I made a short piece for Artshouse Hot August Night in 2011.

It as called ‘The Ballad of Randolph van Dyke’.

The brief was 3 minutes.

So, ok, this was 4.

Am I remembering?

or am I just remembering remembering?

When we recall the past, when does fact stop, and fiction begin?

I have been assisting digital media and sound artist Catherine Clover with her project ‘Birdbrain’ – an investigation into pigeons, ravens and seagulls. To participate in Cath’s research project, I was involved in attempts to mimic, as closely as possible, the sounds and voices of these common birds. Cath recorded the mimicry, as well as our conversations during the process. Then followed a live performance at the opening of Birdbrain at Screenspace in Melbourne in November 2011.

Read about Catherine Clover’s Birdbrain

The work brought up significant, and engaging, challenges for me as an artist and performer – from the purely mechanical questions (is it possible to mimic with any certainty the voice of another animal? what do I have to do to do this?)  to the questions connected with my own enquiry (what is my relationship with these animals? what’s going on in my mind, body and brain when I am trying to mimic? what images are occurring?)

On the birds

Crows are probably the easiest, although none of them are ‘easy’. Each bird presents its own particular set of challenges. I wonder how much of the challenge is about my own perception of these birds in the world and/or commonplace associations?

Crows are Edgar Allan Poe, witches, cloaks, Hitchcock, those frightful eyes and beaks, ‘a murder of crows’ …  yet I also have read about corvids and their remarkable abilities in forward planning and tool use.

Seagulls (and their sounds) evoke eternal and pleasurable nostalgic summer holidays, whether they were pleasurable or not. They are selfish and unsharing; they squabble and argue in a cacaphonic babble. There is always one that bungs it on for sympathy, usually with one leg.

Pigeons I have difficulty with, because their cooing sound used to terrify me when I was a child – otherworldly, alien, disembodied.  Cath tells me this cooing is doves, not pigeons. Yet my connection to this image prevails.

The seagulls’ gutterality is really hard to reproduce – although if I hold a small amount of water in the back of my throat I can attempt it; similarly their small, soft whistle is one of the few sounds in their repertoire that seems not so difficult to imitate. I feel a tad more knowledgeable about the seagull sounds because our experience is broadened by a session on the beach with actual seagulls – we listen to recorded and live seagull sounds. We watch the seagulls as they vocalise; we see their bodies, their patterns, their interactions and relationships, to each other, to the environment, to us.  Pigeons are a slightly different story: I need more time and practice to enter the pigeon world.

On imitation

Listening with eyes closed helps. I shut out external stimulae as much as I can.

I think I imagine a crow at the times I am imitating a crow, but I am imagining it in view of embodying its voice in as detailed and faithful a rendition as I can, so it’s more about a physical way of reproducing the sound.

I consider physical questions – the shape of my mouth; the use of breath; the way I use my body, and how that affects the sound. What does it sound like if I close off my glottis more quickly? How do I stay with an open, back-palate sound?

Yet I also hold an image in my mind of the crow as I produce the sound. Do I? I’m not sure. If I do, I think it is retained as a kind of disconnected image; that is, as if I’m observing a crow, rather than I am the crow. Writing this now, I am surprised that I don’t imagine myself as a crow. Perhaps this is something to do with a sense that my breath and sound and voice is not connected to my body, my self. Yet I do not believe that.

On the others

I listen to them; I watch their mouths and the physical shapes they make with their bodies (sitting, slouching, pitching forward, closed eyes, wide eyes); I feed back on what I see and hear – this seems to assist my own attempts. As I watch their bodies, mouths and faces, so earnest and committed to this task, I somehow inscribe this information into my breath and body, refining and distilling and incorporating into my own experience of imitation. So there is a loop of watching, listening, embodying, and re-attempting.

On our conversations

Caught up in all of this are the stories of what we might do with this project

how it could be realized as a performance event

how we are together

what it means to be ‘animal’, and an animal

the fact that birds don’t have larynxes (?) so what physical process is happening when they make sounds?

the difference between pigeons and doves

how funny we find each other/the faces we make when we’re trying to do it

the picture of Phil Spector in Robbie’s studio and how his wig looks a lot like Penny’s hair

what is or what makes ‘conversation’?

contributions from Cath about what she has observed or what she knows from the research she’s already carried out

she’s quite knowledgeable really

the difference in seagull sounds in the UK

can you burp on cue, and how is it done?

stress on the voice and making sure we do a voice warmup

 We’re born, we live, we die.

