Creation processes for real time Performance
“It’s not what you do it’s how you do it” (Sharon Smith)
I have been investigating theatre, dance and music with live performance for 45 years. I take a microscopic view on the role improvisation plays in the creation process combining my background as a maker and performer with a curiosity for advances in brain studies. I have worked with music artists from various backgrounds who share my passion for interdisciplinary real time performances. I include text and objects in my performances with an ear on how this can integrate musically as well as produce an objectified meaning. My study and practice of the body is the glue for how I combine all aspects of the performance arts. I accept artists from all performance art backgrounds without prejudice concerning technical skills or aesthetic boundaries.
Tell the brain to tell the mind to shut up – body obey me
I guide performers through physical exercises that highlight how the eyes and ears effect movement choices using my research in “why we learn to walk”. I extend the workshop towards improvisation sessions setting a fictional front in the studio space and then declare this as a platform to choose pause, flow or exit. All three of these actions are studied separately through out the workshop. These three choices provide the frame for a composition to take place while misunderstanding, coincidence, messiness, emotions, intuition, impulse and inspiration feed the content. The improvisation sessions are given a delegated time frame with an option for the workshop group to shift, drop or lift the space at will. That responsibility places each individual in a position to be fully awake or they will recognisably loose the thread of the creative activity in play. Individual development and understanding of presence is critical in this workshop. To amplify how presence is revealed in the artists work, I have invented games that encourage us to reveal vulnerability and/or expressionism.
Major question introduced to the group “What is your relationship to public and how does that relationship formulate the way you compose your work”?
Creativity is messy. Three choices arise out of the messiness; Pause Flow and Exit. Each of these choices are a mountain of study and each of these choices are shared in the space under the guidance of the performer / artists relationship to their public.
I am not interested in the moment, even though it does feel good. I am interested in the fact that time is passing us by. Time moving is what we share with music, sound, sonic, public and most obviously “life”.
There is a difference between seeing, looking and watching. A difference between hearing and listening. An artists chooses if they wish for a public to watch or to see – to hear or to listen.
I choose for the public to see and listen and do my best to gather a crowd in that quest. It doesn’t always work and it is never 100% of the public. But because I choose it, who I am as artists is clarified.
The combination of moving, seeing, hearing, feeling and deliberately volunteering to expose myself in front of an audience alters my perception of time, space and emotions. What I do for a living is an induced neuron madness.
A fully awake body is rarely pedestrian. The body awake needs to be discovered and demands a discipline beyond everyday tasks.
And yet when movement or dance does not respect the beauty of the body in pedestrian, I become uncomfortable.
I am not attracted to future pain. Anything less than feeling the body is like watching a dog trying to learn ballet.
It is abundantly clear when the artist choice has been closed down by solutions portrayed as “ideas”. Scrounging for authorship, these “ideas” place a filter between artist and public. Off with their heads, let the artists choose.
JUNE 29-30 Saturday and Sunday / 13:00-17:00 / One day €60 / Two days, €100.
Limited to 25 participants TICTAC ART CENTRE
Rue Emile Carpentier 34, 1070 Anderlecht, Brussels, Belgium.
Register: katie@katieduck.com
You can make payments into our accounts at: Stichting MAGPIE, Bank: ING Amsterdam / Bank address – Kinkerstraat 130a, 1053EE, Amsterdam / Bank account number (same as the IBAN code): NL22INGB0009476524 / BIC: INGBNL2A
Videos from Katie Duck can be found on this link
