Inclusive Improv

Ensemble Physical Theatre Group

Monday 24th May 2010

Part of the [[events:2010-05-22_wofs-2010|Week of Speakers 2010]]

Event

This open workshop (2.30pm on Monday 24 May 2010, Phipps Hall) is the penultimate event in a collaborative project between players of the Inclusive Improv and performers of the Ensemble Physical Theatre Group.

You are invited to come to this session both to see what we have been working on and, if you so wish, to join in with some structured improvisations -> bring your instrument(s) or suitable attire for if you do want to play, but there is absolutely no obligation to do so!

The sessions leading up to this event have been used to find common ground between improvised music/sound/noise making, and improvised dance/drama/movement,
to establish some shared vocabulary for communication - both within performance and about it,
and, as an inevitable bi-product of the process, to better understand the inter-relationships of these two forms of performance art.

Workshop

working with some identified methods/relationships/structural ideas:

Development

Rehearsal 29th April

with 4 from ii + 2 from eptg

Rehearsal 6th May

with 2 from ii and 4 from eptg

Rehearsal 12 May

text response to the previous session:

(This is in no way a script.
Use, abuse, use as kick off, or ignore.
I see them as voices on speakers, either pre-rec or live into mic or
live inside or out the space.)

At the moment this is our core text for deconstruction and elimination:

I am Loki
I know by heart the forms of southern clouds at dawn April 30th four thousand B.C, and can compare them in my memory to mottled streaks on a book in Flemish binding I saw only once and to every fleck of foam raised by an oar on the Black Sea the night before the great uprising…..
I can recount each hair of the stormy mane of any horse in Svadilfari's wild, white herd, paint each flame of a changing fire and its innumerable ashes after and the many faces of a dead man through his long wake on the pyre at Ragnarok. I know how many stars there are in all the universe. How many clocks. I count them every day, and all the atoms of all the seas and all the flakes of summer snow and grains of winter sand. I make the world in words with all its architectures, quarrels, terrors of its narratives, uproars of emperors and seas, its minerals and birds and fish, its algebra and fire, its theological and metaphysical and lyrical convulsions. And what does my body say to it all? Oh. Dance. Or destroy. Shapeshifting, mirror in a mirror in a mirror in a mirror, I do both.
I am Loki.

“It is possible – likely indeed – that all religions, all mores, arts and sciences, all ideas, conversations, theories, philosophies, logic and imaginings, all thoughts in fact, (all facts in fact) and even objects and persons, are completely temporary manifestations of illusion and as evanescent as a coloured aura generated by the brain.” (Dorris)

“all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.” (Borges)

The text we used today to improvise to was mainly by Jorge Luis Borges, from a short story called Funes the Memorious. Funes falls from his horse and strikes his head, and from then on his brain forgets nothing – not the slightest detail.

This gift and curse of naming everything with language out of the primordial “silence” (actually the sound of improvisation itself – chaos raveling and unraveling) was my idea for text as a component play-thing.

It reminded me of my idea about Loki the Trickster God who stole things from the chief gods to give to mankind, like Prometheus, and actually caused their downfall.

Rehearsal 20 May

with 4 from ii:

Sam Freeman (amplified acoustic guitar), Rich Glover (piano), Scott Hewitt (amplified laptop with live ChucK coding) and Scott McLaughlin (cello)

six cuts from rough stereo recording (microphone was too close to the guitar amp):

:!: mp3s to be uploaded :!: