making sense of one’s body
Gabi Reuter presented her materials/thoughts in the middle session on Saturday 18th.
We worked ‘on the floor’ with a type of mapping process. Gabi had brought in printed google maps of cities that “might be meaningful to us”. Melbourne was in there, but Tom stole it from under my nose. Well not quite. I chose Rotterdam, simply because up until this week I had thought it was a German town. Ignorance is blissful (and embarrassing).
It was an experiment for Gabi because she is used to working with systems of place or location as a solo practice. I really liked that she chose that ‘practice platform’ to experiment; to use the presence of a group to trial something.
We looked at a work of hers being performed (I think) at The Place in London. In it she chooses to map the entire performance space: one spot for being funny, another for ambiguity, another for ….
She is busy in this work, talking a lot, hands moving as if they are responsible for shifting where and when things occur. She has a pixie-like presence (in an earlier improvisation in the week I had thought of her presence in the space as being like Tinkerbell). The work seems elegant - funny, conceptually strong, and wonderfully loose whilst adhering to a tightly organised series of areas.
It made me think of ancient mnemonic devices.
In the discussion we seemed to latch onto ideas about stand-up comedians. Igor expressed his interest in “reformulating the position” of the stand-up, and Gabi mentioned her desire to “stop being the clown”. She talked about “the content, and the thing I am concerned with …” as if they were easy to differentiate.
Rui described how in Portugese the word ‘grace’ can also mean ‘to be funny’. This doesn’t seem so far from the English … to ‘accept’ things gracefully approaches the ability to ‘experience things with good humour’.
Igor: “comedy not judged necessarily by the amount of laughter’.
Gabi discussed whether or not “this phrase was just in my head, or is it real?” - she felt she needed someone to witness it to help resolve this question.
“Witness” is another word that has been used a lot during these dialogues. I kept wanting to discuss it in relation to the practice of authentic movement, and perhaps discuss how it might be different from ‘watching’, or ‘observing’, or being an audience.
Gabi said, later on, “I choreograph to make sense of my own body.”
