Rehearsal 3_2.7.18

Two weeks of thinking and review went into this rehearsal, as we did not hold rehearsal last week due to conflicts.

The same will be true of the coming week. I will be filthy rich and boiling over with ideas by the time our next rehearsal comes round.

We began today walking through the room, again concentrating on space: the shape of space, the shape of ourselves in space, proximity to each other, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the like.

I brought into the room the image of google maps in Virtual Reality. This brought up discussion about
-points in space,
-sensors in space and on our bodies,
-backspace: what we see and what we sense,
-the concept of “tech-ify-ing” the space with our minds
THIS idea about tech and our minds brought more conversation about our relationship with technology and what it does to our bodies, which is much of what is curious to me about this process with the cameras. How interesting for it to show up from another angle!

We moved into some deep and physical improvisations focusing on this image of the room as a Virtual Reality space, and it brought really different kinds of movement out of our bodies. Initiations were coming from parts of the body and taking on qualities that were unusual and exciting.

Moving on from this idea, but keeping the knowledge of it in the space, we moved into duets with the cameras: both people moving but one person in charge of holding the camera: switching back and forth between who was holding the camera.

After a few rounds of this, we moved into this same exercise, improvising as a quartet. This started to happen anyway pretty quickly.

We started just improvising with the cameras on, not worried too much about considering the frame of the camera.
Then we tried making more conscious choices with the frame of the camera.

Some reflections from this rehearsal:
-Who is in charge and what do they see? (KL)
-Is this a sextet or a quartet? (KL)
-How much space do cameras take up? see? (KL)
-Heightened awareness- activating the space. We started to make some distinct choices about composition toward the end. (KL)
-I was a bit taken by being a moving frame and wanted to see it right away. (CM)
-What happens to a face when it meets a camera or looks past a camera to someone else’s face (CM)
-When there was a clear or mutually known relationship between subject and camera it was exciting to find that in moments of doing without prior planning. (CM)
-There is a specific intimacy to filming one person (CM)
-Surprised at how this version makes me think more about how I’m seen than camera in place even though both are specific and not human sight. (CM)
-reaching out and in at the same time (KM)
-Alive (KM)
-Split attention to outer and inner (KM)
-Red light beaming (KM)
-How can we connect beyond making moving lines in space? (KM)
-Something happens in a human’s body and while the actual thing wasn’t caught on camera, the movement of it was. I could be holding the camera and see someone else with my eyes, the catching of that shake in my body makes the footage shake. (BRJ)
-It’s a long game of telephone. (BRJ)
-I felt very aware of Beatrice because of her light (BRJ) (Regarding Camera B)
-I thought for a moment that all my cells were cameras, and the camera was another cell. (BRJ)

It is hard, HARD, right now to hold the camera and move. It’s too early yet in this process for us to know exactly how to compose and be moving at the same time. I am not interested at the moment as much in what kind of accidental footage we get while we are moving. I am more interested in how we can be constant fluctuating partitioners in this process of seeing what is happening in the space. I am interested in how our ideas of framing the space can be improvisational with our movement, without thinking of ourselves as “in” or “out” for moments. Can this all be a cohesive, ambiguous space of viewing and doing?

I am editing together a tiny clip from this rehearsal to be posted upon completion.

Onward.