Movement Sketch: Mending Wall

First presented at CSM, Back Hill in the Black Space Performance Lab on November 10, 2009

Conceived, improvised and performed by: Ruchita Madhok and Payal Wadhwa

Over the course of 3 weeks, the students of the MA PD&P attended a workshop taken by respected choreographer and dancer Athina Valha. An artist and director herself, she works with multi-disciplinary teams of people. Her workshop with us focussed on the relationship of the body to a performance space, to itself and to other bodies that inhabit a performance space. We learned many interesting ideas and concepts from her through intense 3 hour sessions in which we really put our bodies to the grind. I’ve never really been a performer, so the whole workshop was an entirely new experience for me. For a change I learned what it meant to be “directed” and to “perform” and to convert an idea into a physical, bodily expression.

At the end of the workshop, we were required to create “movement pieces” as a final assignment.

Payal and I decided to start with a piece of text and see where it would/could take us in terms of physical expression. The text we selected was Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. We decided to ascertain only 3 points in the narrative and improvise the rest in-performance.

The are a couple of pictures from our visualization process in which we used studio chairs to build this idea of a wall:

How does one mend an existing wall?

Coming up with ways to improvise a wall on stage

A big thanks to Petya for helping us with lighting. Here’s the video from the performance thanks to Pat Ku and some “movement pictures” courtesy Duygu Ozturk.

Note: The music we’ve used is from the film Le Fabuleux Destin de Amelie Poulain. It was composed by Yann Tiersen and all copyright rests with the creators. No copyright infringement intended here by its use.

The performance itself is only an exploration of how movement based work can be created. It was intended to be a study or a sketch of a performance and is in no way a finished piece of work. Given some time, we’d definitely like to work with different kinds of text and try out other methods too.

The feedback was quite positive from our tutors and we’re really glad we took this approach to the assignment. We got a new perspective doing it. Sometimes as directors or visualisers, we have certain expectations from our actors, but up until this point, it was really difficult to understand what it is that a director demands from a performer and how a performer can deliver on what is required of him/her.

Stretching Space @ Kala Ghoda Arts Festival ’10, Mumbai

So many months ago, when Ruchita was in Ahmedabad, figuring out life, the universe and what the heck she was supposed to be doing with it, she went picture-taking with her Nikon D50 one day and came back with an idea.

That idea transformed inside her head and on her computer screen and became a series of collages of spaces she encountered on her picture making trips to the Old City and around Paldi village. She drags stillwater, the hooked nose and jeetpal around the city with her, annoys them endlessly while fidgeting with her digital files until she makes 12 collages she really likes. Then she puts them away and returns to Mumbai

Fast forward one year and stillwater sends her a call for entries to a photography group show at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2010 in Mumbai. Ruchita thinks. Then decides to send her collages in as an entry: just to play with the curators a bit.

A month later they say Yes, they would like her to put up a wall at their exhibition.

And now you have it: Stretching Space a selection of my photo-collages running at the KGAF ’10 from February 6 to February 14, 2010. It’s open all-day, everyday on the pavement outside Max Mueller Bhavan at Kala Ghoda

Here is a collage from the set. Click on the image to see a larger version. To see more, please visit my Flickr set at this address

Incident @ Central Saint Martins, Back Hill

On December 2, 2009, I was part of a group from our class that performed a site-specific piece of work under the guidance of Geraldine Pilgrim, noted theatre director, visualiser and artist in the UK.

In the UK it is a growing trend to create performances and installations that are made specifically for certain sites such as buildings, parks and public spaces. These works derive their inspiration and often their content from the space in which they will be performed. They rely on the histrocial use of the space, its relevance in the local ecology and place in contemporary myth and culture. Sometimes these spaces are abandoned buildings doomed to demolition, sometimes they are open-air public areas like train stations or bus shelters and other times they are working edifices like museums, schools or colleges.

Our tutor Geraldine Pilgrim has been creating this work for many years, even before it became such a widespread phenomenon to bring theatre into such unexpected spaces, and is the artistic director of the Corridor group. To find out more about their work, visit their website here. Before working with the Corridor group she had her own visual theatre company called Hestitate and Demonstrate which was funded by the Arts Council back in its day.

Our Workshop and Performance

The assignment: INCIDENT
BRIEF: A site – specific project involving research and practical application around a selected given theme; culminating in student showings of site- specific performance/installations in selected sites either in a chosen space in the Back Hill Building or within walking distance of the college.

