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Marie: There was a definite difference between working with Alan and Martin on the development of my projects. The work with Alan was impacted by the familiarity we have as life partners and setting and receiving constraints ignited the intimacy between us that we had experienced in our previous work together on ‘Parameters & Practice’. We know each other’s working habits, so I felt both nervous and excited about entering a space together that confronted these. In moments I had the impression that Alan deliberately frustrated my process, because of his impatience with my tendency to work intuitively and without many self-imposed limitations. For this reason, I found aspects of the imposed constraints challenging.
Alan: There’s no doubt that my and Marie’s relationship as life partners and parents, and our previous experience of working together, affected our encounters in the 3WI meetings, both when giving or receiving coaching and constraints. Partly this was very positive: it made for some knotty and intense dialogues on the differences between our individual poetics and concerns. But as Marie says it also generated some discomfort: a sense that the other’s opinion of your work might intersect with their personal regard for you.
Marie: What made it feel safe and non-confrontational was the meeting protocol we had derived from the Critical Response Process. We complied scrupulously with the protocol steps (the initial response and feedback). This shared space where the roles were clarified from the outset helped override potential unequal power relations (the senior academic and the freelance artist) and prevented us from falling into habitual patterns of how we discuss our respective work.
If the meetings with Alan were sometimes tense, those with Martin were very pleasant and the conversation proceeded without friction. The advantage of not having a pre-existing working relationship meant that Martin approached my work fresh. We arrived at the constraint-setting through dialogue and an agreement about what might be interesting and useful. That said, maybe the character of the constraints made it easy for me to fall into my tendency of under-constraining my work and so the solution space remained very wide. I had maybe too many options to work with and this led to frustrations with my own capabilities.
Martin: Setting constraints for Marie seemed intuitive, as she wanted to draw on my experience with sound. But in setting constraints, a balance had to be struck where the sound editing would not give her days of unnecessary work. I did sense about her way of working that she was inclined to leave the solution space open in her projects as long as possible, and so my constraints were set mainly to further elements within an ongoing exploration that she might not necessarily intend to have a specific outcome, because the exploration was the purpose, or ending, in itself.
Marie: Before 3WI, I didn’t know much about Martin’s work or methods. Martin was starting from scratch with the writing of a new song, which was an opportunity for me to guide him and follow his work from the beginning. He came with a very open proposal for writing this song (‘Song To be Born’), which left a very open invitation to approach the work using the tools that I have. So I took my cue from my own expertise, as I also did in my work with Alan — body and movement. Over the course of the project, I found myself more confident in trusting my intuition to set constraints.
Martin: Receiving from Marie the constraints of walking while singing, and walking while working on lyrics, melody, and rhythm, alerted me to a sensitivity to internally felt prompts that may lead to a songwriting process. The structured coaching process made my simultaneous pursuit and monitoring of the practice-phenomenological process possible, as I set out to write a song about writing a song.
The constraints set by Alan, on the other hand, forced me to draw on approaches to lyric writing that were not part of my existing repertoire. They forced me to defer sense, frustrating my embodied expectation of songwriting outcomes. I met that challenge by adding elaborate self-imposed constraints, and to an extent the ‘Song To Open’ project became over-constrained: I felt it missed the sweet spot where constraints are most generative, and during much of the 3WI process I felt like I was ‘singing the phone book’. Alan’s constraints were challenging what is at the core of my usual practice, influenced by confessional songwriting. Perhaps Alan had a similar approach to constraint-setting as Lars von Trier did in his approach to setting obstructions for Jørgen Leth in The Five Obstructions, a playful destabilising or ‘unmaking’ in order to create. However, I think that if the song had been cleansed of all sincerity, a destabilising would have happened towards an ‘unmaking’ of me as an artist and therefore as a person, as the two are deeply entwined in my work. Whether that would have been interesting as an experiment I don’t know, but I expect that it would have been very uncomfortable for me not to be able to recognise myself in a song I had written and was perhaps to sing to others.
