Category: Blog

Performance Philosophy!

Performance Philosophy!

“AWE: an experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure you mental models of the world to assimilate it”

Enjoy this video, especially if your brain needs a kick. It looks at the science of new experiences and our responsibility to have them.

I like to think of Jason Silva’s Shots of Awe as big thoughts packaged for our soundbite culture.

I don’t think ‘sound bite’ is bad – we train our brains to have fast data intake which is incredible useful and doesn’t stop us enjoying languorous fiction. I’d love forcing my brain in to Baudrillard – but I don’t have the time anymore – so Jason Silva’s great – his thoughts resonate in my head in no time I have now replaced my cigarette break with a philosophy break.

I hope your world is as touched by these two point four nine minutes as mine is.

Camilla
@camillarts

6 million, million

6 million, million

Light Year – I love meaningful paradoxes.

I recently wrote a post about our relationship with words and spoke about how we use them in performance – but I started thinking more about the first part of the post regarding etymology as I love the word ‘lightyear’.

When you start to learn about space, distance and time become related. (And then you start thinking about time travel but that’s a whole other project ;] ) A light year is the distance light travels in one year. It’s a unit of distance rather than time. I love that humans are so relational in our speaking. If we can’t describe something (like High Street) we describe it by naming it to the most similar thing we know – like pom de la terre. Surnames were professional led (Haddad is one of the most common Arabic – meaning Smith). Surname joiners such as such as ‘bar’ ‘von’ and ‘del’ all state progeny. Descriptive words degrade over time, for ‘Grape Lane’ it was due to ideas o decency (google that one – it’s dirty).

So when I hear ‘light year’ I cannot imagine almost 6 million, million miles (9.4607 × 1012 I can’t imagine 6 million, million of anything.

To my partner’s dismay I have very little grasp of maths or science and when he starts using phrases like ‘to the power of’ I switch off (sorry Greg!) and just think – it’s really frelling big. I can get my head around a year. I can get my head around the fact that light is*really* fast. It works in my head. It’s poetic. Hearing that our nearest solar system Alpha Centuri is 4.367 light years away just makes me go ‘wrahhhhh’. If you like that feeling, I thoroughly recommend The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a very intense (read visceral) novel which is philosophical and immense. As a reader of science fiction you kinda become immune to the amazingness of space travel – Russell’s communication of it appeals to science thinkers but also dreamers like me with the emotional impact. The characters travel there and back in what is only )) months to them. Which is 40 years for earth, for the people they love, for the lives they knew.It’s a stark reminder of how interconnected space and distance are, although it doesn’t really affect our everyday lives much except for the additional 20 minutes it takes me to commute in trainers or high heels (IJAD’s office is up a hill).

I’d love to know if you ever feel affected by the time/distance thing – do you fly across timezones much? How does your linear perception of experience cope? I have a few more things I’m curious about too – indulge me on #InfiniteReach

– Can you imagine 6 million, million of anything? If so, what?

A relationship with words

A relationship with words

One of the things I love about new things whether they’re people, products or discoveries is that they highlight our cultural relationship with language.

Latin and Greek are of course the standard fall-to options; it’s amazing fun to annoy etymologists by mixing them up in words such as ‘automobile’, ‘dysfunction’ and did you know ‘octopodes’ is the correct plural of ‘octopus’?

We have a very intimate relationship with words – they’re collective agreements of meaning and I’m sure we’ve all felt failure about the ineffable qualities of emotions such as ‘love’ and the feelings of ‘longing’ – which supports a whole music industry.

You can’t pin a language down; we hear tabloid headlines that the word ‘database’ replaces ‘foxglove’ in a children’s dictionary, ‘twerk’ enters common parlance or an artist coins a new phrase like Dr Suess’s ‘nerd’.

Ralph Fiennes claimed that Twitter is ruining the English language and he’s not alone in thinking this. What do you think? I lean to the side that whatever aids accurate expression of our personal interpretation of life is valid. I saw ‘FML’ in the Evening Standard the other day – and I thought it was quite eloquent. Twitter is probably the most recent mass-modifier of our mumblings (as TV or radio were to their times) and IJAD’s really interested in the relationship it has with our work. As you know, we’re interpreting what you tweet or write to us on 30th immediately within the show, as well as your sharings inspiring the development work itself – as you can see here (hyperlink to vine).

The movement IJAD uses aims to have meaning without words. To reproduce the complex nature of a feeling within a context so that language is not required to speak to your soul – or any pre-existing understanding of dance vocab – that’s why we absorb many cultural experiences and touch many nations around the world (we had 11 countries in one night in March 2013) and join them together.

