In Vienna to talk with Fumiyo Ikeda about the solo for her which we will collaborate on next year. Before I arrive she sends me these notes on improvisation.

These are my personal notes about improvisation.
They are very short. I want it to be short sentences.
While improvising it’s too late to think what am I doing ?
While improvising it’s too late to think how will I do it?
Improvisation is now and here. Me and communication.
 
Consciousness/unconsciousness
Accepting the situation
Getting into the momentum
No judgment
No comment
No evaluation
Addition/Subtraction
Selection/Elimination
Anything is possible
Let it come
Let it go

I first saw Fumiyo dance more than twenty years ago, in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Rosas Dans Rosas. I must have seen her dance many times since then, most recently in Nine Finger with artist/performer Benjamin Verdonck, which they made with Alain Platel. Fumiyo always looks like she's thinking about what she's doing, as if the movement she makes is under some kind of scrutiny or consideration - consideration not shown on the face, more by the body. More than anything else her movement seems constantly weighed, as if there is some sub-micro-second (or unquantifiable attention-split) of contemplation involved in even the fastest move. Not all dancers give that impression but with Fumiyo it's very strong. For me it means that what happens counts. What's amazing too is how fast she picks up and drops a particular energy in her movement - so the tone of what she's doing can seem extremely fluid, changeable, unstable - light one moment, harsh or difficult another, with barely a boundary between the two. I'm compelled by this - as I am watching the other dancers I've been lucky enough to work with, Meg Stuart, Wendy Houston for example - even as I'm still very unsure what Fumiyo and I will make together. There is time for that still.

I found the new piece of Anne Teresa - Zeitung - very strong. The structure is deeply fragile - deploying the nine dancers in small groups for duets that turn into solos, trios that turn into duets - an unfolding, dissolving, endlessly adjusting and re-forming use of the stage, which only later pulls out the stops for some large-group set-pieces or more dynamic and exhausting improvisations. Even there though the piece resists the easy climax very often, many times choosing to dissipate an energy rather than take it to the max, shifting focus from one performer to another or one mode to another, where continuing would evidently make better, or at least more evidently functional drama. The piece is all so much the better for this fragility though even if it gives a hard time to anyone looking for an easy ride and even though I'd struggle to explain why. It's more than my perversity speaking here I'm sure. There's something very simple going on (not that I can name it), as well as a shifting between different kinds of intimacy, dramatic interaction, bodily distortion and, in a certain way, grace.

Throughout much of the piece Anne Teresa also lets the music and the lights take their own independent tracks - working with and for the choreography but also at many junctures seeming to ignore it, keeping it off balance. Ghosts or spirits that haunt the dance but do not serve it always, the lights (done, along with the stage design by Discordia's Jan Joris Lamers) are prone to changing apparently at random, moving from one to another of the set number of lighting states during scenes, throwing what begins as a stark or simple scene into sudden backlight or total darkness, or creating huge space suddenly around an image that was previously isolated or framed by light. The music for its part quite often arrives during sequences that have already begun, or at other times the action endures apparently unchanged once the music has ended, suddenly exposed, continuing in silence. You have the impression I guess of things being slightly out-of-sync, displaced, misplaced  but without any kind of melodrama being created out of this condition. What seems key too is that these tactics aren't deployed to make a mess either - there's no flaunting of dysfunction. In fact the structure remains extremely careful, slow-burning, without appearing to be going anywhere much and persists in this way, nontheless creating a space, place, mode in which small interactions or events in the choreography start to count over and above their real weight. There's a kind of self-effacement in the work too - each of the dancers gets their moment, or shines in some particular interaction or sequence, but no one's lifted far out of the group which remains in some senses human and straightforward (watching each other, working, waiting) but at the same time slightly austere, blank, sparse and aesthetic in the ways that you might expect from a Rosas piece. Perhaps the closest thing to a through-line is the presence of Alain Franco  - seated at the piano to play the Bach pieces which are the spine of the work, and controlling the introduction  of the recorded versions of Weburn and Schoenberg that provide the rest of the music. It's certainly matters that the first Bach track is played by him alone on the expanse of the stage area, with both dancers and audience in effect waiting - it's an act of contemplation, private as well as public, that sets the tone for much of what will follow - simplicity and focus. Later in the evening Franco rises from his place at the piano - abandoning it during one sequence so that he can slump in an arm chair, and for another wandering into the depth of the space, behind the playing area - a man, who, drained from his own playing and having set the final recording in motion seems to have no further task left.

