Revealing Process 29th January 2012

Please come to ’Revealing Process’ - an exchange of talking and live performance. We will share some of our findings from my recent residency ’Embodied Drawing’ at The Point, Eastleigh. My hope is that an interactive and exciting dancing, conversation will unfold about process, about touch and drawing and movement and sound. About relationship. About traces and journeys, imprint and history.  

image by Kimbal Bumstead

I will be joined by some of the wonderful artists I have been working with – Jennifer-Lynn Crawford, Thomas Goodwin, Janine Harrington, Sara Popowa and Tom Spencer. Kimbal Bumstead, Rohanna Eade and Nick Keegan will be with us more in spirit – physical bodies spanning Devon to Edinburgh to Amsterdam…!

Sunday 29th January 4-6pm,

Roof Top Studio, Siobhan Davies Studios,

85 St George’s Road, London, SE1 (closest tube, Elephant and Castle)

Free for Patrons of Charlotte Spencer Projects

£5 (concs £4) Includes a glass of wine

Places MUST be reserved in advance via email to charlottespencer22@gmail.com (payment on the door) so that I know how much wine to buy and how many people to expect!

This event is also a celebration of my Patrons Scheme – to thank all of my Patrons for their continued support and generosity and to provide a chance to chat and meet over a glass of wine! 

I look forward to seeing you there!

warm wishes

Charlotte x

Embodied drawing

Using drawing as both a process and a product of sensory contact in dance, Kimbal and I start to work. How can we use drawing processes to map the embodied nature of our everday human interactions, and how can we translate this into dance?

By walking, dancing, and drawing we aim to produce a body of work which will take the form as both performance and a series of drawings. Last wednesday we mapped and walked and lost ourselves on Hackney marshes. A series of preliminary touch drawings followed our discussion.

Kim moving Charlotte's hand

Touch, movement and drawing

I am starting to prepare for my next residency at The Point, Eastleigh, at the beginning of January 2012. I plan the time to be a laboratory of experiments working in collaboration with visual artist, Kimbal Bumstead, and a collection of dancers and sound artists. We will look closely at 3 shared research strands: touch; movement and drawing; and the interplay between process and product.

As a central point of departure, we plan to use a touch based improvisation tool ‘sacrum dances’ that I first came into contact with through working with choreographer, Rosemary Lee in 2010, and then adapted and used extensively during the process of creation of The Nature of Things.  I have been wondering why these dances are so resonant. What is it about them that time and time again bring dances that are so rich both to witness and to be inside? On the train to London one Friday last month to meet with Kimbal, and having just read a fantastic article by Gill Clarke ‘Mind as in Motion’ and re-visited the notes I made during rehearsals this summer in Hamburg, something clicked – something about touch which I will come to in a moment.

Sacrum dancing operates primarily in a felt space. It is a process and therefore draws our attention to the nature of process itself. In moving from process to product, by finding a way to create drawings through these intimate touch dances, work in a new medium unfolds. The drawings that are made during these experiments are equally both process and product, and thus, can be considered artefacts/works in their own right. Such drawings might then be used to create new choreographic and visual art work, in an environment where the creative decisions are informed by touch – felt experiences and are handled through intellectual (more cerebral) processes. In this way, we integrate a variety of mental spaces – noticing how our intellectual decision making is more embodied, more lived, more intuitive.

Having recently visited Siobhan Davies Commissions exhibition at The Bargehouse on the Southbank, I was delighted and excited to observe a likeness in this interplay between process and product, between movement, choreography and drawing that was shared in the work that Sarah Warsop and Tracy Rowledge produced.

Touch is a sensory experience. The vast number of nerve endings in our hands enable us to read and give information far more immediately and accurately than when a directing, primarily intellectual space intervenes. Touch is intimate and personal and is therefore a potent mechanism for bringing us into a different relationship with our physical/sensory experience(s) and, as social entities, therefore potentially closer to others. This micropolitical awareness changes us and our relationships with people and our environment. It changes the people we touch in our professional and personal lives. In turn, it changes the people that they touch from the change in our touch and so it ripples outwards into the world through an endless chain of intimate interactions. In this way there is huge value and potential contribution that movement/ embodied knowledge can make to broader social and environmental concerns. This touch puts us, our audience and our participants in a more receptive and responsive space to be able to make radical changes in our lives.

