Hands & Feet

Spent some days working with Fumiyo on the piece we do for next year. Early conversations still. Some nice things in the studio. On the floor of the space we were working in at Rosas many coloured dots and lines of tape, red, blue, yellow, green – the dots  like oversize confetti, diagram-ghosts, marking points for the geometry that backbones so much of Anne Teresa’s choreography. The week before (in London) I watched the Reich evening, in which the standout work was Phase, to Reich’s Piano Phase. I loved it, in its tension, and apparent singularity – the dance like the music a simple-but-complex, complex-but-simple braid of repetition and doubling. Stunning. Ant Hampton has been blogging some lately which I’m glad of – he wrote nice things about the performance here.

Really noticing these days how much I watch hands in movement – was momentarily  obssessing over what I saw as a difference between the hands of the two dancers in this work (not visible in the grainy YouTube clip of course!). Watching Fumiyo in the studio too it’s certainly her hands and her face that I seem drawn to as she moves – maybe not so much that these are what I see more, but rather that they are what i can frame a comment on or through – as if these more easily narrative parts of the body (?) allow me a language with which to start speaking. I’m not sure. Sara Jansen watches the rehearsals too and at some point commented on what F. was doing with her feet. I’m suddenly reminded that whilst I must have seen how she moved them, and certainly felt it, I can’t even start, for the moment, to describe or speak of it. It’s either not in my memory, or where it is, I don’t have the words with which to extract it.

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New York based theatre academic Jonathan Kalb did an interview with me a while back, then came to Portland to see Quizoola! and Sight is the Sense… His generous and smart response to the work can be seen online.

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