Lighting: 10. and 11. February with Iria Arenas

Another pleasurable experience as I put all my trust in the hands of Iria and Gabriela. What an amazing team were these two petite women so strong with their presence. Iria up and down ladders changing angles of lights and being amazingly creative with our simple set up. Creating islands of secrecy and intimacy where key symbols and objects such as the swing, jacket, shoes and tutu came alive and deep. It also created for me as the live mover, a world to live this self portrait for REAL. Both Iria and Gabriela graduated from PReS at SOZO and I felt extremely grateful to be working with rich fruit of something I invest in.

Images from the general rehearsal on 12th February 2021

My time with Gabriela Branco 07.02 -14.02

Continuing to find myself in a state between seeing that I can finish this portrait and really imagining it, internally seeing and feeling it, and then feeling that I cannot get any further alone. Me myself and the moving portrait where I cannot observe the portrait because I am IN IT. A layer of the self Portrait in the “live” moving image which is not there in a painted, or recorded self-portrait. I could film myself and watch it but them I am not seeing the “live moving image anymore”. Does this mean that I myself as the artist, will NEVER see the self-portrait in the live moving image?

It was time to work with the outside eye and stage the portrait with a person of honesty, openness and detailed eye. After watching a rough run through, Gabriela grabbed her note book, looked at her first notes and then hesitated. “lets go into the piece” she suggested. Really going through each stage of what I had presented, laying, siting and standing in certain positions on the stage, talking about the background of these situations, how they developed and arose. I revisited my process and by doing this the portrait REALLY started to emerge. After over one year of time and effort, without force, over the next 3-4 days, like a metamorphosis of butterfly wings, it emerged fully to reveal itself. As if the Portrait has its own life and own power because I let it take over.

intensive week 28.12.20 - 02.01.21

Hovering between new impulses and thoughts, pictures I see revealing themselves, words and poesie at times, and then stickiness, frustration at not feeling I am able to see enough. Ummm, have I taken a bite into something too big to chew? Thats how I feel at least once everyday. I tell myself thats how it should be.

Absolut highlight of the week and VERY REVEALING are the “walk and talked portraits” with a fellow artist, or person I know more or also less. Three hours of quality time spent in deep listening with another person, in the midst of a pandemic time. This is so far the best thing I could have done to facilitate my work and fits perfectly hand in hand with my “time and effort pictures”. The walk and talk is fascinating enough but then the peaceful reflective time of writing and placing of cards leads beautifully into an exchange of observations, questions and connections. Each time I have talked about myself in a completely different way and each walk and talk has drawn out a particular characteristic, picture, principal or symbol that could play an important part of the portrait. It’s also been every time quite a vulnerable and fragile exchange and I feel very privileged to have been able to listen to each person who gave me their time. I already know that this research will be lengthened beyond my performance.

After pondering on the merged portraits (of words and phrases) on paper and usually by the end of the talk, something concrete had usually crystallized. Even one particular word would be standing out as a central theme. I took some spontaneous shots at packing those words and themes into small instant compositions. There will be one video for each walk and talk. Emerging from this talk with Loreen was “sword”.

Just to motion what I also started in this week was a set solo block based on a score from my last piece “seven” where each dancer was given the task to develop according to a long complicated and multi layer score, a solo. We developed the score together with layers to facilitate the creation of a personal unique solo based on depths of personality, symbolic and gestures and by using the 7 movement elements of Quan Dao Kung fu which has been a personal research of mine since 2016. As part of my self-portrait to include an exercise that really need time and effort I set myself the same task as I did my dancers just 14 months ago. From the complete score of 151 movement elements I mange to make a loose start of 26 of them.

26. December 20 - Holiday time and TIME to sort out all this stuff. A two week intensive rehearsal time lies ahead, beginning in two days. Apart from my walk and talk partners (which are serving me as a hybrid of dramaturgy), I will be alone in studio 2 with notes, music, paper, text…

“inspiring myself with myself”

10. December 20 - On this day I already have to decide on a press-text for the dance calendar. This means committing myself to a title. I am very surprised by what happens as I sit down and read through some notes, ponder on pictures and let my thoughts wander somewhat forwards to a performance which has a title. Up until now I have been calling all research under “A dragon’s life” which came very spontaneously to me last November as I presented the first picture. Its not something I feel comfortable with now. A dragon is already such a strong picture which I absolutely can still identify with. The dragon has not ever been any symbol of evil for me but something that is strong and wise, flexible and yet vulnerable. Still in society it carries other connotations and I need the portrait still to remain free and flexible to become what it becomes. I’m as excited about it as I could be. Now 9 weeks before a premiere I cannot really see what will happen. The latin word “protrohere” amplifies itself from my pages of notes and I agree and accept it. Below in German (because advertising will be in German primarily)

protrahere

Ich würde mich als „mich“ bezeichnen.