Spent some days working with Fumiyo on the piece we do for next year. Early conversations still. Some nice things in the studio. On the floor of the space we were working in at Rosas many coloured dots and lines of tape, red, blue, yellow, green - the dots  like oversize confetti, diagram-ghosts, marking points for the geometry that backbones so much of Anne Teresa's choreography. The week before (in London) I watched the Reich evening, in which the standout work was Phase, to Reich's Piano Phase. I loved it, in its tension, and apparent singularity - the dance like the music a simple-but-complex, complex-but-simple braid of repetition and doubling. Stunning. Ant Hampton has been blogging some here lately which I'm glad of - he wrote nice things about the performance here as well as linking to these two YouTube clips of the piece here and here.

Really noticing these days how much I watch hands in movement - was momentarily  obssessing over what I saw as a difference between the hands of the two dancers in this work (not visible in the grainy YouTube clip of course!). Watching Fumiyo in the studio too it's certainly her hands and her face that I seem drawn to as she moves - maybe not so much that these are what I see more, but rather that they are what i can frame a comment on or through - as if these more easily narrative parts of the body (?) allow me a language with which to start speaking. I'm not sure. Sara Jansen watches the rehearsals too and at some point commented on what F. was doing with her feet. I'm suddenly reminded that whilst I must have seen how she moved them, and certainly felt it, I can't even start, for the moment, to describe or speak of it. It's either not in my memory, or where it is, I don't have the words with which to extract it.

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New York based theatre academic Jonathan Kalb did an interview with me a while back, then came to Portland to see Quizoola! and Sight is the Sense... His generous and smart response to the work can be seen here.

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Reading this meanwhile I really wished I could read the entire 31 page guidelines - a "statement of understanding" - for the recent town-hall meeting debate between McCain and Obama. 

Fumiyo and I have been working in Sheffield, on her solo during the last couple of days. Here are photos by Herman Sorgeloos of the two of us in Brussels a week or so ago.

I've been working on a lecture presentation with Hugo and Adrian, titled Intangibles and concerning presence and other hard-to-quantify aspects of performance. Seeing as how I'm in Brussels most of the time these days my contribution was a series of video fragments which Hugo and I recorded on various early mornings in Essen, Vienna and London, usually in the space between breakfast and a taxi to an airport. So I was doubly absent I guess. I also wrote a letter to Hugo and Adrian, which they read in Exeter last week, as a part of the presentation. An excerpt:

What you know already (but i hope you dont feel it too much in the moment) is that some of these words [in this letter] which seem to form a flow, a coherence, a more or less solid Tim that is speaking/writing, some of these words, in this flow, were rather written as insertions, not part of any flow at alland in fact not even written in the scene i described - my sat on the bed - but written much later instead perhaps added whilst I was in transit to brussels (airport, plane) or added (still later) in Brussels itself (in the apartment there)insertions - a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph or two in some other place - which are by now indistinguishable from the rest of the fabric of this writing.

There so many insertions and rewritings in fact that its probably wrong to think of what's written here as anything other than a layered accumulation of tracesnot so much a single thing as an unruly concoction, an assemblage of voices, the pressed and gathered sum of many moments, somehow tricked into one place.

I had to that same idea about that watching the dancer Fumiyo Ikeda in rehearsals today
she was dancing something connected to the word 'forgetting' (we're working from words somehow)
and she was doing this thing where (she said afterwards) "all the corners of the room were calling" to her
like she was trying to be (somehow) in relation to all directions
her body contradicting itself, if you can imagine that
limbs stuttering, arms heading one way, head another, legs dipping and turning
not especially forceful or angst ridden this, just a body flickering, layering its own intentionalities, belying its own impulses
even in short bursts all this was exhausting to watch...
a kind of muliplication of presences produced by one body, a strange quantum maths.

I even had a simillar feeling weeks before even when she stopped dancing during one rehearsal
and in silence simply re-walked, re-traced her journey in the room - marking its ups and downs, walking and silently pointing the twists and turns of her progress
before stepping back up and into dance again -
i said afterwards "like there were two Fumiyo's" - once dancing, the other following behind....  some tricky maths again.

 Rehearsals for in pieces - Fumiyo Ikeda and Tim Etchells. Photos by Herman Sorgeloos.