We’re getting a lot of poems which we’re finding electrifying to work with in the studio. I tend to think of a writer’s relationship with words similar to a photographer – the subject is there – but the wordsmith or photographer selects only certain things to reveal which makes reality more and less than what it is.

IJAD starts with universal themes – and after asking you what you think – ends with a highly culturally specific piece of work. We’re asking you to lend the way you see the world to us and watch as we weave it into a powerful wordlessness.

Follow #InfiniteReach – we’re asking what inspires you about space at the moment.

And if language is your thing, here’s a quote from Stephen Fry:
“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”

Open rehearsals!

Open rehearsals!

Rehearsals have started and you’re invited! Come and see how it all works…

Where? The Science Museum

When? 21st October and 28th October 2013 between 10.30am and 2pm.

What happens in a rehearsal is pretty fun. Sometimes it can be intense and the focus is overwhelming, sometimes we can’t stop laughing, sometimes we discover new things about ourselves. We want you to see this because it’s an important part of the creative process – a performance doesn’t just happen. Originality and expression evolve and we watch those paths, selecting the ones which we think you’ll find most interesting.

Come take a look. We hope it will inspire and excite you. We hope it’ll demystify what happens on stage. If you’re artsy, you’re more than welcome to bring your camera, sketchbook or whatever you love.

All welcome! Tweet at @ijaddance if you’re planning to come and we’ll send you directions

Camilla
@camillarts

Call for writers…

Call for writers…

Embedded Journalism is getting a lot of attention at the moment.

With the spread of online critics and citizen journalism (one report suggests that 20% of theatre goers publish their experience online) and the sad loss of more and more newspaper critics (the Independent on Sunday axed their critic and the Evening Standard allows just 220 words), it seems ever harder to find out what a show is like. And then comes the internet! Blogs and self-published articles are a great way for us, as a company, to gauge response to our work. For those that are familiar with us, you’ll know that we love social media engagement during our performances. (Phone) Cameras are strictly allowed!

Having an outsider report on what happens behind the scenes (literally) is a rather delicious appeal. So we thought we’d ask you.

We’re offering two lovely and passionate performance lovers the chance to follow the progress of Joumana Mourad, IJAD’s Artistic Director.

You’ll see each process of the performance unfold and build, culminating in three shows in one night at The Science Museum.

You’ll need to be able to write and be armed with a camera (phone). So long as you can translate your experience into words and publish them shortly after you have them, we’d love to hear from you. If you have your own blog, that’s great. If not, we can set you up a very simple one which you can continue to use after the project finished.

To apply, email Camilla – camilla@ijaddancecompany.com – with a short article (no more than 600 words) about an interesting art experience you had with at least one accompanying image. It can be anything from a piece of graffiti you walked past today, to an awesome theatre show – or some clouds you made with sugar.

All applications need to be in by 10th October and you need to be free during some weekdays to attend rehearsals and meet with the creative team. This is for our show on 30th October so you definitely need to be free in the evening for that one!

I look forward to finding out what art makes you go ‘wow’

Camilla

TEDx

TEDx

Yesterday Artistic Director, Joumana, went to the TEDx event at the Albert Hall.

‘Inspirational doesn’t come close. Most of the day was based on people who had visions springing from Prince Albert who helped to establish the cultural centre in Kensington & Chelsea or, as we learnt, Albertropolis. The collection of cultural sites and educational institutions would work to support all human progress in culture and science. This TEDx location was an ideal setting for an event that explored art and science and how they fit together in the modern world.

The speakers were a variety but they came together in their belief in their own internal powers and their cutting edge practice in their respective field.
The speaker who blew me away was Jessica Thom. Her creation, Touretteshero is incredible. Nicholas McCarthy’s talk was also a great example of people defeating physical nature in order to be more than functional, to be incredible.

A few of the speakers were inviting people to be creative, to indulge in their hobbies and for me this has never been more relevant. You only have to look at the #TEDx feeds on Twitter to see the conversations that inspirational stories can spark. The use of Twitter at the event made the experience even richer. This is the kind of engagement that we want to encourage through the In-finite Space project at the Science Museum. We are inviting people to be creative through Twitter (we are @IJADdance by the way) in order to provide our artists with a new foundation for their response. Overcoming physical limitations was a theme of TEDx that got me thinking about the existence of a more universal limitation for humans. Does digital interaction lead to richer social and cultural experiences? Can we learn, from these inspirational examples, how to bridge the gaps between the physical and the digital space we inhabit?’