Ich möchte „mich“ sein.

Ich werde mich als „mich“ präsentieren.

Ich werde den „ich“ in mir hervorkommen lassen.

Ich werde andere denken lassen, ich sei „ich “

Eine hybride Form des Selbstporträts, untersucht und reflektiert über eine Zeitspanne, was eine Frage der Intimität aufwirft. Welches Selbst wird gezeigt? Es geht darum, etwas zu enthüllen, etwas ins Leben zu rufen. Die Entscheidung, sich selbst darzustellen kann einen so genannten „Gnadenzustand“ bewirken. So hat protrahere das Gefühl, hervorzuziehen, herauszuziehen, zu verlängern oder ans Licht zu bringen.

protrahere (English)

I would call myself "me."

I want to be "me."

I will present myself as "me".

I will let the "I" come out in me.

I'm going to make others think I'm "me"

A hybrid form of self-portrait, examined and reflected over a period of time, which raises a question of intimacy. Which self is shown? It's about revealing something, creating something. The decision to represent oneself can lead to a so-called "state of grace". Thus, protrahere has the feeling of pulling out, self revealing, prolonging or bringing to light.

25. November 20 - image Nr 4. performed as spontaneous act without rehearsal.

I saw myself in the jacket and red shoes again standing like a politician saying “This is a political statement. I am an optimist”

I saw myself dancing barefoot to “those were the days my friend” by Mary Hopkins. This was a single vinyl that my parents had as I was about 6 -8 years old. The 70s. I had a long floral dress and I used to dance and dance tirelessly to this song on the record player in our living room. I remember feeling invincible, freedom, long hair flying around and at the end of each round wanting to dance again.

The words “a floral dress, a 45 inch vinyl, like yesterday, like tomorrow”

Yes, I am an optimist, most people know this. It is often shameless to the point of naivety. How to communicate a private political movement within me, to let it move in the space and become contagious? I keep the jacket on - like something I am married to (it is the jacket my husband wore as we married at the registry office).

The private showing within the evening of other small showings of SOZO students - our Jour Fixe, meant we just watch each other. For the forth time I experience this “time and effort” thing. After weeks of letting this picture build up in my imagination, I open a door and let it escape and even though it is inside my mind and developed there, I can honestly say, I can only also see what it really looks like when it comes out. I even wondered if each and every performance can be a fresh portrait so that my continuing work is just to research and develop a process through which I move in each performance, where by a new fresh portrait emerges each time. I really like this idea, as in the last years when I try to go back to fixing material (which I still do as a choreographer for younger dancers sometimes), I get very frustrated and stuck in perfectionism, worrying about how I look and if I still dance things like I did when I was 20, 25 or 30. Either I will bite in and learn again the satisfaction of dancing fixed material, or I will avoid it like the pest!

13. November 20 - Today I begin a “sideline research”. In a workshop with Christina Ciupke at the end of October, she showed me a method she uses as part of her “deep listening” practices. I had already heard of taking a “walk and talk” with a fellow artist but doing the practice on this particular day and the follow up hours of sharing and sorting of information, revealed to me the possibilities for using this practice for my own self-portrait process. I decide to find a wide variety of people to share the practice with and see if the data can filter through into my “moved self-portrait”.

Once again time and effort are playing an important role in the portrait being “drawn out” of the process.

This is the practice:

• I choose and then ask someone to go for a walk and talk with me. We walk for 40 minutes.

• One of us talks for the first 20 minutes about how we would describe ourselves (a talked self-portrait) and the other listens with as much mental observation as possible. For the second 20 minutes we swap the roles.

• Arriving back at a workspace we sit for as long as we need (in the experience, about 20-30 minutes) and write on small cards or papers, words, sentences, themes that we remember about the other persons “talked self-portrait”.

• We have all the small papers on one pile and sit before a carpet / big rug-size paper. One by one we each take a small paper and read what is on it and begin to place them on the large paper. At anytime we can place things in groups as we see similar themes or connecting words coming up.

• We are left with a large word picture of our “talked self-portraits” mixed and merged. We begin a conversation about what we notice and observe. Maybe we still what to move something… open end.

