Will they just look? Will they complain? Will they ignore us? We continue exploring our choreographic scores with the footwork material we had so far, we look how to move the space as we change fronts and diagonals, creating a swarm that synchronizes and desynchronises as we play with the material rhythmically and spatially.

https://vimeo.com/863764258/53458618bd

This week we notice more and more how our own consolidated dance styles clash together in the studio, and we wonder constantly if we let them coexist or if we try to adapt our bodies to each one of them. We keep on practicing rhythmical compositions all together and wonder about our individual and collective silences and how we use them. How are we using sound and our voices to invite new layers of meaning in the space. We have random conversations about folk dances in different places and how they slowly become more “pop” to be able to survive modernisation and the disappearance of the rituals where they’re practiced. We talked about our experience with the group of people we met, and their being a group composed by only male. What does it mean to us to identify as a female, or to want to connect to our feminine side, as we experience life in the outsideworld and how can we feel safe in these changing spaces? We keep on exchanging practices and interests with our bodies in the studio: flamenco, passing through, floorwork and the rhythms of our new friends on the harbour pop up as we practice. These questions don’t leave our minds, all the information of this time is gathering and layering in our minds and our bodies as the time passes.

Important Note: COWS appear in the city and our imaginary.

On the full moon night, we go back to the harbour to witness the nature of this light, and we meet them again, this time we talk and get to know each other through words. We make a new appointment for dancing and playing, and we make a stop to say hello and thank you to the moon before we go back home. The week is charged, we make a lot and plan a lot too. We wonder how to invite sudden changes in the space, and we practice through improvisation what it means to contrast and oppose actions done by ourselves and the others. We have so much material in our bodies and fantasies that we need to create a little map/pool to draw from, with it we might have more clarity of what tools we are using to compose. We’re looking forward to tomorrow, we will go to the island of Sylt.

Our task for this little trip is to observe rhythm, in all imaginable ways: visual, auditive, metaphysical. How is rhythm composed in the environment, and by what? How does the rhythm of nature oppose, supports, or compliments the rhythm of the city? How will we be able to translate this into our voices and bodies? Some of the questions for this day: how do you perceive the sounds surrounding you? How do you perceive movement around you? How do you understand synchronicity? What kind of patterns do you notice around you? Document by sound or video recording or photographing something that you see in the island that calls your attention regarding rhythm.

The most relevant documentation to share about his is a sound recording which unfortunately cannot be uploaded into this page, for this reason we leave then, only the following Foto.

The next day we come together in the studio, and we start to compose images, sound and movement based on our practice of the day before. This shall become in the future a steady practice: learn how to read an environment in a certain way and transform it to your own visual and auditive language. Later, let other people translate what they see and hear with their voice and their bodies. How can we create a choreographic structure based on this listening practice?

Intense Week 3 is finished… Hopefully…