This research is about people, journeys and tracing, about using touch to tease out greater connectivity between different brain centres – both intuitive and intellectual spaces. It will examine how we can use touch and drawing as a way of capturing the sensitivity of intuitive interaction between dancing bodies without undermining the intellectual brain centre. Our aim is to produce rich food for further choreographic, visual and performance art work that emerges from a more tactile way of working, re-affirming the importance of touch, movement, eye/hand practices to enable fuller integration of multiple mental spaces.

Start again…

sharing some notes from residencies at K3, Hamburg and Le Pacifique |CDC, Grenoble, July 2011:

landing

An ocean of landing

helped into landing

and then rising

the ocean moving into the distance

is this how dying looks?

 

about rising

how can we melt into the sky?

into flight

pushing, reaching

flow moving upwards

brimming over

so much up that the body can’t 

contain it anymore

and so you go up

 

each landing is as if it’s the only one

and once you have become the ground you are born again so that you can land again.

sharing energy to make more

landing

decaying

becoming the ground

 

How much down is there in going up?

How much sky in the ground?

How polar/dual, how whole is this rising, landing, taking off, becoming the ground thing?

 

keeping going, keep on being

start again

 

i keep going

we keep being

 

listening

the world is hanging

we are just drawing it down into a plane of ‘now time’, ‘today time’

 

what is the nature of your relationship?

what happens?

start again

 

what is it that makes these sacrum dances so special?

over-whelming feeling from witnessing/watching/participating – dancing is good for people. that’s enough. 

start again

 

what about seeing time as circles and not lines? re-gathering my thinking feeling choreographic mind

It is time that I write something new: to clarify my thoughts; to draw together strands/scraps of ideas that are disparate in my brain, but are in fact inter-connected and close knit in their roots; to keep this blog alive! I have been reluctant to write because I am in re-gathering, re-nourishing internal phase of the creative cycle, rather than outward, output phase. I still don’t feel that I have drawn clear conclusions from the research that I carried out during my residency times in Hamburg and Grenoble this summer. But I know that we embarked on a journey that informs and shapes how I am thinking feeling now, and how the next pieces of work will unfold.

I notice that I am currently hungry to see work, and have the time and head space for it (when I am in the midst of rehearsal period, I don’t tend to have the time or inclination to see other work – it is too distracting). And so now I am relishing in my enthusiasm to see as much as possible – dance, art, music, gigs. what are people making at the moment? what are they busy with? what speaks to me?

I find myself re-visiting some of the materials that I read when I was working on Mountain Dialogues in 2010. Especially some of Jeanette Winterson’s writings on time. (Which are wonderful) If you haven’t discovered her prose, then you should. My perception on time and how I live my time is changed a little (if only in terms of perception) having read ‘Pip pip – a sideways look at time’ this summer in Holland and Spain. Jay Griffiths encourages us to disband the rigid boxes that humans have created to divide up time. They are indeed arbitrary, uncreative and rather lifeless concepts imposed by western capitalist culture, directing time as a linear rather than a circular path. We have become so tied up with efficiency, productivity, speed, progress – but who’s progress is it and at what cost? what about child time? what about play time? what about wasted time? what about glacial time? what about seeing time as circles and not lines?what about time just to notice, to listen?

Being involved in artistic practice somehow gives me the luxurious license to spend time thinking about this. spend time experiencing it – not even necessarily thinking about it. I can justify my need to go walking by the sea, to be in empty space, to read, meet friends for interesting conversations, have time for reflection, for thinking: it all feeds the work. It’s true, it does. But only because it feeds me. And don’t all people need this kind of feeding? Not just artists.

