4. Marie's account of process
As described above, the work in 3WI grew from a ‘Whale Piece’, a work-in-progress presented as part of my MA in 2016. The first strand is the ‘Whale Performance’, developed with Alan, a direct continuation of the MA performance in which I stuff my clothes with newspaper. I was particularly interested in investigating the choreographic aspect of this work. For the second strand — the ‘Whale Film’ — developed with Martin, I had already done some initial filming with my daughters, and wanted to work on the film’s audio track and soundscape.
I performed eight minutes of material derived from the 2016 work-in-progress. Alan took part in stuffing my top with newspaper and I played with movement that eventually helped me remove the top. His initial reflections gave rise to a discussion of the newspaper as an antagonist and how it could be said that the piece is, in a sense, not a solo. A question about the quality of movement called to mind, for Alan, an image of the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons.
It struck me how my choreographic mindset had expected that he would give me feedback that focused directly on the movement of my body. I learned that working on a choreography with an academic filmmaker was going to get me very different answers about movement. We arrived at the following constraints based on Alan’s suggestion that that this was not a solo piece, and so the choreography should be elicited through collaboration.
Constraints set:
- Work with two additional performers for the ‘stuffing’ part. First performer stuffs, the second one unstuffs.
- Use permutations:
- passivity — not resisting or helping but allowing it to happen
- helping/activity — actively helping with the stuffing
- resistance — pushing performers away and not allowing the stuffing to happen
- compliance/indifference — like a rag doll
- trying to escape — running away or avoiding the stuffing.
The suggestion to work with other performers to elicit the work was a fruitful one. I overcame a discomfort with involving others in the fragile ‘early stage’ of an idea and the hours with the two performers Anna Penati and Marco Zavarise (theatre performers with HumanLab; see video clip) led to interesting and useful conversations around the topics of motherhood, the changing body, power relationships, and the meaning of working with newspaper.
I showed Alan a five-minute video recording of the ‘Whale Performance’ where I work with Anna and Marco. We discussed the different ways of giving directions and passivity/action. For this maker meeting, the protocol flowed with more ease, which meant that that the boundaries between ‘who is talking’ became more fluid. (Alan lay down on the ground halfway through this session, a sign for me that he was feeling comfortable and at home in the situation.)
The constraints we set for this meeting directly targeted a difficulty I experience in my work: giving instructions and taking charge. His intention to challenge my working habits suggested to me that Alan was deliberately employing Lars von Trier’s playful or didactic intentions as seen in The Five Obstructions.
I was interrupted ten minutes into the session by a missed call. The disruption of the conversation (as I made a quick phone call to check if it concerned our kids) added a slight tension between Alan and me for the following minutes of the meeting. Returning to discuss the work after the phone call, Alan pointed out that I had frustrated the constraints set by refusing to do something that I found difficult, which was to use my own instructions for the work. Instead, I had used a voiceover from choreographer Merce Cunningham guiding a class. The impurity of the exchange became very clear in that moment, as I reflected on whether the same degree of tension in the conversation would have arisen had we not been partners.
We discussed how my body’s archive became visible in the performance through the different types of dance techniques (like Cunningham and Graham) I had trained in. Alan suggested that I look to a variety of performance instructions from different traditions, like that of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece from 1964.
Constraints set:
- Make a soundtrack of different archival experiences. The archive should result in a long set of instructions referencing stuffing a whale (taxidermy), performance art (e.g. Yoko Ono), and dance (ballet, Cunningham, Graham).
- Think about the score (the set of instructions that guide the activities) of the piece and rehearse it. Perform in different spaces, one indoors and one outdoors, to test how different spaces affect the movement.
This meeting helped me understand the history of my body in the piece and how I could activate the archive and make it tangible by foregrounding my dance training. As I rehearsed and filmed indoors and outdoors, I became aware of the how location changed how I performed the piece and also how the piece communicates.