23. September 20 - image nr. 3 performed as a spontaneous act without physical rehearsal.

This picture was tough and fun at the same time. During a workshop with Antje Pfundtner the awareness was drawn to my “mischmash” way of communication between the English and German language. English, spoken with a German sentence structure, or German words that I love squeezed in everywhere to exaggerate the English. Herrrrlich!!! Antje just said “you should feature this language”. The idea of me illustrating work with this “mischmash”, the play with words and language, the potential for the story-telling and portrait-telling, has accompanied me this last month. 

SNAP! - The picture came. I was skipping on the top landing of the student hostel in London as I was 17 years old at the Royal Ballet School. I was telling the story in “mischmash”. This picture was wobbly as I couldn’t imagine performing the picture without a physical rehearsal. Mostly I meditated on speaking in “mischmash” and remembered the feeling of skipping high-speed my 1000 skips. I could hear the sound of the rope hitting the marble floor… tic - tic - tic - tic…

On the day of showing this picture to about 20 willing watchers (all distanced), the energy arose, the effort born out of nervousness needed to form the final decision of how to enter the space to perform this part of the portrait-picture. Something like a bartering inside my thought world, weighing up the choices I have. I don’t actually have the time and calmness to put a whole order of happening together, but I enter the space with the following decisions.

1. I wear casual trousers and a huge sweatshirt.

2. I sit on a chair and place a skipping rope on the floor next to me.

3. I introduce my method of working to the observers (which I didn’t do in the last two showings. Now this seemed appropriate and some of the observers had seen the Pictures nr. 1 and nr. 2

4. I ask for the lights to be put out, and I skip for minutes in the dark so the audience can only hear the tic - tic - tic… near the end I say “Shhh!” about 3 - 4 times before I stop skipping.

5. Sitting back on the chair with the lights on I begin to tell he story of skipping on the marble staircase in London in the “mischmash” language… It is difficult and I fight my way through to finish the story with “Shhh! There are people trying to sleep”

6. Unexpectedly I get up of the chair and a spontaneous movement sequence of stored-up states of being after skipping and talking, flow for about 1,5 minutes. Also, unexpectedly I begin to talk again adding a piece of information, something from recent years which connects to the story from 33 years ago.

Again I have used 1. The moment 2. The time 3. The collecting 4. The effort

10. June 2020 - image nr. 2 is spontaneously presented at Jour Fix at SOZO

Following my structure of bringing the received image to a real time unrehearsed showing. I received the image whilst putting something away in the costume storage in the HALLE - I saw my old Tutu and immediately I knew this was part of the 2nd image. Through meditating on the image I remembered a few photos of me in my tutu. The trampoline, the beamed image of one of the old photos and a spoken recording of me thinking about my wrinkles and freckles

May 2020

Coming up - Jour Fix. I have the chance to use this platform to work on another picture. It is proving helpful to me to make this into a research format and to keep the structure of forming and presenting these pictures the same each time. These steps describe the process that I would like to keep. I feel they make space for time and effort to show up.

1. The moment - of the picture coming into my thoughts - like the snap of a camera shot in my mind.

2. The time - days to months of letting this picture ripen and taking care not to force anything.

3. The collecting - a piece of clothing, a sound, an atmosphere. Through spending time in the meditation of the picture, I can gather the elements needed to research the picture in real time without rehearsal.

4. The effort - A huge burden of nervosity and risk is involved in the last part of researching the picture in a real-time one-off showing.

24. April 2020 - a found portrait.

So far I looked into some texts about the self-portrait. Different genres of art and how the methods of producing a self-portrait and the opinions about doing so differ. What I find attractive for me and my work is letting the two elements of time and effort draw the portrait. I would like these two elements to be felt and experienced in the moving image - performance.

This portrait is not a self-portrait but I relate to it when I observe it. I relate to having messy hair, being fully in a performance mode, showing age (40 at time of picture), showing some toughness, showing some vulnerability. I see time and I see effort. A thousand thoughts pouring.

"Propelled by natural strength, 
You are as strong as a dragon.
Inhaling and exhaling naturally and quietly, 
You perceive the mechanism of all movement.
In quietness you are like the hibernating dragon" - Wang Xiang Zhai

22. January 2020 - Collection of first thoughts and words.

A dragon’s life

“I would describe myself as a dragon.

I want to be a dragon.

I will present myself as a dragon.

I will create the dragon in me.