Follow us on Twitter to find out about why the In-Finite Space performance won’t work without you!

In-Finite Incarnates In Switzerland

In-Finite Incarnates In Switzerland

It’s easy when you sell out a show to think that you’ve done everything right. However, as ever, we like to set the bar a little higher. We like to think we’re more concerned with the way you, our audience, experienced the performance. We did something brand new.

On March 8th we had three different audiences:

– A live audience in London (did we mention we sold out?)
– An online audience – watching from 11 confirmed countries
– A twitter audience – from the 20% of people tweeting (in the auditorium, and many more of you from home), over 400 people had an experience of the show through a twitter feed

After a month of research collecting feedback and opinion from you (please continue to let us know what you thought) we’ve noticed some interesting things.

One recurring piece of feedback is that the latter part of the performance was so engaging all the way through and changed quite rapidly that you felt you were missing things if you stopped to tweet or take a picture. Also, there was little time to absorb what was going on, decide what you think till after the show.

We’re very happy to announce that ArtCorps who run the Antilope Festival in Switzerland was so intruiged with what we did on the 8th that they have invited us to perform as part of their 2013 Festival. On the 24th April In-Finite with incarnate as a twitter performance and live showing. We wont be streaming it – but, you will be able to watch the performance through the eyes of those gathered. To get the most enriching experience possible we’re breaking up the performance in to three parts. This will give 4 scheduled opportunities (one before, two intervals and after the show) for the viewers to watch, digest, interpret and share their ideas over twitter.

Antilope are very excited about the way we’re integrating social media with dance to the point where our very own Joumana Mourad has been anointed their Twitter Ambassador for the festival and will be spreading the exciting opportunities Twitter has to performers and audiences who attend the festival from the 22nd April.

Be prepared to watch #infinite13 as we think you’ll find some delightfully creative thoughts appearing as well as a never before seen insight into what’s happening at the festival and in the minds of the creatives involved.

The performance is at 8.30pm CEST (7.30pm BST) so if you can’t make it in the flesh (book here if you can) you can experience for the very first time a twitter only dance performance. We’d love to hear what you think as well – so, follow @IJADdance and we’ll let you know all about it as it fast approaches!

In-Finite at Rich Mix [Review]

In-Finite at Rich Mix [Review]

Charlotte Goodhart is 23 studying Museum Studies at UCL and interested in the way that cultural organisations communicate with their audiences, through exhibition, engagement and digital marketing. She tweets @CharGoodhart

 
Having absolutely no experience or knowledge of contemporary dance, I was intrigued about what a night with IJAD would entail. All I knew prior to the night was that they are based in London, that use mutlimedia approaches throughout their performances and will let me tweet while I’m actually watching.

The event was held at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green on the 8th March and the venue was perfect, as a space that holds a variety of different cultural, musical and other events regularly. On the night itself, we entered the space by lift in groups of ten and came straight into the dancers and the performance space. The room resembled something out of a very surreal dream, or at least a Tim Burton film. Spools of plastic were scattered and hung around the room, looking like the innards of cassette tapes, whilst the lights, which were low, flickered: first impressions, very eerie but very intriguing. At the front of the room, a majestically dressed performer was reading out secrets that had been submitted prior to the event by 100 strangers. These varied from the obvious ‘I stole from the corner shop when I was 10 and I’ve never stopped feeling guilty about it’ to the more extreme, something about poisoning your dog with Class A drug. This only added to the intimate, spooky atmosphere and I couldn’t help but that I had secretly snuck into someone else’s unconscious whilst they slept.

Meanwhile, at the back of the room there was a screen, where tweet deck was showing everything being said on twitter about the performance. At first it was obvious that people involved in the performance were just trying to keep numbers up, by tweeting about the room itself, or how the dancers looked. But within about ten minutes, as the guests relaxed, the page became a flurry of messages, thoughts and feelings and as you looked round the room, almost all the faces were lit by their phones, as they typed away. In what worked as a wonderful contrast to the intimiate intensity of the secrets, we were all viewing a different performance; our own livetweeting.