In between, there’s a lot of talk about love and other similarly awkward things.

Kate Hunter and Emilie Collyer have been in conversation for a long time.

 Inspired by physics and wave theory, and borne out of stories and sounds that have been recorded, re-written, re-told and re-collected, Maybe we’re never together is part poem, part performance, part audio collage.

 It’s a poignant, strange, difficult, loud, pensive and funny work which offers the audience an intimate look at friendship, the things we do together and the ways in which we’re always alone.

Writers and performers: Kate Hunter and Emilie Collyer

Dramaturgy and direction: Glynis Angell

Sound consultant: Ben Grant

Lighting designer: Katie Sfetkidis

When: Wed 16 Nov – Sat 19 Nov, 9 pm

Where: Bluestone Performance Hub,

10A Hyde Street, Footscray

Cost: $20/$15

Bookings: www.bigwest.com.au

Presented by Constructive Interference and Big West Festival. Image: Mark Gambino

Some more experiments with audio…

When I begin work in the studio, I often start by playing with a gesture, a shape or a simple movement sequence without any text. It may be in response to a theme, an idea, a fragmentary image, a memory. It may not be in response to any theme. At times I score the improvisations, providing a simple structure to work from, such as ‘lead from the top of the head’ or ‘right toe as primary mover’ or ‘attention to gaze: intimate, middle distance or infinite’ or ‘be asymmetrical at all times’ or ‘eyes as limb’ or ‘reverse impulse’. Sometimes I work in complete darkness for a while, or work with eyes closed, or ‘fishtail’ – cheat with my eyes open briefly in order to orient myself in space, or move from one state to the other. At times I focus on what feels nice and what is interesting to explore. At other times I attend to patterns that have been/are being created in space.  An image may arise following a particular gesture, which I may ignore or respond to. I may become bored, and if I do I work to maintain or re-generate interest.

As I continue, I build material by choosing to repeat, sustain or develop a particular idea. For example, I may choose to explore one gesture further, repeating it, extending it, slowing it down, playing with tempo, duration, spatial relationship, and so on. Images, texts and movement sequences are gathered and established in this way. Particular expressive moments may resonate or stay with me somehow – I will return to them again and again. I choose them. These ‘choices’, however, often occur in the moment of physical action. They are not always consciously planned, but seem to come from an intuitive, feeling place.

Is there some biological process that supports my experience of my body and its ability to uncover authentic and engaging material? My body seems to be leading the way in these moments. It assists me by gathering and collecting objects, elements, themes for performance. How is it doing that? Can neuroscience provide a theory for this practice?

I continue to facilitate research workshops with improvisers and performers – the latest block runs through December and is focussing towards memory and image-based work – how we collect, embody, select and incorporate material through our body’s ‘internal preference system’ (neuroscientist Antonio Damasio from ‘Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, p. 179).

At various stages of the session, we stop and discuss what’s happening for the participants. I record these discussions, and later, transcribe them. This process is painstaking, time-consuming, but fascinating, not least because it introduces a whole other set of questions for me about my own language, my instructions, the way I and others talk about movement practice and movement experience, and the relationship between language and the ‘doing’ of the work. It also enables me to analyse the discussions in a different way – for example, I isolate chunks of text according to categories: ‘brain’, ‘embody’, ‘image’, ‘self’, ‘other’, ‘pathway’, ‘choice’ and so on, and I begin to group ideas and themes this way. It starts to tie in with my reading around categories, taxonomies, and the body’s role in assisting with decision-making. I turn to George Lakoff – ‘What is there that is common to the way all human beings think?’ (Women, Fire and Dangerous Things p. xi – what a book!) and wonder: is there some common ground  amongst makers, improvisers, theatre practitioners, about how we perceive and conceptualise our process?

Here are a few of the key words and phrases that I identified in the transcripts.

The Head - Head/conscious(ness/thinking/frontal lobe/thought/knowing/neural/physiology/ brain

Decisions, Decisions - Decisions/choice/choosing/selecting

Connective Tissue - Connections/pathways/synapses/relationships between brain and body, body and brain in describing experiences

My Story - Narrative

 Acts Of Creation - Author/observer; maker/watcher; the relationships between (and definitions of) these.