Alan: The model of The Five Obstructions was important to me in the encounters with both Marie and Martin. I like the idea that a playful aggression is part of respect for the other, and the testing of the limits of the other maker’s practice and poetics is also an act of appreciation of their work. Von Trier plainly holds Leth in very high regard, but the obstructions he sets are intended to challenge Leth’s aesthetic and even his ethics of making. For the purposes of 3WI at least, I wanted to make Martin do the opposite of what he was used to, to work like a writer interested in language rather than meaning. (I think he enjoyed the process but maybe not the result….) In the agonistic process of responding to the constraints, Martin was able to find again an ‘emotional centre’ in a song I had hoped to evacuate of sincerity, and this allowed him to reassert his own poetics against my didactic intentions.
Martin: I had to feel my way when giving constraints to Alan, as I had no experience of making video essays. As Alan was interested in thinking with musical form and motifs as structuring principles, I could quite intuitively help set constraints, although less intuitively ‘read’ how they had been implemented, and whether they were congenial for the work. If Alan was playful or didactic in his constraint-setting for me, in my constraint-setting for him I definitely leaned more towards the Critical Response Process and its avoidance of value judgements. I looked for types of constraint that might be useful towards reaching goals that seemed already to be set for a project (‘Men Shouting’) that was ongoing. I wonder if there is a continuum between constraint and obstruction, and whether it might have been more generative for Alan if my constraints had been more obstructive?
Alan: I found that Martin’s patient questioning in the four meetings encouraged me to articulate my poetics of making and plans for my video essay, and particularly the meaning or implications for my work of musical models and metaphors. He was hesitant to provide constraints, narrowly defined, preferring to propose guidelines or questions. This might be an aspect of Martin’s personality, but perhaps also the character of our relationship impacted on the tone and form of his suggestions…. Did he feel any anxiety, I asked, given that I was his doctoral supervisor? He said no, because our exchanges focused more on artistic than academic topics, and on the pragmatics of making, which meant that he was not conscious of any difference in status.
Marie: My approach to the constraint-setting for Alan was to rely on my expertise as both filmmaker and choreographer and with a conscious decision to try not to be put off by potential resistance on his part: a response I had met from him in the past! But I did find it tricky to give constraints. Alan is very sure and articulate about the work he does, and it can be intimidating to intervene in his process. Should I be directive or responsive? But he was receptive to my suggestions and interested in my perspective even if he had well-formed ideas of where he wanted the work to go. I got the impression that he was sometimes struggling with the constraints, and I wonder if our meetings were successful for him.
Alan: I definitely struggled with the constraints set by Marie, but I didn’t doubt that this struggle was the process. Although, within the timescale of 3WI itself, I was frustrated with the lack of progress made with the episode of ‘Men Shouting’ I worked on with Marie, in the long run the process was extremely generative and took the work to a place I don’t believe I would otherwise have reached. I do wonder if I didn’t make deliberate enough use of Marie’s expertise, as I did of Martin’s. Maybe his expertise was more directly relevant because so much of the video essay was to do with voice and sound, but I wonder what the video essay might have become if I had consciously worked with Marie to think more in terms of embodiment.
Marie: I agree with Alan that unsuccessful experiments and the feeling of struggling with a task are essential for generating new material and new ways of thinking about your work. But I also want to think about which constraints make me want to go back to work, as Liz Lerman says is the goal of the Critical Response Process. Here I invent two constraints for the sake of contrast. In both cases I imagine working in the studio to achieve a score with instructions for moving while being stuffed with newspaper.
First, the ‘concrete’ approach. The wording of the constraint is: ‘Work with the sensation of newspaper against your skin’. I start from the materiality of the newspaper. The practical interaction gives me a starting point from which to investigate and develop the score. I then experience an urge to continue with a task, a bodily curiosity, a concrete pleasure/displeasure with the task at hand. I find that this type of constraint helps me to continue to be interested in what I do.
Second, the ‘abstract’ approach. The wording of the constraint is: ‘Play with the relationship between newspaper and your body’. I start from a more abstract thought where I can investigate the material more freely. But the activity opens up a wider solution space with little specificity about where to begin or end. I simply have too many options of how to work with my body and the newspaper. I will get fixated on how something looks, or the meaning of what I do, and stop being present in my body.
I have come to understand my own preferred working method from defining these different strategies for formulating constraints. Looking back at the constraints from Martin and Alan it is clear that the ‘successful’ moments happened when the instructions were specific and concrete because it allowed me to be curious in the moment of working. These constraints clarified in which direction I wanted to take the work, even if they generated ‘failed’ or rejected material.