THEMES: Each group will select collaboratively one of these subjects as a starting point, to create a performance/ installation which lasts a maximum of 10 minutes inspired by their chosen space. Each group will find a site and get permission to use it for their performance installation.
•    A Memory
•    A Celebration
•    A Suicide
•    AN Affair
•    A Dream
•    A Crime

Or a combination of any of the above
ENVIRONMENT: Select a space inside or outside and create an environment in accordance with the chosen theme/s
COSTUME: Create or find a costume for your own character in the performance/installation
OBJECTS: Use one object or more if required
MOVEMENT: You can create a still image, or movement can happen within the piece. You may also use Puppetry/animation of objects
TEXT/SOUND: Maximum one sentence of text plus live or recorded sound or just live or recorded sound
LIGHT: You can use practical light i.e. table light, torch or theatrical light   You do not have to use light but must consider it.
VIDEO: You may also use video and animation as part of your installation

The Green Group

Our group consisted of the motley leftover people who hadn’t been able to find a group in time. We bonded together over the 10 days of this assignment and were rather pleased with our process and outcome. My fellow Green Groupers were: Baron Kim, An Li, Jin, Artemis Katsampani and Zsofi Kocsmarszki.

Our Site: The Back Hill building where Central Saint Martins’ BA and MA course in Performance Design and Practice are located used to be a printworks building at one point in time. Our studios are located in the basement and sub-basment of the college and, hidden away in the BA studios, we found a new room the morning we started this project, that had not been there before. It was a planchest and locker room filled with cupboards and storage racks. Perfect! We felt inspired the minute we walked into it together and decided to develop our performance there.

Of course, things don’t always turn out the way you plan them: sometimes they turn out even better! Once we had lit the space, we knew this was going to be something special.

Our final theme was DREAM. The audience entered in groups of 6 and the total duration of the piece was about 4 minutes. We were supposed to perform it only 3 times, but it proved so popular that we did 5 encores. Here are images from my sketchbook and also the final performance (without the audience)

The Black Hole at the Tate Modern

When I received an invite from a A Twin Fish a.k.a. stillwater to join her for a talk at the Tate Modern on February 6, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go. I didn’t have the time, and to be honest, I was still grappling with the outcomes of the symposium I’d attended 2 days earlier. She managed to convince me however, that I pretty much HAD to attend because there was to be a story-telling performance involved. So of course, my ears pricked up, my brain started to get excited and I agreed to join her at the Tate’s Experiences of the Dark lecture series, this particular event being titled The Black Hole.

So what is this lecture series about, and why did it get me excited? The Tate Modern (like all great museums should do) has organised a special set of talks, workshops and performance in and around the installation of a new artwork by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is. This installation is part of the Tate’s Unilever series which has included works by Anish Kapoor and Juan Muñoz in the past. These works are usually installed in the museum’s massive Turbine Hall and are free to the public to come, observe and experience.

How It Is by Miroslaw Balkav

When I walked into the Turbine Hall recently however, I looked around for this famous new piece that everyone was talking about. “Where on earth is How It Is??” I asked myself. I couldn’t see anything anywhere. I read plaques that annouced the piece, saw Miroslaw’s name everywhere and yet I couldn’t figure where I was suppoed to be looking. Until I realised that I was supposed to be looking at a rather large metal container sitting at the back of the Turbine Hall, looking very smug, fitting in rather too well with the environment and mimicking the surrounding architecture so spectacularly, that I hadn’t realised it was a “work of art”. I tend to be daft about these things, but as soon as I walked around to the entrance of the installation, it ocurred to me that this experience was going to be anything but ordinary.

The installation – one might even call it sculpture or architecture – is a 13 meter high, 30 meter deep box-space filled with beautiful velvety darkness. At you stand on the threshold of the darkness, wondering just how to venture into it, its sheer size is awe-inspiring. That awe quickly turns to terror and aprehension before soothing you into numbness as you find yourself surrounded by the inkiness, the outside world reduced to just a hum and the insides of this space becoming clearer and clearer as your eyes adjust to the absence of light. It’s a fantastic experience and it conjures up all kinds of imagery: of black holes and dark alleyways; of long corridors and deep trucks; the bogeyman and the bodies of strangers to bump into as you fumble through the container, feeling its walls, breathing in the dark.

“The lecture can’t be all that bad,” I thought to myself as I remembered the installation and got down to booking my tickets online.

Johnny Walker commercial by Jamie Rafn

In an age when ad firms consider an audience’s attention span to be nearly as short as a goldfish’s (no offense to goldfish), it’s refreshing and altogether flattering that Justin Moore at BBH London came up with such compelling copy for what was to be Johnny Walker’s nearly 6-minute long film commercial.