I See You - Eyes/gaze/looking/seeing

Guts - Embody/embodied/body/skin/flesh/guts/visceral

Senses - Senses/feeling-sense/emotions

Training Vs Performance - Performance/performative; training; ‘sats’

Movement Vocabularies - Gesture/gestural; movement vocabulary(s)

Who Am I In This? - Self, awareness of self, self in relation to other

Language - Describing thinking: ‘I’m going: “How do I do this?”’     Active voice/passive voice

The Container (And Other) Schema(s) - Internal/external; outside/inside (the ‘kinesthetic image schemas’ referred to by Lakoff p 271 onwards; the ‘container schema’)

The Nature of Instructions - How instructions are interpreted; language used; physical responses to abstracted (a quality, an expression, an essence, a feeling)  vs specific physical instructions (use your eye as a limb; follow your hand; left pinkie as primary mover)

 Lists - Repertoire, lists and categories, patterns, habits, constraints

Image - Images that arise in the mind, pre-empting or allowing

Thanks to past and present participants (note excellent use of alliteration) Kelly Alexander, Debra Batton, Penny Baron, Vanessa Chapple, Dani Cresp, Andrew Gray, Dan Goronsky, Peter Fraser, Bronwyn Kamasz, Leesa Nash, Stefanie Robinson, Sally Smith.

I show some work to some people – it is a series of six pieces mostly based on audio recordings of improvised monologues that I have carried out whilst in the studio moving. Some of these are transcribed. I always think they look more interesting on the page – like poetry – especially when all the accompanying sounds are written: um, ahh, clear throat, shuffle, sigh, rhythmic outbreath, pant. Then I play with layering some of this more unrehearsed audio and texts that are read, like dream fragments, and sounds. There are a couple of pieces in the showing with live text interspersed with the recorded audio. At the end of the piece I read this list:

• Play the ‘Speak 3’ text with the hairdresser and the mouth story and intersperse with the live scripted text.
• Learn the ‘You might choose the..’ list and build it up with gestures, including hairdresser, plastic ear cups and other physical shapes
• Tell ‘The Road To Bruthen’ story. Is this true?
• Record the bottles and the blowing, and put them with the bellows sound, and use this somewhere.
• Describe the owl dream and the crow dream and the imaginary childhood friends: the Diddies, the Marys, Cainton who was fat and came from Canberra or Canada and who had a sword.
• Tell the ‘Are you there?’ story with Dad and the intercom and playing Satie and his dying wanderings.
• Record some sparse piano
• Tell the ‘Want 20 cents?’ naked- man- in- the- car story.
• Record the squeaky door.
• What to do with the ‘Thud thud’ list? Try just reading it.
• Play the ‘Speak 1’ audio with the movement and the baby dream with audience listening in the dark.
• Read this list at the end of the showing.

Thus the work becomes a little about the making of the work. Some of the things in the list above are actually included in what I have shown. But some aren’t, and might never be. And the titles of some of these list items become engaging in themselves. Because this is a list that includes what I’m leaving out.  It is a description of what the audience has just seen, a helpful back story that assists with making sense retrospectively of some of the work, and a poetic treatment of my creative process that becomes part of the work itself.

What I need to try and do is put that around there. If I can sstick this right…. Down there so it’s kind of….nestled between my … breasts then (deep breath in) I don’t think that will come out (breath out) and .. then .. the (pant)…. wait a second (open-mouthed breathing) …wire… (small slight breathy grunt)  if I can.. sort of… stick that in the back… of my top (small inhalation) like that (breathe out) that’s kind of (breathe out) .. that’s sort of how it works I think. Ummm.. just testing by moving around (inhale with mouth open) Yeah, I think that’s relatively (pause) (inhale sharply) painless… ummm… bending down (muffle) is… hang on.. what’s that? That’s that bit of wire … needs to go more back there (sharp long intake of breath, closed-mouth swallow and then sigh out). My breath … I can really hear my breath (breathe in). Ahhh.. can’t.. adjust volume now because…the microphone is stuck down my top. Upside down? (big exhale) not too bad…ummm.. I can feel it could… it could come this on my back… the thing with that is just the headphones I think.. Yeah.. I have to keep my head at a certain angle… or else.. (sigh) it won’t (sigh) the headphones will actually come off which is.. means I can’t really lie fully on the floor… sigh.. unless I lie with my forehead on the floor.. ah… and.. I can’t really put the crown of my head on the floor… eyes are closed now… and I’m feeling with my hands so… there’s some slithering….hmmmmm… sigh… pant.. yep… pant…. Grunt… I can see where the light is through my closed eyelids…. Breath, walk, like a sunset through my eyelids…. Walk, pant, sigh, hmmmm… I’m starting to move a bit more tentatively as my eyes stay closed.. or at least in one place… sigh.. what can I feel with my back? My back space … my rear space…. Pant, huff.. all my aural senses are really heightened because of the microphone and the headphones and the sound of my breath as I’m exerting… pant… my body (sharp short exhalation of breath).

