Technical Rehearsal

Here is the dance, the sound and the lighting all coming together ready for the first (and final?) live performance.

Third and Fourth Rehearsal

Following the first two rehearsals there were about 3 or 4 weeks with no contact as I was on holiday. I had been very pleased with the improvisations that the dancers had made around the themes I wanted to explore with extremes of emotions. It had become clear to me that a duet between Jem and James would work well as the main part of the performance. There is something about the way they move that creates a sense of 'unheimlich' (literal translation from German is 'unhomely') or uncanny and that is a theme running through the work that I want to explore. Dan and Jack could provide an interpretive role by watching and using their moves to puzzle over and decipher the emotions between the dancers and eventually join in to explore their own emotional states.

I'd been thinking about trying to make a music cut or a storyboard or something to begin to work out a structure but didn't really know how I should approach this or where to start in terms of dancers expectations. Rachel advised NOT to start with music as this would be too rigid. She kindly picked my brain, contributed some good ideas and acted as scribe extraordinaire so we had a plan for the third rehearsal.

On Saturday morning we cracked right into it! And it worked surprisingly well. Rachel had the playlist from SamULG for the music and we found about 4 tracks that were good to use. We set the first 3 parts/phrases/scenes (what do you call in dance - no idea???) quite thoroughly although we didn't have music for the 'control' duet. Again I was absolutely overwhelmed by the dancers skill and ability to translate my garbled instructions in to something amazing. Thanks to Sally and Rachel for help with interpretation. And to Dan and Jack for some really good ideas to progress the choreography for Jem and James. I became more confident to give instructions, make changes, say no to suggestions that really didn't work for me and so on.

The last rehearsal was the following day. My daughter was having a little party so the rest of the day was spent cooking and hanging fairy lights. No time to reflect before we're in the studio again. The one thing I could do over breakfast was to try to find the music we were still lacking and - bingo - looking through the playlist on my phone I discovered a strings version of Joy Division's 'Shes Lost Control' by  the Vitamin String Quartet (VSA). Perfect!

So by the end of Sunday morning we had cracked it and with a 'flocking' ending. Apparently this is a technique that is bit of a cliche in the dance world but for the purposes of finishing the work on a playful and upbeat vibe, and with Sally's advice to the dancers to refine it, I think it works perfectly.

So I have edited together video of the whole piece and it runs about 12 minutes. I'd love to post it here. But I won't! Not yet! Come and see live on Sunday 21st at 8pm. Farnham Maltings.

http://www.thedancemovement.co.uk/tickets-every-day-people

Finding the structure and the music

A big thanks to Rachel Palmer for helping me sort my ideas into a structure before 3rd rehearsal on Saturday and to SamULG https://soundcloud.com/samgproducer for recommending some great ideas for music that we have used along with a great string interpretation of Joy Division's 'She's Lost Control' that I found minutes before the last rehearsal this morning.

https://soundcloud.com/futurebeatsrec/invention-xndxrgrxwth

https://soundcloud.com/mixmag-1/premiere-v1984-synchronized-joy-and-sorrow

https://soundcloud.com/ovallfun/hashfinger-a7-may12

https://soundcloud.com/bilo503/nero

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs3fpB_L1qs




So now we have set the whole 12 mintue performance with a possible few tweaks to follow at the technical rehearsal next Saturday. The last two days have been so exciting and fantastic to see this piece come together with my ideas, improvisation from the amazing dancers and guidance from Sally and Rachel.  Further blog to follow about Jem and James' duet with Dan and Jack as the puzzled watchers who join in the dance in the final stages.

Second Rehearsal

I have just returned from a lovely family holiday in Santorini and didn't get a chance to blog about this before I left. My recollections now are that I wanted to lift the mood and work with a more calm, loving and fun vibe than the first rehearsal as a counterpoint to the anxiety, stressful and manic modes we had explored in the first rehearsal.

The dancers really engaged with the four areas of the room that I mapped out for different emotions and interactions and I will be going through the video rushes in the next few days to try to pick sequences and begin to 'set' (if that is the right term) for the final choreography.

During the week I also hope to work on music and sounds that we can sequence into some kind of timeline to structure the finished piece.

Here is Rachel's updated post on The DanceMovement blog:
http://www.thedancemovement.co.uk/every-day-people1/rosiesjourney

First rehearsal

Somewhat overwhelmed. I came away from this first rehearsal quite numb - even slightly traumatised - and needed to wait a few days to revisit the video and make some sense of what we had achieved. The dancers were completely awesome and gave so much energy and support to my ideas.  I didn't expect this so a massive thank you to you all.

