R&D kickoff The Heist/The Deluge
Day 1
This week is the final week of our research into a project we have named the Heist at The Point.
The last few months have seen Abi, Carrie, and I research the logistical and technical questions that surround making a new immersive theatre piece, so this week in the Creation Space is our opportunity to try out some of the ideas we have collected over the last few months.
As the composer and co-artisitic director of Lîla Dance, this week is about finding the sound of The Heist.
Today we explored memories, and for me, a memory is about so much more than just the story of 'what happened'. It is about reliving the whole experience; the sounds, the smells, the feelings, the relationships, and the environment. So I spent a lot of my time listening to soundscapes and field recordings, looking for sounds which have both a sense of space and time. Sometimes the quality of sound can instantly transport the audience into a type of landscape, like a beach or a train station, and that's what really interests me about found sounds. The extra layer to this, is when the sound can imply a time or an age, like a particular decade.
This week we are also working with three new dancers, Kit and Sarah, who we chose from over a 100 dancers that auditioned for us a few weeks ago at Chisenhale Dance Space, and Alys who we met through MAP Dance. They are fantastic dancers, and we can't wait to see what we can achieve together this week.
Day 2
Thanks to Aya for a lively class in the creation space and to the wonderful local dancers from around The Point who joined us, always lovely to have new energy in space.
Whilst we were celebrating Artistic Director Dougie Evans's birthday with cake and birthday cheer we met this high spirit with the weighty subject of loss - how do you move forward when it seems pointless? Can the body move on whilst the mind is anchored in mourning what went before? Each of us attempted to locate this feeling of hopelessness within a solo response - the individual response to this idea revealed hugely different emotive dynamics but it seemed we all shared a physicality where undefined gestures often erupted into surging pathways and collapsing bodies... Falling through space only to have to rebuild and reconsider the bleakness of the situation.
Dougie underpinned the 'world' we were building with moody piano notes that I'm sure didn't help his birthday spirit! When presenting the solo it was powerful to feel engulfed in the vastness of the blank creation space whilst exposing something quite raw and honest.
Then off to The Point's local Turkish restaurant for birthday Mezzé!
Carrie
Day 3
Today was the third day of my first week of R&D with Lîla -and what a cosy one it's been in the creation space at The Point.
After last nights birthday antics at at the Turkish restaurant, which lead to the birth of my alter ego She-Ra; the day started with a challenging but fun company class by Abi. This was followed by a discussion surrounding the idea of how an item of clothing can hold a significant connection to a person. We explored this idea with the use of a jacket and how we would feel/react if that jacket ended up being worn by the wrong person. We used the clothing as a prop to somehow connect two bodies that want different things. This was helped and influenced by the smooth grooves of Dougie Evans. When sharing our ideas we realised that using a jacket provides endless creative possibilities including the creation of a person with 8 limbs.
So far this week has been awesome! It has been great to find out how Abi, Carrie and Dougie work and I'm very excited to discover what the rest of my time with Lîla has to offer. I hope this is just the beginning of a very special journey.
Sarah
Day 4
The day started with an energetic and predictably 'pacey' class by fast-twitch newby and 90's child Sarah Golding -wonderful to have a fresh energy in the space.
Today we attempted to give inanimate objects a life and even a personality! We discovered that this is possible through the correct use of focus, intention, emphasis, breath and suggestion. Yes, I realise that sounds like Derren Brown, but in actuality that is not far off! We worked with simple walking patterns to fully animate an immersive space with emphasis on a 3 dimensional perspective. Then we kep the walking and added a suitcase into the group and tried to create the effect that the suitcase had its own energy and own mind for directions. We also 'gave life' to lamps by duetting with them and by investing the lamp with an attitude and 'mind of its own' as well as using it as a light source.
Today we also asked questions about what it is to feel 'unhomed' with particular emphasis cultural identity. Kit, forgot how to walk and tried to re-learn it again, Aya recreated Japan in a suitcase, and Doug echoed her thoughts by providing a Tokyo inspired aural landscape. I also learnt that the northern line is not so bad- in Tokyo people are hired to literally push and squash people onto the underground tube to which the correct response from the commuter is "thank you"!
This R&D has also been about Lila working with new collaborators who are not familiar with our work and therefore not 'conditioned' by it. Joining us in the space today was lighting designer Mark Howland. He had some fantastic ideas about how to heighten themes within our work through the use of creative and often DIY light sources. Amazing what you can do with very little when you have an enormous amount of knowledge.
