music music music

Its been a most beautiful autumn weekend in Berlin. Today we are doing shifts at the Hamburger Bahnhof (one of us there, one of us with Ada... Ada is going to miss her dose of Joseph Beuys this week), and yesterday we did not very much except cycle round town, buy some things at Muji, have an accidentally long afternoon nap, and I don't want to keep banging on about Fräulein Frost but we ended up there again in the late afternoon. It seems on a sunny day in Berlin that ice cream was only invented yesterday and people still can't get over the genius of it. The visit to Fräulein Frost ties in nicely with what I was thinking about to write anyway, because not only was the rhabarber back, but they were playing the State I Am In by Belle & Sebastian, which is (to be euro english about it) a super nice way to order icecream.

I was thinking about how music seems different when you travel. Perhaps you are more alert in general so incidental music in shops seems less incidental and more like a soundtrack. I remember hearing Elliott Smith in a cafe on my first day in New York in 2005 and don't think there could have been a better way to hear it (though that scene in the Royal Tennenbaums is also pretty good). Here, despite the fact I've been in a dance studio for much of the time, I am listening to much less music than I would normally. The stereo in the studio with Wendy didn't work, and at Matchpoint talking dominated, and really no one dances to music anymore anyway. There have been two moments that stuck out, and both seemed like gifts to me when I was feeling anxious/moody/frustrated/unhappy/bored with my artistic abilities.

The first was at Tanzfabrik where I took a break to go to the bathroom and heard Bill Callahan's Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle blaring out from another studio. We listened to this album so much in Sydney before we left that I took a little moment to sit outside the studio to think about home and what it is I'm doing here. The other was during Matchpoint after a quite intensive yoga session, leading into another session of talking, when Matan for some reason plugged his ipod in and played Moon Pix by Cat Power. I have listened to Cat Power pretty much everyday since Ada was born as The Greatest is one of our go-to go to sleep albums, and despite this, I have never tired of hearing it, and I'm still not entirely sure what the songs are about. But Moon Pix is my favourite album and is the record I listened to over and over when I first started hiring Omeo dance studio and attempted to make dance work that would change the world.  I was trying to be intense back then. Now I'm wondering why I always want to make a joke. If I could make a piece a quarter as good as Metal Heart I'd be happy. And I was happy and revived to hear it again on this day.

I often think about using music/songs in dance as cheating, because music is so persuasive. The Fondue Set/I have certainly done it but always with some sort of reference to it inside the work. I tried so hard in my latest solo to find a reason to include Phil Collin's 'You Know I Love You' (with me singing it and all) because I wanted to use the pathos, but it never worked. I ended up with Rick Astley. I think using Rick Astley is probably working against a piece being good. Next year, I'm working with Gail (a sound artist) on a project specifically about music and dance. This I hope will challenge some of my assumptions.