It was a strange experience, it felt rude to get my phone out and write about what I was seeing rather than watching it. But is this much different to what we do on a day-to-day basis? Most twitter pages, regardless of who owns them, read like an internal monologue. Sure, some are more interesting than others, I would probably rather read the twitter of a journalist whose life centres around keeping people up to date with what’s happening, than that of a 15 year old in a small town near Birmingham whose priorities are boozing and avoiding school work. But if you strip away what they’re writing, the intention is the same, to broadcast what’s on your mind. So it was a novel experience to literally live tweet what we were seeing. And it clearly wasn’t just me who enjoyed it.

There’s a huge preoccupation with turning off your phone when you enter a cultural space, be it an exhibition, a museum or a play. And it’s true that it can be very distracting for others, particularly if you’re in the cinema or if you have a godawful ringtone that keeps going off in an exhibition.

However, visiting an exhibition, or watching a play is an experience that you will interpret and understand in a way totally different to another viewer. Being able to look up other people’s thoughts on what you’ve just seen is fascinating and might make you look at something in a totally different way. So long as you aren’t disturbing someone else’s experience, using your phone to tweet about your experience actually does a lot more good than it is harm. I certainly felt it softened my introduction to contemporary dance. Lets start a conversation, open it up, debate and say what we really mean. And please, when I enter the space, let me turn on my phone!

Live Streaming

Live Streaming

Streaming in performance is a loaded area. While the obvious access opportunities are great, there are lots of issues around what, where, how much and what we even call this digital addition that is becoming so important to live art.

First the practical, what exactly do we mean by live streaming? Options include the use of static cameras on tripods versus using a live camera crew. Besides the relative costing differences, there are hundreds of reasons why we might choose one method over another, each one with even more alternatives. How and where should static cameras be placed? How many cameras should be used? Do the camera crew become part of the performance itself?

Many of these issues come down to whether we should be treating an online audience as equal to the physical audience. If so are we not obliged to strive to provide the same experience? And then how does the streaming impact on the expeience of the physical audience? When does streaming equipment begin to change what the present audience experience? With online audiences potentailly outnumbering the physical audience might we lose something of the feel of a live performance, as if we’re inviting them to a filmset?

So does the thought of a less committed audience offend us? An online audience will inevitably watch differently. The experience of a recorded or streamed performance can arguably never be as powerful as the live version. There are aspects of a performance beyond the visual and as technology develops, we’re seeing ever more innovative and performance practice… – sensography. Are we therefore offering our online audiences a reduced performance? Does live streaming cut people off even further? What about those with no internet connection or a generation that are not ‘digital natives’? Are we doing enough to introduce new audiences to the possibility?
At the same time, it could be said that live streaming is in fact more powerful. As we’ve said before, digital interaction may well be the answer to audience participation that performance art needs.

If we can achieve more online, or at least achieve something different, are we talking about the emergence of a new artform? Possibly, who are the curators of this new space? Working with a venue is one thing but what about curating a space where your viewers can adjust the volume, dim the lights, switch cameras or get up and go and make a cup of tea?

The implications on the more traditional audience are huge! Does an online audience encourage people to come and see a live show or make them feel like they’ve seen it? People who buy a DVD won’t then go see it in the cinema (usually). People who buy an album will go and see a band live. What role does mystery have in the arts? The industry is scared of losing business and artistis are scared of giving everything away…

But, we do know that live streaming promotes more access to the arts…Undoubtedly, streaming allows access to performances to those that might have had none but is potential the key word here? Certainly the possibility of access is there but are we really seeing larger audiences from around the world, disadvantaged people and the less able taking a new interest in dance and performance or are we just transferring our current audiences?

In-Finite is being live streamed on Friday from 8pm (http://bit.ly/ZkfEEe). Or attend in person at Rich Mix from 7.30pm (http://bit.ly/XUjRfI)

Turning Social Media into Creative Media

Turning Social Media into Creative Media

Today we ran our Turning Social Media into Creative Media workshop alongside the Plan d school of Dance, Barcelona with the help of Twitter, Skype and some great ideas!

 

‘Hoy, junto a Joumana Mourad dictando un workshop entre Barcelona y Londres en simultáneo..! IJAD Dance Company junto a Pland Centre de Dansa. Que buena experiencia!!!’ Juan Leiba

 

The collaberation between the two countries would not have been possible without the support of technology. And what we’re seeing is the potential of the use of technology to create artwork that is accessible. Creative director, Joumana is working with cross platform dance performers, aiming for the creation of transparency between virtual & real: ‘today we managed to incapsulate two countries and different groups of dancers in a bubble of time where sharing was crucial. I’m excited that we’re starting to explore the migration between physical spaces and virtual maps.

Thanks to everyone who made it today and look out for our next social media project!