I will make others think I am a dragon.” (Deborah Smith-Wicke Januar 2020) 

The self-portrait of an artist. A simple likeness? A calling-card? The practice of the skill to capture this likeness in order to show capabilities or a narcistic need to “perform the self”?

When we look at a self -portrait we occupy the same space before the canvas as the artist did to paint the image. While this is also true of all paintings, in the case of the self-portrait it is particularly poignant: we find ourselves looking back into the eyes of the artist, just as they gazed into their own reflection in the mirror. In this way the canvas replaces the mirror spatially and the viewer is caught up in a close exchange with the artist.

(“Performing the self” by Anthony Bond) 

Self-portrait is a common practice for many painters and newer genres such as photography and film have been analysed too. The smart-phone selfie has totally divided the opinion of researchers and scholars of Art. 

What about the self-portrait in the moving image – that moving image being not film but a body in a space before a live audience? 

A hybrid form of self-portrait. Investigated and reflected over a time span, raising a question of intimacy. Which self is shown? Which body, which face, which voice? Which performance? For me? By me?

In every self-portrait we discover individuals who wish to portray not just likenesses or even inner worlds, but concrete facts about who they were, what they could achieve and how they fitted in to the world around them. These things can in no way be conveyed by physical likeness alone. Performance art, and in particular the performing body, is founded on enacting similar definitions of the creative force to those we have already examined, such as the relationship of mind and body of the artist and the spectator as collaborator. (“Performing the self” by Anthony Bond)

Not only who you are but who you would like to be? Who you are becoming?

Unlike monuments, these compressed and urgent communications come alive for every viewer because they are remade through our own image of selfhood and the wonder of being.

According to Cristina Nunez, during the creation of a self-portrait we can start a dialogue between our thinking mind and our ‘gut’ to draw from an inexhaustible source of meanings, which must be expressed. The self-portrait can be incredibly empowering. Despite the fact that she was writing about self-portrait and photography where the NOW moment is crucial, the decision to represent oneself can provide what is termed here a ‘state of grace’: the feeling of centeredness that occurs in moments of creative work in which the emotions are naturally retained because our higher self is in command. 

The French portrait comes from the Latin verb protrahere [55]. The prefix pro- (a variant of por-) means forth, forward or outward [56], while trahere (from which come also the English words train and tract) means to drag something slowly or to draw something out in the passing of time, resulting in some consequence. Thus, protrahere has the sense of drawing forth, pulling out, prolonging or bringing to light. 

We should recognize that the portrait, in its primordial sense, is not a matter of depiction or representation. Rather, it is a matter of revealing, of bringing something into being. Key elements here are time and effort. 

If that is the nature of the portrait, then the meaning of the self -portrait has to do with bringing oneself forth over time. It is not that there is a preexisting self that is being duplicated or even represented (on paper), but that the self is being constructed, coaxed into existence, drawn out, as the self-portrait unfolds. 

Tim Gorichanaz - from: Self-Portrait, Selfie, Self: Notes on Identity and Documentation in the Digital Age (Published: 26 September 2019)

27. November 2019 - Spontaneous performance for SOZO’s Jour Fix

I didnt rehearse anything physically. I had a very strong image of myself in the jacket of my husband worn back to front and shoes two sizes too large for my feet. I imagined myself setting off on a way and I chose a diagonal tragectory from right back to left front corner, the shoes like stepping stones. I removed the shoe from behind and placed it infront of me whilst standing on one leg. The heels of the shoes put me in a vulnerable position of balancing whilst taking off the shoe. Writing this after performing and analysing, it is interesting that the choice of steping continually into a shoe that is too big reflects somthing of how I function in life. I take risks even if the situation seems too big to handle. Mostly I am growing to the size of the occasion and yet step into yet another shoe that is too big. Also the constant state of needing to stay concentrated and alert to balancing out the tinyest nuance is typical of my daily life. This could be a major factor in the development of composing. A state to work further with and discover in the context of self portait and performance.

Continually bending down caused the jacket to keep slipping forwards and so I was occupied in keeping the jacket in place with my free hand. It was almost like having my hand on my heart. The fact that the shoes were too big made it actually easier to slip them on and off.

The first half of the “way” was made it silence - tension, wobbling, concentration - half way I had given sound-desk the task to play "Deborah's Theme" -Ennio Morricone (Once Upon a Time in America). I found this by accident about a year ago and had saved it in my music library. A few people asked me afterwards why the music was needed. It wasn’t - so actually just a trying out - an experiment. A bit rebellious to the “in thing” never to have dominating music. Why?