TTT meeting, Ana stegnar Class , June 2, 2013

Ana Stegnar’s class was on resistance. She proposed many dynamic exercises that invited you to be active and not to go dreaming around...

In terms of instant documenting Ana did a threefold proposition near the end of the class: the ones who wanted could go further into movement impro, others could go into documenting with electronic devices and if you wanted you could also observe from the side. I wanted to start documenting but arrived latest at the table with all the electronic devices. There was only a soundrecorder left. In the beginning I saw this device as a deficiency. I didn’t feel at all connected to recording only sound when it was about moving bodies. So first I entered into an observation mode. My focus went to the qualities of movement and especially to  the “sound feedback” these bodies gave and received while touching the floor. Then I decided to use the soundrecorder and trace these sound dynamics in the space and the group. While recording I felt confronted to a chaos of noise and I was questioning already how this could be of use as an Idoc…
At a certain point Rob Hayden started to integrate the soundrecorder by breathing into the recorder, trying to give outer sound to inner sounds (f.ex. tapping on his chest in the rhythm of his heart beating) and then playing also with sounds. This focus on sound travelled through the group as other people started to experiment more with the voice. I noticed how this device became somehow an input for the dancers too. It was not just an object outside the group documenting what the group was doing, how they were moving, but it became a document and a device that was a part of the experience.

Attached you find a soundrecording that is showing this evolution…

In the meantime I was questioning also my state as a documentor, my drive to “capture information”, next to the state of the dancers whom where completely emerged in movement. Since I was somehow convinced that I had to stay close to the dancers to be able to record sound, I felt I was entering an intimate space of the dancers. Was I intruding their space or not?

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
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