I was a bit apprehensive, shy and not a very able communicator when it came to direction. Sally Marie spent a lot of time with me trying to understand what I am trying to achieve which is a complex task given I'm not even sure. But she teased out some meaningful themes and she guided the dancers to improvise around these ideas.

I have about 15 mins of video that I have edited back to 8 mins of great sequences that we can begin to develop next Sunday. On reflection - it all got a bit more angst ridden and violent than I imagined it would. We cut to the chase really quickly and that was weird. So next week I think we can work on calm and love! Perhaps explore that as a meaningful contrast and juxtaposition to the completely relevant and necessary structure of difficult themes around mental health for which the dancers have already created some amazing choreography that we can build on in future sessions.

Rachel made a great post on the DanceMovement blog that summed up the day perfectly... my video upload to follow later.

http://www.thedancemovement.co.uk/every-day-people1/rosie-edp-day-1

I've not got a lot of laughs in here!

Oh no - what to do about that???

Note to self: I need some humour to communicate a difficult subject!

First reheasal tomorrow

So not sure where I am going with this... but excited about the first rehearsal with the dancers tomorrow. I will need a lot of help from Sally Marie to translate all this into some kind of sense for the dancers but hoping I can show them this blog to start developing ideas.

Push and pull
Chaos and calm
Fast and slow
Big and small
Loud and quiet

Need to think about music...maybe examples

And about space... here are some plans of the Brislington Asylum near Bristol that maybe helpful for mapping out movement in imaginary spaces.

Olive Wharry - Suffragette and Hunger Striker

Olive Wharry used several names; Joyce Locke, Phyllis North and possibly others. In 1913 she burnt down a tea kiosk in Kew Gardens believing to to be property of The Crown. The archive shows how she was moved around various prisons from Holloway, to Carnarvon, to Liverpool and so on. Medical records show how she was force-fed through a tube into the esophagus leading to a gradual deterioration in her mental and physical health.

My mother has always loved her food. Since entering a care home she has insisted that the food is poisoned and existed on a diet of jacket potatoes, cheese sandwiches and yogurt for most of the last six years. She self neglects in other ways too - for example she won't shower or wash her hair. Apparently there is little that the care home can do because any force is now seen as a violation of her human rights.

Dance videos for reference

A film I found when searching for mental health and dance...

and this one which is perhaps a bit off piste but stunning nonetheless

Sarah Petty - suicide attempt/murderer of her 2 year old son

On 24th October 1917 Sarah Petty left a suicide note and turned on the gas in her kitchen at 56 Wornington Road, London. In the note to her sister, she claimed that her husband who had returned from the war shellshocked and abusive was insane, not herself. Sadly her son died but her baby daughter survived. Despite the medical evidence that she was nursing her baby and was possibly not of sound mind (post natal depression?) at the time of the attempted suicide and the evidence of her sister that said she was bruised and battered by her husband, she was convicted of first degree murder. The archive contained all the transcripts of the murder trial.

My mother has tried to commit suicide a few times - mostly by overdose. Not aware of any notes she left but she has left notes and written letters at other times during her depression and psychotic episodes. I remember one incident when I was very young where I was pushed through a back door into the garden and next morning mum had been taken to hospital - possibly sectioned.

S L Sassoon - 2nd Lt and Poet

There were lots of medical records stating that Siegfried Lorraine Sassoon was fit for military service in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers from 1914 onwards.

However it seems that on July 13th 1918 he had some poetry published in The Nation Vol XXIII No 15 and because of the controversial nature of his description of life as a soldier on the frontline he was deemed unfit to serve and be in in charge of men... it appears he was a Captain by this point.

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front,^[1] he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war.^[2] Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy".

My father was not allowed to sign up to service in the second world war as he was suffering from a mental breakdown after a doodlebug collapsed the ceiling of his bedroom in their house on Green Street in Forest Gate, London. During Dad's last months in a hospice he told me that around this time he had to give up his university place at Kings College where he was studying a Physics degree. He was a very clever man (and possibly Aspergers - recognising himself in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night during his latter years!) and was always haunted by the fact that his two sisters both had degrees and he didn't. Sadly mental health issues in civilians weren't well supported as so many were coming back from the war with worse problems.

