It's August

July is over, and this morning the sun is out. It's still a chilly 9 degrees, but the sky is blue and the air is full of the promise of Summer. I'm sitting having a coffee down the road from my house, reading a book titled Moving Together; Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance by Rudi Laermans. It's the kind of book I find myself spending several hours digesting just a few pages, sometimes with a dictionary and thesaurus open beside me.

As chance would have it, my bookmark fell out, so I used the crack in the spine to try and find my place. I opened to page 115, and immediately the first paragraph on that page jumped out at me.

"Performance's only life is the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance", says Peggy Phelan. The paragraph continues "In a dance work, movements or stillness do not only repeatedly appear and disappear in a present resisting representation, but also constantly refer to each other blindly or reflexively, through their implicit entwining or through repeated motions that make an explicit link with a previous dance action."

Thinking about the movement and physicality within Night Sweats, the beginning of the following paragraph has particular significance; "Theatre dance is temporalized self-referentiality: each movement is the temporal other of one or more actions already performed or yet to be performed, to which that movement refers... A dance event happened now (and here), and this present only exists because it differs from both a before and an after."

It's a convenient coincidence that I have stumbled upon this passage at this time. Beginning to choreograph is a daunting task for me, but somehow these words make me feel more at ease. I have also confirmed that I will be attending a 10 days workshop run by Strut Dance in the coming weeks, run by Andrew Morrish and Humphrey Bower.

Within the workshop description is the following list of intentions:

"we will move, we will talk we will speak we will improvise we will write we will perform. we will be busy and excited!”

And with those sentiments in mind, I'd better not miss my bus!