I’m tempted to make big sweeping released movements…today…muffle … I think they… because they sound more interesting I think…huff….hup! intake! Breathe out. This (breathe out) this apparatus does not make it easy for me to release my head which is something I (intake) I don’t do very well I’m aware of often my head is at the same… on the same plane…. Which is pretty much a horizontal one most of the time… exertion, sounds of exertion.. so I really have to consciously…wooorrrkk on letting it.. on letting it go…arms wide…being still. Breathe out. I’m symmetrical now (closed-mouth swallow)… another very comfortable shape for me… symmetrical body.. as I move I can.. feel behind me there’s something – there… coming towards me – what is it? Feels like it might be a wall but.. is it? But I keep walking back and there’s still nothing there. I can feel it getting closer and there’s still nothing there, there’s still nothing there.. Ah! There it is. Pause. The wall. Pause.

If I keep.. my eyes closed, (very quiet sigh), if I let go of a sense of gravity… I could be lying very lightly on the ground… my feet .. hard up against another wall.. my body.. on the floor.. arms by their sides… palms facing upwards.

Eyes still closed… I walk.. I can see the light through my eyes. (Change in voice). So.. I’m partly oriented… through light.. very subtle.. it’s colour really it’s not really any .. visual representation. Arms are out in front .. and behind.. I feel something in front of me again …sighs.. I lie on the ground…. Again if I let go of my sense of gravity… can I imagine I’m (swallow) hard up against a wall? My feet holding me up, on space, on nothing. Fingers splayed. Pause. I can hear a kind of a hum of.. puff… I dunno… machines… the underbelly… of the university, keeping it going, keeping it running, keeping it chugging along. (Rhythmic outbreath-pant) eyes still closed, funny sensitive part of elbow.. (sharp intake of breath between closed teeth). Oh man that hurts.. oooh.. something, I’ve done something to myself there. That is really sore. What is that? (Sigh out) I’ve busted something. Anyway. I am old. Father William. The young man said. Grunt gasp. Ok the wire…. pesky… (big outward sigh). Muffle muffle. Click off.

Keep trying to make connections. I read more of Damasio, this time in ‘The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness’ (Damasio, Antonio (1999) Harcourt Inc., San Diego New York London): a neurobiological investigation into consciousness. How do we know that we feel when we feel? What are the neural underpinnings of our sense of self?

Today I introduce a camera and that affects the explorations. An eye watches me. I place myself more strategically so that I can be viewed. The camera is running a time-lapse movie so every 30 seconds a photo is taken. If I am out of camera range in the space, the photo is blank.

I warm up in a part of the space that I know is within camera range. I extend and stretch my arms and legs, knowing that this might make for an interesting picture. I spend a lot of time focusing the camera, and not very much time undertaking the task from Monday. My ability, such as it was, to de-privelege (is that a word?) all the elements in the space, including my body, is sorely compromised by the camera.

I try to work through the boredom. I try to trick myself and not move the way I expect myself to move.

Damasio differentiates between ‘image space’ and ‘dispositional space’ in the brain as a kind of framework for the way the brain process implicit and explicit sensory input and creates events, actions, memories, recollections, stories. He describes images as mental patterns of information: not only visual, but haptic, aural, vestibular, space orientation. Dispositional space represents an abstracted framework of potentialities: the space where images become manifest as conscious, connected notions (pp 331-332). I think.

Neuroscientists can pinpoint more specifically now where this activity occurs in the brain (dispositional space is held in ‘higher order cortices’: that is, subcortical areas, amgdala, brain stem and others). So this is interesting to me because I like to consider that when improvising and devising my brain’s dispositional framework is highly active, making connections, synthesizing and gathering and throwing away and re-collecting all sorts of sensory, physical and visceral inputs in surprising and unusual ways – even when I am trying to trick myself. And it is also interesting because I have a sense of where, literally where, it may be occurring in my brain.