What I really appreciate about this commercial is that it is six minutes of pure, classic story-telling combined with clean, clear filmmaking boosted by Robert Carlyle’s excellent performance. When one is trying to tell a story – especially the story of a brand as well known as this – it’s easy to get entangled in special effects or trendy shot taking. Further, given the ubiquitous presence of images all around us, it’s even easier to forget the power of a strong oral narrative delivered by an able actor. After all it isn’t everyday that one comes across any kind of publicity material with more than a paragraph of copy in it let alone text to suffice five minutes worth of talking.

A simple and very effective piece of communication if you ask me, heightened by this: the fact that the whole advertisement was shot in one single take!

To know more about the making of the film in an interview with its director click through here.

Movie Narrative Charts

Thanks to Gunjan Singh, I came across the webcomic xkcd and their absolutely hilarious visualization of the storylines from a few well-known Hollywood films. My favourite is the Lord of the Rings chart!

To see a larger version of the image, click here

Image (C) www.xkcd.com

Dastangoi

The word “dastan” like “kahani” means tale or story – only a dastan is what you would get if you took a kahani, stretched it, wrapped it around itself, added a few dozen characters, stewed it in magic and soaked in overnight in a steaming cauldron of the beauty that is Urdu and then served it up on a platter decorated by the skilled dastango’s voice. For the magic of the magic of the dastan and it’s telling lies in the physical act of recitation: in the inflections of the performer’s voice, his choice of words, the whisper that creeps into his voice when he describes palace intrigue or the shrill pitch of his giggle when he takes on a princess in a playful tease.

The tradition of Dastangoi is a centuries’ old practice of oral story-telling. As I understand it, the artform was popular under the patronage of Mughal emperors and at least Akbar is known to have practiced it himself. The practice became especially popular in the 19th century when dastans began to be composed in Urdu up until which point they had been composed in Persian. Many of the dastans that survive today come from the Dastan of Hamza and they are still with us not in the least due to their immense epic-scale popularity as printed stories from the 19th century. Of course there are as many different styles of Dastangoi as there are dastangos and each practitioner brings his own special flavour to a performance.

In July this year I was fortunate enough (and free enough) to attend many of Motley theatre company’s performances at their fortnight-long festival at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai. The company has made itself a unique niche with its performances that work with the idea of “storytelling on the stage” and among the many of their thought-provoking productions, my favourite was their Dastangoi narration. The performance I witnessed was derived from a volume of the Dastan of Hamza. Written by veteran dastango Mahmood Farooqui, joined by Murtaza Danish Husain and the inimitable Naseeruddin Shah, it is one of many dastangois that are seeing a revival across India and indeed, the world.

A still from the performance at the Motley festival. Image from the blog http://dastangoi.blogspot.com/

The artform saw a rapid decline in the 20th century as did the language of the dastans themselves. The performances that we see today however, are thanks largely to the efforts of dedicated dastangos like Mahmood Farooqui and his team. If you’re interested in knowing more and in being a part of a dastangoi yourself, I highly recommend their blog which you will find here.

Of course there are other performers discovering the magic of this form as well. In June I was at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai for a Ekjute company’s production called ‘Hum Kahen Aap Sune’. Directed by Nadiraji Babbar the performance was supposed to be a re-contextualised adaptation the dastangoi tradition. Since it is a relatively new production, you may still get a chance to see it in Mumbai or when Ekjute goes on tour. Catch either of these performances around Mumbai or Delhi later this year or early in the next.
References:

http://dastangoi.blogspot.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamza_ibn_%E2%80%98Abd_al-Muttalib

and publicity material handed out during each of the above mentioned performances

Jonathan Harris on ted.com

Jonathan Harris is an artist, scientist and – as he calls himself – internet anthropologist. To me, his work speaks of the innate human desire to speak, to share and to commune through the medium of stories and celebrate in their diversity the myriad ways in which we express ourselves.

A Brooklyn based practitioner Harris creates online art derived from his computer programmes that collate and visualise unfiltered internet data into beautiful interfaces. At times intensely personal, at other times universal, his work uses technology to bring at times disjoint and unconnected ideas together in unconventional and fresh new ways.

In July 2008 I saw a video of Harris’ talk at a Ted event. This video has stayed with me ever since and may even be (in unbeknowest subconscious ways) the inspiration behind the name Kahani Designworks.

In the spirit of sharing, here it is for everyone: