A year at Daghdha Dance

Daghdha Dance Company is closing down, terminated by unfortunate and ill-inspired decisions made by the Irish Arts Council. It seems appropriate for me to express my thoughts and my feelings on this blog, that so much helped my creative process during my residency at Daghdha.

It is obviously a sad moment, collectively for the loss of a creative force and of a rally point for a large community of local and international artists in such a deprived place such as Limerick city; personally for the loss of the family house and for a place where I could always seek refuge and inspiration.

Nevertheless, the ethos of Daghdha, the ideas and the legacy will carry on through the work of the people that have been influenced by its sprit and energy; people, such as myself, who have had their work and their lives deeply reshaped by such a place. Now we take Daghdha to the world, we go viral and spread everywhere we can. I have seen this happening before, with the quiet executions of the European Dance Development Center in Arnhem or the slow degeneration of the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. The ideas live on and eventually resurface in a different time and space.

I am currently in Copenhagen working with another former Daghdha Mentoring Program (DMP) participant, Ellen Kilsgaard. Yesterday, Ellen and I had the fantastic opportunity to show a preview of our duet to a small audience in the foyer of Dansescenen, the most importance dance theatre in Denmark. Former DMP coordinator Bush Hartsorn, currently artistic director at Dansescenen set up this opportunity for us, gathering the staff of the theatre and of the adjacent Dansens Hus. It was a true Daghdha moment, spontaneous, fresh and provocative.

On Saturday the 26th, a good-bye event will take place in Daghdha Space, John Square, Limerick: the Ponderous Counter-spectacle of Things Ceasing to Be. We go out with a bang and then we keep banging all over the map.

A solo by Giorgio Convertito)
approx. 48 min.
Daghdha Space, 14.9.2010

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.” — Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

My body is sailing in the gap moment where movement is just about to begin or just about to end, suspended in that instant just before something happens or just after something has occurred. This focus seems to take us to a place in between places, a moment in between moments, a silent, uneventful, yet compelling place.

In my research I have located that place within the body, the connective tissue, which is the tissue that connects one body system with another, for example the muscles to the bones.

“When we move in the space in between the organs, bones, muscles, blood vessels, or cells, we are moving through the connective tissue sheaths. This movement is sensual, internal, flowing and elastic (…). It flows on and on, rebounds, and flows on again. It gives vital support to the integrity of the whole in both movement and stillness.” – Linda Hartley (Wisdom of the Body Moving).

Certain aspects of this piece of work can be discovered only in the presence of an audience and that is why at the moment it is called a work in progress.

My most appreciative thanks go to the Daghdha Dance Company staff and the fellow DMP artists in residence

Another short solo has come out of my practice here at Daghdha. It’s somehow more instinctive and less conceptual than the first one, stemming from a stream of consciousness instead. I have been introducing words and sentences in my usual dance practice, trying to apply the same kind of process to the text as I do to the movement: awareness, observation, appreciation and the inevitable choices that become apparent. During that practice I found a couple of gripping elements which I decide to use as pillars for the construction of the solo. This choice led to a somehow structured composition and left me wondering if I “closed” it too soon.

The question is whether to throw all the elements back in the air and see where they fall next, or accept the result of the process as it is and move on to the next effort, with the heartening knowledge that the practice can support and stimulate a fruitful creative process.

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.” — Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

When last month I presented a short work in progress to my fellow artists in residence for a feedback session, the work was described as dystopian. Most agreed they saw that element as focalizing in the “narrative” of the piece.

From Wikipedia: A dystopia (from the Ancient Greek δυσ-: bad-, ill- and τόπος: place, landscape) is a vision of an often futuristic society, which has developed into a negative version of Utopia. A dystopia is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government. It often features different kinds of repressive social control systems, a lack or total absence of individual freedoms and expressions and a state of constant warfare or violence.

As much as this aspect intrigued me, I couldn’t immediately quite recognize it as part of what I was doing. Under recommendation I picked up “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy and read it in a couple of days. The novel describes a post-apocalyptic world in which all matter of wildlife is practically extinct and the human race is slowly starving to death. The past is irremediably gone, the future is a dark hopeless place and the present is a timeless moment in between nothing. Wasn’t that what I was after, what I saw in those Hopper paintings? Something crucial has just happened and we find ourselves suspended in that “in between” moment. Except I didn’t quite see the desperation of that moment.

I went back to Hopper and to little surprise discovered that in many of his paintings he used linear perspective to draw the eye, not just into a third dimension, but into a region of darkness and implied fear. Pictures like “Approaching a City” or “Automat” are clear examples: the dark tunnel into which the railroad is leading us; the two rows of light reflected in the back window in “Automat”, leading into a vanishing point in the darkness; the only one way out a staircase leading downward. Despair is evident.

Has she? Will she? Should she? Now that she has, what next?

“Approaching a City”

“Automat”

Possibly for the first time in my life I seem to be needing a long and attentive warm-up in order to do what I’m trying to do. Ironically I am moving very little, at least apparently, as my focus is on tiny minute movements and shifts in the body, the small dance as it’s been called sometime. Is it maybe that I need an extra “effort” to stay true to the listening when the information is so little, when the voice is so quiet? Or perhaps it’s the groin pain that has been bothering me for a couple of weeks, but then injuries are sometime our best teachers. At any rate I seem to need to get my body warm in a different way that I have been doing in the past and if I don’t my attention is inadequate and I notice something imitational about the way I move. Is perhaps “moving little” physically more challenging than “moving a lot”?