I encountered difficulties with the soundtrack I had created of my own voice giving instructions. The idea of ‘speaking an archive that was already an archive’ (me recounting the voice of Merce Cunningham (2013) giving instructions for a dance class on YouTube) did not generate interesting material for me. I found myself losing interest in the piece. The constraints did not just push me out of my comfort zone but also away from my curiosity about the work. I felt I had hit a dead end with the ‘Whale Performance’ despite having passed many useful places along the way.
However, the performance did eventually take shape. In September 2022 the ‘Whale Performance’ was shown in the pilot programme at Horsens Teaterfestival as a work-in-progress called Avismave (‘Newspaper Belly’) and in October 2022 at the Horsens venue Platform K in a longer version called Fire Generationer af Kvinder (‘Four Generations of Women’). Both of these integrated aspects of the work I did with Alan.
The first meeting with Martin was delayed by a few minutes as I received a call from my daughter’s school to say she was unwell. After I showed Martin some material of the film work I had done with my kids so far, he stated that his experience of the work could not be detached from the phone call I received. Martin explained that this real-life situation (which, like the film, was about being a mother) became a frame for the showing of the film and indirectly a lens through which to see the work.
We talked about the role of sound with the aim of creating coherence in the film. I wanted to draw on Martin’s expertise with music and we discussed how the first sound a fetus experiences in the womb is the sound of the mother’s heartbeat.
My reflections from this first session showed how Martin brought my awareness to beats and layers in sound, utilising the two different heartbeat sounds as interesting, syncopated rhythms. In this session Martin took note of a full-length mirror (which happened to be in the background of the space I had been recording in), which I had not put much emphasis on. His observations of how this mirror reflected what was happening behind the camera became significant in how I later used a mirror when recording new material.
The constraints set for this meeting were similar to the first meeting. In the sound clip from the end of meeting two, Martin and I talk about how to take a constraint on board and how to evolve constraints collaboratively. This way of evolving the constraints in a similar idea seemed useful in the moment.
However, I’m not sure how useful the meeting was. There was a sense of wavering and meandering going on in our conversation. We stuck less to the protocol, which led the conversation in a more general direction. Perhaps as a result, I got sidetracked by my own doubts about where the film was going and thoughts about the piece as a whole. Perhaps also for this reason the constraints were less rigorous and had a similar theme to those previously set.
I created twelve minutes of film for our final meeting. The integration of the rehearsal footage produced for the 'Whale Piece' (with Alan) had interesting visual overlaps for me and I decided to play with juxtaposing it with the existing film material from the ‘Whale Film’ (with Martin). In an intuitive and exploratory way, I decided to place three videos next to each other. What would this triptych format reveal to me about the work?
Martin’s response to the film work helped me to clarify what I perceived to be the strengths and weakness of my work. The heartbeat (introduced in response to the constraint set in meeting one) had become a clear marker in the film as had the use of the mirror and my own voiceover.
The meetings with Martin were pleasant and very supportive and I came away reassured of my creative voice. Looking at the progression of the four meetings and listening back to the audio recording from meeting four, I hear myself talk about how spontaneously I make decisions about what to do next. Might this have made the constraints difficult to set? Did my meetings with Martin reveal that constraint-setting is frustrated when the maker is unclear in their intentions? I wondered then what is the relationship between the quality of the material, the working style of the maker, and what constraints are possible.
The ‘Whale Film’ was subsequently weaved together with the ‘Whale Performance’. As explained above, I staged the Whale Performance in Horsens on two occasions and those two performances together with some original film footage from 3WI were edited together into a film named Arkiv Avis Mor (‘Archive Newspaper Mother’), finally finished in April 2023 and currently (November 2024) being considered for publication. The integration of the performance footage from 2022 has meant that Arkiv Avis Mor looks very different from the original work for the 3WI project in 2021. What stayed with me throughout its creation was Martin’s observation of playing with sound, music, and voice as a way to foreground elements in the film and to change its cadence.
