Dear Blog, I didn't mean to leave you so long. Here is some writing for you from the last week or so. We are going to Copenhagen for the weekend. And then I promise I will become so regular in my habits. Love Jane
3/11
Yesterday when I was in the park* with Ada, I noticed a little girl who was part of the childcare group that had just rolled up in a kinderwagon**. She had been plonked down on the side of the play equipment area, and as she couldn’t walk, that is where she remained, looking on at the other children, occasionally one noticing her and giving her some attention, but mostly looking as though she was abandoned to her own world. Apart from wondering whether her parents knew she had moments like this and whether this being left out was going to have long-term affects on her personality, I thought about myself in relation to Antje’s process. Now we are getting to the serious end of the process, there is a lot more German being spoken, particularly between Antje and Ann, the stylish dramaturge (who I look forward to seeing each day just to see what she’s wearing), and while I like to think I can kind of follow along, there are many moments where it is evident I simply do not understand. And that’s not only the language but also what the piece is trying to be. I feel a little bit like the girl on the edge of the playground.
*This is my excuse to accompany this post with these photos of us at the Hamburg Stadtpark, taken by Toby's mum.
** Kinderwagon's are contraptions for carting children around in. They are like wheelbarrows with seats. I've counted up to ten children sometimes riding on them. Those tagesmutters/vaters are strong!
28/10
Thoughts that keep persisting: While working with Antje, I keep thinking about the bluebird solo I performed at my ballet concert when I was about 12. I don’t know why it is in my head so much. I still remember the choreography. And I remember the feeling of what it was to do it. The me inside the choreography. I think I’m thinking about what the skills of a dancer are. Of how to take on someone else’s movement or someone else’s direction, and give your attention to it so you can inhabit it but also be able to suggest new possibilities. I don’t know when it was I decided I wasn’t a very good dancer. I’m pretty sure it might have happened studying at QUT. But it might have been earlier. It is not my greatest skill to fulfil someone else’s wishes. I get too caught up on the desire to please, to do it well, that it prevents me from actually being able to do this. I remember discussing this with Elizabeth, who I think is a great dancer, and being surprised by her confidence in fulfilling something of someone else’s. Not that I’m worried about this. I don’t want to be a great dancer in some one else’s work. I’m so much happier in collaboration with someone or making my own work, but mostly in collaboration.
But then thinking about choreography, I know I am so formed by working with Rosalind Crisp’s method of movement research. Sometimes I wonder if it actually serves the work I want to make because it is an attention so clearly about dancing. Of course with The Fondue Set and on my own, the emphasis has changed, but I wonder if it’s stopped me from being able to follow other methods. This is a long preamble just to state that when I see a vocabulary of choreography that is known to me, like say generic contemporary dance (which is probably no longer contemporary), I don’t know how to read it apart from how well it is done in relation to the ideal i.e. How good is the dancer. And there I have just stopped myself from writing how well it is executed because I don’t know why dancers are killing moves all over the place.
Is choreography new movement vocabulary or is it the way it’s put together? I ask that in a complete Carrie Bradshaw way to be followed by an illustrative narrative about dancers and dancing rather than love and sex. I feel myself knowing less and less about dance. Firstly I don’t know if I like it. Secondly I don’t know if it’s what I do anymore. But then I know that I do and I do. I’ve just been in three new contexts where the movement seems to be the thing that happens last.
Last night I dreamt that Lizzie and a long forgotten fellow student from QUT Lucia were making a work together, and I had suggested that they worked with a third who was Danni Coglan, the tenant of our flat in Sydney and the music curator at the Sydney Festival. Lizzie and Lucia were both upset because Danni kept bringing in moves like barrel rolls and leaps to the ground, and they felt philosophically this destroyed the work, but I kept saying they had to keep her because if they sacked her, they’d never be presented at the Festival. Also Xavier Le Roy was in the dream but he was bald with a comb over and fat and had thick glasses, and my mum was in the workshop saying can someone just tell me what he actually does.
27/10
I’m not sure how it got to be the 27th of October. A Thursday even, which is quite far into the fourth week here in Hamburg. And Berlin feels not just far away in space and time, but as though it exists as a whole other period of life. It could be that the weather turned just as we arrived in Hamburg, isolating Berlin in another season, but it also clear that Berlin is not Germany. Berlin is something different altogether. And here I am now in Germany. Or Hamburg. Or a café in Hamburg, taking a midday pause from Antje’s project and drinking yet another hot frothy coffee. A friend said to Toby recently that one of the defining features of an Australian in Berlin is that they relentlessly complain about the coffee, and to go with type, what is it about Germans and latte machiattos? Or more precisely Germans and froth and scalding heat? Donna Miranda sent me a link to Zizek talking about European ideologies and toilets. I would equally be interested in hearing what he had to say about coffee drinking habits. I sort of get the heat because the Germans are without doubt a hardy (and ungentle) people and its cold here, but taking to the already frothed milk with a heavy -handed whip of a spoon confounds me. Or to be more precise upsets me. But they are playing Nick Drake and The Cure here so I’ll stop being so Australian and get to the catch up I thought to start with.
We are in Hamburg, living in a suburb that’s quite nice but definitely not cool, after having spent two weeks sort of camping in an empty flat round the corner from the Reeperbahn, which was seedy but definitely cool. I have been in the studio with Antje and Silke for about three weeks and have been thinking a lot about dancing and my relation to it; how funny it is to have ended up in process as three women but in such a different constellation to how that is normally for me; how I have a lot to learn from Antje’s objectivity to the material she creates and her confidence if I can call it that without seeming too insecure; how much I admire her as a performer; and last but not least just how nice Antje and Silke are. Antje is so welcoming and makes me feel like I know her a lot better than I do.
I think that trying to put an image with my writing has been stopping me from writing a bit, so excuse me if it gets a bit wordy here in future.
I’m reading The Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald at the moment. The description of the bombing of Hamburg during the second world war has made me see Hamburg very differently.
