TTT meeting Brussels, Juliana Neves class , June 5, 2013

In the second part of her class, Juliana Neves, proposed us to work with an emotional state to generate choreography. We where guided from level 1 to level 5, passing from extreme peace to extreme nervosity and reversing the process. Then Juliana asked us to recall three movements and to teach it to someone else. The performance of this short choreography was considered as a documentation for this part of the class.

I choose to document the process of exchanging the movement material and I filmed  Inaki Azpillaga and Maya Dalinsky doing so with an Ipad. Later on, I made an interview of Maya about her experience of performing the shared choreography . In her interview, Maya talks about how to consider movements as documents changed her way of performing them .

This statement awakes my personal interrest in terms of what dance documentation can be, and what is the life spend of a document.  In "Visions, a research on poetic  documentation based on Lisa Nelson work" that I am sharing  with some guests , we also want to consider performance as the document of a process, and see how this statement modifies the performance activity and  the audiance's perception.

During the last residency we had in Bains::Connective, Brussels, the possibility to consider a performance as a document  felt supported by a sentence that my guest Eva Maes, BMC® practitionner, said one day . According to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the brain was the last one to know. Firs, I was very intriged by this statement. Then  I started to see the activity of  the brain as a documentation activity (documentation is always late, it always refers to the past). The brain job was  to register informations, to provide, like any other type of document, a momentary stablility that would be re-lived and questionned in the next moment . This made me think that, the only difference between a written text and a perception could resides in their life spend, in the time they take to emerge, live/serve and die. Since then, I tend to consider living as a way of documenting and documenting as a way of living and I am interrested in what this paradox can create for performers and watchers.

Here is the written transcription od Maya's Interview. I took the liberty to erase some words to make it more readable.

 "Yesterday in Juliana’s class, she asked us to recall three movements or create three movements based on the explorations we had done. I just found it really interesting that while I was making them --but even more so while the three couples were teaching each other their movements-- it really felt like the movements were documents of the experience that we'd had earlier in the day. So just having this feeling totally changed how it felt also to perform them and to use them. Because every time I would do one of my own movements, but also one of Inaki’s movements that he had taught me, it felt as though I were reading. You know, like if you have a paper document with information on it and you would read them. That how it felt to move and especially to move using someone else's movements but from a shared experience. It was really like I was reading Inaki’s archive, reading inaki’s document, his take on what had happen for him. And it was really fun because also when you're reading the movement --my own or someon else's-- embodying them, it was also like when you read a document: it makes a kind of sense, it has a chronology. It has a beginning and an end. And so when I would do it too, it felt like I begin somewhere specific, I begin with the first word, I begin with the first sensation or the first intention and then it grows and grows the way that maybe words or a drawing or any kind of document will kind of have a start and take shape and then, have a conclusion too, or ends somewhere. Ends not just anywhere, ends in a place where its has to end." Maya Dalinsky

TTT stands for Teaching The Teachers . It is an initiative from Jardin d'Europe which aims at giving an answer to a European dance scene in need of new teaching and training methods in the field of Contemporary Dance, taking into account the various forms enriching dance creation nowadays, such as dramaturgy, scenography, lighting, visual arts practices, transforming movement into film/image, dance photography. Respective activities e.g. workshops, lasting each of them about ten days - are taking place at the relevant intiatives/venues of the participating co-organisers (Ultima Vez for Brussels
).