Nine Sacred Trees continued

Just realised, that the image looks really small on the blog - but if you click on the actual image you go to a larger version which should give you a clearer picture of what the trees look like.

Nine Sacred Trees

These are the nine sacred trees - I've uploaded them so everyone can let me know which ones you like and which ones should go so I can download some new images. After that I'll ask the aborist I know to double check them all.

The Dancing Body + comment 2

A notion that has been discussed amongst a few of us is that the "traditionalists" who find fault in forging new ground in a highly regimented form forget that the form was founded by those who adventured into the unknown, who improvised.

To reconfigure.. the role of the artist! of the adventurer! For this I work so hard to help realise this reconfiguration that is needfire!

Thoughts on 'twists and threads' reflected in the aesthetic.. the woven tartan..

continueing this discussion will lead us to the question that we leave the audience with at the end of the performance...

Is it a question of transformation?

My feeling is yes, and how will be the ongoing discussion until we find an answer.

keep investigating.

Dancing body + 1 comment

Yes it is truely the art of improvisation in any art form the diving into the unknown and only knowing the outcome when it is in front of an audience - this is the beauty and the danger of creating work. Once these traditional dancers were created from nothing from a gesture or from an image that was seen by one of the warriors and now they are danced competitively to rigid guidelines.. I find this fascinating.

The dancing body

I guess what interested me about this project, and what excites me about dance in general, is the new kinds relationships between movement, perception, sensation and space that dance as a practice can engender.

I've always been interested in Arakawa and Gins' project - architecture against death/ reversible destiny/ we have decided not to die - which examines the way in which 'procedual architecture can help people achieve a reversible destiny' examining the 're-linking of the body and the world to one another' (Araakawa and Gins, 2002: xiii). Here architecture, rather than viewed as a passive stracture, 'actively participates in life and death matters' because it can affect the way the body moves through and come to know space (Arakawa and Gins, 2002: xi). But what is key about this is that it recognises that the body is in movement, the body can move in different ways, and different sorts of movement gives rise to different perceptual, sensing, even I guess you could say, philosphical kinds of affects.

I was also recently reading about the sense lab the other day: http://thesenselab.com/aboutthesenselab.htm which focuses on sensing bodies in movement, exploring the relationship between the sensing body and philosophy. The statement on their website reads:

'Because this relation between sensing and knowing takes place chiefly in our bodies, and because to “know” via the senses involves a movement toward that knowledge (we move to touch the object we see, for example), theorizations of the body in movement are required. Through a rigorous engagement with the moving body (the dancing body, the body in art, the body in relation to technology), The Sense Lab proposes to re-think the inter-relation of movement, sense and the senses in art practice and philosophy.'

I find dance an interesting discipline because it has such a strong relationship with movement, sensation, affect etc. This is exciting because it could be argued that moving (and thus perceiving and sensing) differently allows us to know and conceive of knowledge in new ways.

I feel like I need to go back to that excitement that I initially felt toward the concept of movement, because I think that this could not only create new kinds of potential for the dance and the film/ media to communicate, but it might also create some interesting kinds of potential that the conceptual focus of the work can explore.

Cheryl and I talked for a while about the notion of reconfiguring. I think the term twisting has also been used.

reconfigure: verb, to change the shape or formation of, remodel, restructure.

twist to combine, as two or more strands or threads, by winding together; intertwine.

Twist is a bit of a difficult one to pin down, because it feels so arbitrary, and can be conceived in a whole range of ways.

There are other words I'm thinking of too: a kind of notion of dance/ movement/ film/ culture that somehow (or is somehow) dissolved/ decayed or - perishes, but that is then reconfigured, or actualised, or moved in a new way. So twisting is almost the wrong kind of vocabulary (well in the defition above anyway, but of course there are other definitions that I didn't include) because it implies that you have some kind of pre-defined materiality - ie the thread, that can be pulled together, but there is nothing outside of the thread that you start with. But I do like the idea of being open to the unknown quantity, the potential that is created through the movement/ dance, or dialogue between that process and the other aspects of the work (film, sound, etc) that is uncertain until you find it So perhaps reconfiguring isn't quite right either - Arakawa and Gins make a differentiation between reconfiguring and constructing, and perhaps what I'm trying to say here is that the reconfiguration turns into a kind new sort of construction at some point in the process (a little difficult sometimes in the context of this project! - but a way of working, that when it can be realised can open a pathway for critical and I think experimental work).

But going back to the things I was talking about early on in this post, I think what is interesting about the notion of dance and movment is not just how this type of traditional dance might be affected by the... perhaps force, or new connections offered by its engagement with processes that have historically been foreign to it (ie contemporary music, film, different sorts of costuming or even a different way of dancing) but how the result of that affect actually might have an impact on concept - ie what are we actually learning from the way in which the dance is changed by this kind of engagement (and even how the other mediums are changed by their connection with the dance) and is there something in the new kinds of movements and connections that arise, that can allow us to make a different kind of statement about ideas of culture, diaspora etc (can the movements enacted in the actual work allow new kinds of theoretical engagments allow us to know in new ways)

Links to information about trees of the Ogham

In searching for information to include in the first scene with the nine sacred trees, I came across these resources, which explore the celtic mythology associated with particular trees (including their places in the Ogham alphabet). I am placing the links here as I thought they may be useful for future research needed to compile the text for this first scene, and perhaps other scenes in the work.

Mythology and folklore of the birch:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/birch.html

Mythology and folklore of the rowan: http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/rowan.html

Mythology and folklore of the oak:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/oak.html

Mythology and folklore of the elm:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/elm.html

Mythology and folklore of the holly:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/holly.html

Mythology and folklore of the willow:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/willow.html

Mythology and folklore of the scots pine:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/pine.html

Mythology and folklore of hazel:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/hazel.html

Workshop in Sydney with Mark Coniglio and Troika Ranch on Isadora software

Just wanted to give you a heads up that Electrofringe are running a
workshop in Sydney in the first week of December with Mark Coniglio and
Dawn Stopiellio from Troika Ranch Dance Theatre, New York.

The workshop will be on the Isadora software (created by Mark Coniglio)
working with movement tracking and realtime processing.

It will take place over two days in the first week of December (exact
dates, times and venue tbc in next day or so)

If you are interested in attending please contact me at
catmjones@gmail.com (with Troika Ranch Workshop in the subject)

Places will be limited!

For more info on Troika Ranch and Isadora go to
www.troikaranch.org and
www.troikatronix.com

fyi Troika Ranch will also be doing an artist talk at Performance Space
on the 4th December and will probably also have an informal get
together that week at a pub for Isadora users.

xcat

Cat Jones / Ben Byrne / Alex White
Directors
Electrofringe
www.electrofringe.net

Festival Dates
27 September - 1 October 2007

Electrofringe is assisted by the Australian Government through the
Australia Council for the Arts, its arts advisory body, the Australian
Film Commission and the NSW Film and Television Office.

Festival Partners in 2007 include ABC Radio National - The Night Air,
Realtime/Onscreen, Reeldance, Japan Media Arts Festival, Australian
Network of Art and Technology, High Tea with Mrs Woo, Octapod,
Performance Space, PVI Collective and This Is Not Art (TINA).
Electrofringe is auspiced by Music NSW.