Wonderful also to share our findings with our lovely friends at The Point, who provided feedback to our sharing and gave us food for thought. If we're successful in getting our funding we will look forward to picking the creative brains of The Point's director, Owen Calvert-Lyon's when we re-visit the creation space in July.
I also want to extend a big thank you to all our dancers, collaborators, The Point technicians and staff for supporting the Lila team this week and helping us create sparks of creative potential. The food and cooking has not been half bad either!
Abi
Day 5
GOOOOD Friday! Apart from the creative people in the creation space, it was so quiet around The Point. We warmed the space up with the great class by Kit, and had a lot of people join us, which was lovely. Since yesterday (Thursday) we've been working with lighting designer Mark Howland. It's so exciting to experience all the materials that we're working with suddenly become so vivid and alive by his smart ideas. Kit and Alys created a visually striking duet with a lamp and a suitcase. We have been using a lot of props this week (look at the mess in the space!) and giving them their own mind and energy. It's been interesting to explore the viewer’s perception, by investigating the intention of how dancers manipulate the props, we can control what audience see and what audience don’t see. I love doing this -I love making magic.
Meanwhile, across the studio, Carrie and Sarah were working intensively on the magic of the body. Welcome to Lîla Sarah! Incredible. Must not forget to mention, today we set chairs around the space, because the audience might sit around us for this production. I sat on the side of space and realised that the movement vocabulary that Lîla produce suits the setting, because the movement is so tactile and sensual throughout the body, being up-close is great.
I have been working on my ‘bureaucratic’ solo. My task was to express memory of home and the sense of ‘unhomed’. I tried not to become too stereotyped or gestural. When I think of Japan, it is something very personal and I can’t quite describe, it’s all mixture of smell and sound and feeling that connects to my bone. How can I express that? I won’t tell you everything here but I think I managed to find some minimalistic representation through sound, smell, my body, Mark’s light, Dougie’s sound landscape. Immersed in it!
What a productive week so far, thanks everyone!
Aya
Day 6
Today was the last day of our week together at The Point, and the culmination of The Heist research and development. We began as we had on Monday, with Carrie leading us in Contact Improvisation. The focus of the class was on suggestion and this inspired Abi’s first task for the day. Throughout the week we had both consciously and unconsciously worked on very manipulative duets. Abi wanted us to take the slightly less clear-cut angle of ‘suggestion’ and first improvise and then set some movement with our partners. It was a difficult task due to the subtlety of the distinction between manipulation and suggestion. We defined manipulation as a way of moving your partner marked by a very clear intention, often occurring in two parts: first you take a body part and then you put it somewhere else. ‘Suggestion’ was far more open. Sometimes it was just an impulse with no clear direction; sometimes it was a direction with no endpoint; and most of the time we weren’t sure what it was at all (well, I wasn’t).
Generally ‘suggestion’ had an element of uncertainty, reflected both in the unclear action of the mover but also in the choice of possible responses by the moved. It’s such a subtle distinction but the task gave a new character and texture to our partner work. Eventually we structured an improvisation around the duet tasks, using the motif of circling as a group from earlier in the week combined with performing our duets together and alone before rejoining the group. Suddenly our week of character, text and prop work had become a fifteen-minute piece of pure dance.
Then it was time for lunch. We laid a table full of leftover ingredients from the week and gorged on everything we could (we wanted to do a Ready Steady Cook-style competition but couldn’t use the kitchen- maybe next time).
Having just doubled our body weight we made the sensible decision to finish with a text task. Abi asked us all to record one side of a conversation with ourselves on our phones and then script a response to be spoken in real-time. On top of this we had to find different physicalities for the two people talking (both played by us). For the afternoon the studio looked like an asylum with each of us in our own corner twitching and talking to ourselves. Some of us had fun playing with a disparity between the live speech and the recorded response. After a very genuine conversation with ‘her mum’ Sarah quite casually dropped an ‘I’m going to shave all my hair off’ bomb to which her mum responded with congratulations in line with the rest of the conversation. We then played with this idea some more, Carrie’s recorded character parroting ‘make sure to wear appropriate clothes’ to whatever live speech was thrown her way.
After some more playing with the task it was time to call it a day and finish the week. We left as we had arrived and Sarah and I ended up back in Waterloo station as though nothing had happened.
Kit Brown
Photo credit: Cover image and all photos by Dougie Evans. Dancers/artists: Joe Darby, Kai Downham, Aya Kobayashi, Carrie Whitaker & Gary Clarke,
