Images and my initial response from The Cove performance.
I eventually got to see the full show at the Forum in Derry. With apprehensions about what the 'dance' would become and my hang-ups about dance-ily dance I was feeling slightly sick - what was the final result of all this work and what would my platform be used within???
All these feeling melted away seeing the platform again. I've not see it since the rehearsal workshop studios. It looked great in it's initial configuration with the seating surrounding all four sides of the stage. This made it much more multidimensional and gave the audience a greater and less passive role - also confounding (if they stayed in their seat) any sense of an official or preferred viewpoint. It also echoed strongly the cove where one could take many vantage points down into it. At this show it's a full house - I count well over a 100 people with some standing. I chose to remain standing and free to circulate around the performance.
The trust and understandings Steve and I had developed began to unfold as the performance began - the dance-ily ness did not manifest and the connections with the cove, our activities, my art practice - our shared and contended beliefs all started to mix and meld in an amazing hour of performance and installation. The dancers - all women with a clear passion for movement and ideas - not skinny athletic 'body line' dancers with just abstract technique and form - but beautiful and human. And facial expression - smiles - eye contact - human contact.
The performance moved from referential part-realistic to strange and mutated - social, organic, nature and human - rational structure to irrational expansion and contraction. Beautiful, deep, complex layered - non-linear processes - multiplicity and singularity, deviation, improvisation, then tight and precise. Otherworldly at times becoming something other and then prosaic and grounded in a task and mindfullness. Deleuzian in many ways - in terms of creative expansive philosophy through - and as - a creative form. This was underpinned by the music and lighting - each developing multiplicity and repetition and an attendant breakdown and reconnection with those mutating structures.
The platform goes through stages of configuration and un-configuration - inventive use and imaginative micro narratives - then it processionally moves towards a final configuration of a unified structure - glowing in the light. It's glacial maybe - or at least the performance of it connects with geological time linking it and present time. The colour and material forms with their surface scratches and scrapes definitely had something of the folds of lava and weathering of time and nature that the rock formations surrounding the cove has. Perhaps this is where the deep embodied aesthetics and kinaesthetic derive from - bringing our actions into a continuum with deep time and place. I like that idea: making tea on a stove in a cove implicitly connecting with the movement of the tectonic plates while singing 'a message for you rudy'. dan