I am explicitly making time for this phase now. It goes against my social conditioning. I fight a little bit against a moral feeling that I am being lazy, or that I am only in this more quiet, more feeding place because I don’t have any other work (if i was more successful – a ‘better’ artist – a ‘proper’ artist i would be busy making all the time). But then i remind myself that this more spacious, less boxed in time is essential. that there wouldn’t be any meaningful art work to make if there wasn’t the opportunity for this phase. this is incubation time for the next ideas to begin the process of revealing themselves – and not just because i have to write funding proposals and squeeze them into existence. proposal writing is not so much a creative process.

The performance at Bold Tendencies

Last Saturday Jennifer, Tristan, Sara and I gathered in Peckham at this old multi-story carpark turned into very cool and trendy Art space – Bold Tendencies. We had been invited by the Elephant and the Nun festival to create a performance there. We had a wonderful few hours experimenting, sharing, creating. The lovely, Thomas Goodwin came and joined in as well. It was an inspiring space to be in, to dance in. Tristan created the perfect sound world to carry us into the sky (shame you can’t hear it on the photos…! That’s when the videos come in handy – and they are coming soon…!)

So for now, here are a select few photos taken by Andrew Clarke and edited by Sara Popowa. More in the Gallery page if you want to look.

Performance this Saturday 13th August

Jennifer-Lynn Crawford and I will be performing THIS Saturday 13th August. At: Bold Tendencies, 95A Rye Lane, Peckham 7-9pm Free but ticketed. As part of: The Elephant and the Nun Festival. We will be dancing ‘Cycle Stories‘ a dance that is about me and about Jennifer and about you and your dreams. You can dance too. That would be lovely! Come!

Bold Tendencies is an Sculpture park in a disused car park in Peckham. The current exhibition is running until the end of September.

Charlotte and Jennifer

Cycle Stories: ‘I come from/I am from…’ Day 12

Jennifer: ‘I come from a rather dirty floor.  I come from several dirty floors in fact, my life is a series of floors.  I come from a place of floors being important.  I come from my father hoovering religiously each Sunday.  I come from having to wear socks all the time lest my foot oil disturb the sanctity of the carpet.  I come from important floors.  I am from floors that are disagreeable, hard, cold and brook no resistance.  I come from floors that seem to be telling me the ground is not a friendly surface.  I come from an unfriendly ground and so then I must inquire how that is for me.  I come from leading myself into questions like this all too often.  I come from turning myself in circles because I feel I might get somewhere this time around.  I come from a recognition of that and an absolute inability to cease circling.  I come from hard surfaces and concentric circles. I come from several rather different ideas about space and movement.  I come from linearity and spherical motion, rotation around an axis, an axis around which I rotate.’

Ben: ‘…I am from what people have made of me. Who I am is all that has been before and all my potential. I am from the most beautiful mind set which makes me sure that I am doing the right thing even though my body protests it. I am with the world. I come from spiritual connections that I can’t separate myself from. have I lived before? I quite like to think so although I would like to be a rabbit, no some kind of primate because I like the idea or a opposable toes. Imagine having hands for feet. I come from monkeys but only the clever ones…’

Anna: ‘…I come from/I am from makes me afraid. I come from/I am from makes me feel that experiences stick and don’t slide off like you might want them to…’

Sara: ‘…“I come from” funny how much I resist this statement, how my mind keeps going in doubles, duals, in two lines at the same time the impulse which comes to me seem like the conventional way of looking at it. It’s no news I don’t want to look at things according to templates but with this simple question or statement ‘I come from’, so many things about how I perceive myself and how I believe others perceive me comes out. So if I look at ‘i am from’ well the next thing is I am from the stars, some sort of hippy statement pops into my mind perhaps we have not given enough time and effort to really go to the bottom of this perhaps I am from myself, the the more interesting question is ‘what am I from?’

 

Cycle Stories: ‘We are moving…’ Day 11

Charlotte: ‘…We are moving together. coming together. separately again. we are moving towards a common place that we want to share with us with other us with life and self and speak in you and me and we, us moving. making. movie making. maybe. we are moving from this time to another in now from this Hamburg place towards disparate place. when will we move together again? and when we leave what do we take with us? what does it move in us? what we? we are moving….’