Mary Smith - lunatic

I was shown a small chest with a text passage dated 1811 that was an inventory of the contents that were kept when Mary Smith was committed to an asylum.

There was also a will that she had made when she apparently had 'sound mind'.

Then a separate inventory dated 1916 when the box arrived at the National Archive that listed all the items that had gone missing over the last 100 years.

So why were these items selected?
Where had they been kept for 100+ years?
What became of Mary?

Since 2007 I have had to clear out 2 homes on my mum's behalf; first our family home and then the retirement bungalow she shared with my father prior to his death in 2010. How to prioritise what to keep? The photos that were thrown away... The wedding dress left in the attic of our family home in Essex... This archive made me think of those things.

In Our Minds

'In Our Minds' is a collaborative project between the National Archives and UCA Archives exploring representations of mental health. 3 MA students and 2 members of staff have produced works in response to the archives. This display will take place at UCA and at The Nation Archives and will feature in a panel exhibition to allow for travel. The panel exhibition will also sit beside the objects, including a small sculpture, glass work and a wedding dress. It will also have an audio soundtrack.

Due to my mother suffering from mental health problems all her life and presently in a care home, I have wanted to make creative work around these themes for a very long time and was keen to take part in this project. I was invited to visit the archive to look at some collections that had been preselected by Archivists Ann Chow and Vicky Iglikowski. Due to pressure of work I wasn't able to make the visit until Thursday 7th July when I was shown a number of collections that have narratives around the theme of mental health.

Four stories stood out for me:

Mary Smith - 'lunatic' taken into an asylum in 1811
Siegfried Lorraine Sassoon - 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and a poet deemed mentally unsound in 1918
Sarah Petty - wife and mother who attempted suicide in 1917 but instead killed her 2 year 7 months old son
Olive Wharry - Suffragette and hunger striker 1912-1914

All these stories in some way resonated with what I have experienced with my own mother and were therefore of particular interest.

I hope to use some of the language and images from these collections to develop the choreography for Everyday People and have the first rehearsal tomorrow. The idea of this blog is to show some of the material to the dancers to help with the improvisation and to set movement tasks.

Every Day People

Every Day People is a choreography project directed by Sally Marie (Sweetshop Revolution) and produced by Rachel Palmer from The Dance Movement The project has just been awarded £15k from Arts Council England and will take 6 people, unconnected from the dance world through the process of developing an idea, devising a dance and presenting it to an audience. Sally Marie will facilitate each novice choreographer over a period of seven weeks to translate their ideas onto 4 professional dancers, before assisting them in developing these into six bite-size dances which will be presented at Farnham Maltings on Sunday 21st August, 8pm.

As part of The Dance Movement’s audience development plan the Company strives to find new approaches to connect people with dance.  Audience development reports provide evidence that people attend cultural activities they relate to. If a person wants to paint they can join an art club, sing they can join a choir but there are few ways in which a person can learn how to make a dance.

Through the Every Day People project The Dance Movement introduces people to dance by asking them to step inside the choreographic process, meet and work with dance professionals in order to develop a deep and long lasting relationship with dance.

Participation as a tool for developing a relationship with dance: The Pitmen Painters is a useful example of how participation in art can nurture art supporters. A group of coal miners unconnected from the art world took up an art history class. Their tutor thought the best way for them to develop their appreciation for art was to learn how to paint. Eighty years on their art is permanently exhibited and is described as capturing, ‘every aspect of life from their community, from scenes around the kitchen table to the dangerous world of the coal face’.

The Dance Movement envisages the six Every Day People, like the Pitmen Painters, will nurture their understanding and appreciation of dance as a result of participating in the project and hopefully go on to act as catalysts to ignite other people to experience and engage with dance culture. The project aims to open up a dialogue between those to whom dance is familiar and those to whom it is not. It aims to bring people together to find a common ground by creating something that matters both to the individual who is making it, the people who are dancing it and the people who are watching it.

DFSA Course Leader Rosie Gunn is delighted to have been chosen as one of the six Everyday People to take part in this project. "In my own art practice I am interested in dance for the camera and have worked with dancers on a couple of occasions, but have never had the opportunity to create a piece of dance and would relish this opportunity. I have no idea what I would do, or where to start, but would like to be able to create something that explored an important issue with an element of humour. I would like to make something that would appeal to dancers themselves to interact with the idea but also to draw in an audience through humerous moments and possibly move them to consider something on a deeper level."