Next performances of The Waiting Room:

MELBOURNE

La Mama Theatre

205 Faraday Street,

Carlton

4 and 5 February 2011

9 pm

$25/$20

BOOK FOR LA MAMA HERE

BRISBANE

Graffiti Room, Brisbane Powerhouse

119 Lamington Street

Newfarm, Brisbane

9 – 13 February 2011

8.45 pm

$29/$22/Schools $18

BOOK FOR POWERHOUSE HERE

Andrew Gray, Penny Baron

Notating a aural score created by my feet and recorded on Zoom digital recorder

Clean the studio. Sweep and mop. An enjoyable calming ritual.

Dust is everywhere because of new doors. I feel it settle on me. I am dusty.

As I mop the floor dry with a rag on one foot, I hear the rhythmic swish  and think it makes a good sound. I record it. I think again of Tati and his post-productive sounds matching the movement… but not quite… giving the action/what we see a hyper-real oddly not-quite-right quality.

I’m trying to think about connections between the theory and the doing. But do I really need to do this now?

I take photos of my feet and hands and am slightly depressed when I look back at the images and see how wizened they look. Like someone else’s appendages. Desperate, a bit knobbly, clenching the floor as if hanging on for dear life to the ground.

Here’s an extract from some notes I found from a phenomenology class:

‘Phenomenological reflection does not produce factual statements or generalisations derived from particular experiences. Instead, it produces descriptions of what is essential or invariant to such-and-such a kind of experience. These essences are grasped by ‘intuiting’ or ‘seeing’, after applying a method that enables them to come to light. The method involves looking reflectively  at an instance (or several instances) of the kind of experience under consideration. The instance (or instances) is then altered in imagination. This process of imaginative variation of altering allows for the sifting through of those aspects of the experience that are contingent and variable, thus leaving to be gleaned the necessary and sufficient ingredients – that is, the essence of the object of consciousness.’

I like this description, and I have no idea who wrote it. I just found it in my notebook and I’ve copied it down from somewhere.

The trouble with me is I have two many ideas; viz: just work on releasing the head; choose one movement and sustain and develop beyond the point of boredom; archive all the footage, image and sound material so far, selecting prudently; run the sound against the footage and see what happens; devise a choreography based on neuroscientific principles of memory and repeat every day; document it every day and observe how/if/when/why it changes; overlay these films onto each other; film more body parts eg feet/hands/knee/bum; work with other trained people; work with untrained people; don’t work with anyone; make dioramas of my process; record movement sounds (feet, swishing, clothes etc) and set them to some choreography; image and text: which comes first? Play with this; plot my movement tendencies on a graph; record myself talking on the phone/to others/in a shop; transcribe and use; project body parts films onto white fabric so I get a great big one-eyed face onto a small real body.

Remembering last week’s experiences, especially ‘holding my own head as if it were someone else’s’.. disassociate/attenuate the relationship between my head and the rest of my body. Manipulate and manoever my heas as if it is an object separate from myself.. Observe the interplay of ‘me/that’.. Inhabit the experience; make no judgements (‘this is difficult; I am not doing this correctly/expertly/with ease; the audience will think this looks stupid; I think this looks stupid; why am I doing this at all? what will this lead to? how will I use it? will I use it at all?)

The head is the vessel for the brain. But my whole body, including my head, is part of my brain.

Today I try to experience the space as an object within it.

I walk through it, stop, sway, be still, travel, release.

I do not prioritise spaces in the room, gestures, dwelling spots, attitudes, other objects, light, sound.

I move, and keep moving, through and with these elements. My body is as objective as these elements. These elements are as important as my body.

I notice and attend to places/spaces where I feel more at ease (usually in a corner or close to a wall). I inhabit middle space with the question: can I generate the same feeling of comfort out here in the middle of the room? I pace to and from objects and walls. I try to map or measure when my proprioceptive sense starts to connect with an edge or a wall, and how far away I am before I lose that sense. I feed forward and backward in this exercise, noting what I cannot see. Sometimes I do this with my eyes closed.

As I walk, I notice my choices. I cannot discern any explicit pattern in my choices. Perhaps I could if I was watching from outside. No particular images arise in my mind this time: I try and keep to task. Nothing is more important than anything else.