Ben: ‘We are moving together, apart, against each other, towards a goal. Each goal separate but still we are together. Move me to where I’m supposed to be otherwise I will not shift, contort, trust, misplaced occasionally. Better to fall on your face. Who needs to stop moving? Every second some part of the body is firing. trying to best itself. It’s purpose for existence….’

Jennifer: ‘…Can we move in opposite directions?  We are moving away from each other, which can be a physical distance but we can also move away from an existing intimacy, leave it to shrivel in the vacuum left by our presence.  Or maybe only one moves away and then is left to nurse this bit of emotional clingingness as it slowly collapses in on itself.  We are moving and moving we are ourselves.  We are moving each other, we are moving ourselves, alone, to make others move in a certain direction…’

Anna: ‘…We are moving towards Charlotte’s 3 hour piece. We are moving with the cranes, they are lifting and landing us. We are moving towards flight. We are moving towards compost. Sometimes we are not moving towards anything. We are moving for a reason, multiple reasons…’

Sara: ‘We are moving through space, through empty black space, no it’s not empty it’s full of glistening shards of stars, light sources, all those things you imagine being inside, filling that big empty! – space. We are moving fast, the wind catching our clothes, they are moving with us in the wind of speed, we are moving and everything around us seems to be still, solitude, solitary space all around us, but we, we are moving, together, laughing, speaking very little, just moving…’

Cycle Stories: ‘Today…’ Day 8; ‘Yesterday…’ Day 10

the writing streams continue…

Anna: ‘…To do the day. Today the should not be followed by I will/I might/I go. Just today. That’s enough. No anticipation. To day is the same as to now. To be. To live. To day. Today is not your own, however, and these things are not either. To be is not just your being. To be. All to being. All today-ing. Todaying. Nowing. Being. Living. Doing words… Today. As the day closes today becomes historic. A reflection – there’s less ‘nowness’ left.’

Charlotte: ‘…Today things are close to me, they draw in because they are imminent either now now or near past, near future the ripples of the pool of today are closer to me than they are when I feel yesterday or tomorrow, last week, next decade. instead I am in this intimate now, today time…’

Sara: ‘…Today is different from tomorrow. Today is yellow, perhaps and today is also an accepted idea of what we call both the chunk of time between our sleep and what we can do in this time and it is also a word with, let me see, how many letters: T O D A Y, that’s 5 letters, to describe something so complex, so full, but perhaps also something very simple if you think of it as just ‘NOW’.’

Jennifer's foot and Ben. Today...yesterday...

Jennifer: ‘…Yesterday wore itself out, gave itself up to become today.  Yesterday must be put down to rest in order for today to actually come into itself.  Yesterday, today, all this causal linearity – Yesterday is not.  Yesterday is.  In the past – Yesterday was.  yesterday is another concept, a bit of brain fluff to distract and give imaginary reasons for today’s events which often, too often, include planning for tomorrows…’

Anna: ‘…Skimmed past me. Yesterday I felt as though things could not change and remain the same. Yesterday was full of friends and laughing. Yesterday I made a leek into a head. There were day times and night times. Alan and Steve were still around…yesterday was a care free void in my careful life. Yesterday. Yesterday is now not today. Yesterday has become what today isn’t. Yesterday has become loaded. Yesterday is not remembered without the context of today or tomorrow. Yesterday changes when it has left. Yesterday is nostalgia. Yesterdays nostalgia is not feeling useful today. Yesterday is making me feel a bit annoyed. I wish to stop writing soon about yesterday.’

Sara: “Yesterday all my troubles were so far away. Yesterday all my troubles seemed closer actually, i was drowning in an overpowering feeling of loss of control, of what is going on, who i am, what i want and why. Yesterday a green light was shining in that park we passed through…yesterday, to me, today, seems like something which is about to fall off, in a very physical way, like yesterday lead me to this point but i am far more interested in tomorrow. Yesterday of course flows into my now but i want to cut it off…’