January 23rd, 2012

I received emails from Thierry and Christine this morning that we would be back at the studio on Schmidtstrasse today.

Bill has decided to change the program and put a piece called Hole in the Head on instead of The The, Duo and Nuo.

This means re-configuring the Depot.

The program as it stand now will be Hole in the Head and Point of View (Stellentstellen).
So we had class at the studio. There was a beautiful young dancer named Sally in class. She trained at Lines and she has really good energy. I look forward to seeing her tomorrow.

After class the company got to work on getting Hole back and those who weren't in Hole got to work on their tangles for Stellen.

I didn't bring lunch stuff so I went to the Italian place called Nadine's which is across the street from the studio. Much of the company was there because they didn't bring food due to the location change. It was a nice family meal with Katja, Jone, Josh, Silas (from Cunningham), Cyril, Thierry, Bill, Freya and me.

It was nice to sit down and have a meal together.

After lunch people got back to work and Bill worked with Cyril and Jone on their snapping and mapping duet out of which came a really great triangulation spacial exercise that started with bill, Cyril and Jone. Then Bill had three other dancer try it to find out what question he was really asking. It was a triangulation framing thing with two "framers" or "guards" framing another person doing a tangle. The framers have to be in agreement in facing and the tangle person can change the subject from them to the framers by removing them self and going somewhere outside the frame, or not.

Then he tried it with three framer on one tangle and it didn't really work.

Then he added two more groups of three working independently in the space plus Yasu as sort of an interruption who no one was triangulating off of but who was triangulating himself off of the others.

It really worked, especially from up and away. I went up onto the landing of the steps into the studio to get some distance. it seemed to create an...algorithm I guess?

All the while the dancers questioned Bill and the exercise not to be difficult but to dig deeper. It became about relationships. geometric, human and metaphysical.

While I was up on the stairs I could see that this related perfectly to the piece but couldn't put my finger on how. Then Bill said, "It's just the same as the point to point work that we were doing but on a larger scale." Ta dah!

OH!

Thom Willems, the composer showed up today! So exciting. To be in the room while Bill and he are composing was phphphphphphphphphphenomenal.

I don't know if it's what they'll end up with but Thom was playing this sound. At first it was barely noticeable but then you realized that it was going on. It seemed like a memory that kept coming back again and again.

Near the end Bill said "The music sounds cool." and Thom said "Yeah, I was seeing how many ways you can play the same sound."

Another great day.