Alan: Martin’s two songs were the most obviously achieved and finished outcomes of 3WI within the frame or timescale of 3WI itself. The fact that Martin was starting both songs from scratch, and the fact that they were composed in contained and recognisable song formats, meant that the constraints could be very focused and the outcomes obvious. The intersection of 3WI with both my and Marie’s projects was less ‘clean’: our projects were already well under way, and already had a particular character and set of concerns. In the case of my ‘Men Shouting’, the project was itself concerned with applying constraints to scholarship, and to elicit further constraints might have been to over-complicate and over-constrain.
Martin: Deferring sense in the song developed with Alan also meant deferring sincerity, but emotional honesty became a strength when working on ‘Song To Be Born’ with Marie. The evolving constraints involved walking, singing, and ‘getting guttural’ with the material. And this ‘walk’n’ song’ approach opened a new door to working with the songwriting, which was even more embodied and vulnerable, which I thought was fitting in relation to the metaphor of a song being born. The ‘walk’n song’ approach naturally shapes the song because the breathing constrains how long the song lines can be, and the tempo and topography of the walk influence what is possible — in this way the landscape becomes part of the songwriting. Other practitioners might adapt the ‘walk’n song’ exercise for their own purposes. I would then recommend starting with a coaching session or interview to generate source material and focus the topic of the song to be worked with.
Marie: A key aspect of 3WI that persuades me of its value is how regular meetings, an agreed protocol for non-judgemental feedback, and a clear direction for the project through the constraints held me accountable for getting work done. The quality of the feedback and the depth of the conversation was to a large degree dependent on how much time and effort I put into working with the constraints between the maker meetings. I also enjoyed getting feedback from two interlocutors who were not embedded in the choreographic discipline (their different use of vocabulary, noticing aspects of the work I had not paid attention to, or guiding me to take on tasks I found difficult). The initial response stage in the maker meetings helped to establish trust and confidence in my responder’s constraint-setting. On the other hand, moments in meetings when the formality of the protocol was loosened or lost resulted in a lack of rigour with the steps, and took conversations in less fruitful directions. But the constraint-setting gave the meetings a clear frame and purpose and helped drive the work forwards. For that reason, in my work as a facilitator of the Critical Response Process, I will add constraint-setting to my toolbox.
Martin: Working on ‘Song To Open’, I supplemented Alan’s constraints with my own elaborate constrained procedures, and this led to over-constraining as the radical fragmentations generated an unfamiliar creative space that I found unpleasant to dwell in. The self-imposed constraints were necessary for me to obtain a defamiliarisation of fourteen of my own songs. Working with fewer songs would have reduced the complexity, but the over-constraining did not only stem from the scale of the source material. It stemmed also from the destabilising of a familiar songwriting process that occurred on several levels at the same time: meaning, content, form, intention, and ontology. Where does a confessional singer/songwriter position himself in a song devoid of (literal) meaning? There isn’t really a single answer to that question, but the song result ‘Song To Open’ is perhaps one sort of answer.
Alan: As Marie mentions, part of the ethos of the project was not to exclude all the messiness of the people we were and the relationships we already had, although our perceptions of the degree to which this messiness affected the process (or the degree to which we wanted it to) probably differs. I think Martin, setting constraints for me, adopted a more disinterested role, while Marie has talked about how her concerns as a parent sometimes impacted on the tone or conduct of meetings. I never took off my PhD supervisor hat in setting constraints for Martin. Even in the meetings where my own work was being discussed I wanted to take forward with Martin an intense dialogue between us about aesthetics and value, and so the development of my own video essay project had a didactic purpose. Our distinct temperaments and creative preferences led to different expectations and perceptions of the 3WI process. What we experienced as under- or over-constraining, say, remained individual to each of us, and might be different again for another person who undertakes a similar process.
Martin: I take several lessons from 3WI. The Critical Response Process and Marie’s familiarity with it was crucial. The combination of the structured coaching process, evolving constraints, and a collaborator keen to co-discover what explorative songwriting process could yield about the songwriting process itself was very productive and meaningful. The coaching sessions with Alan had a deconstructive character from the outset, and it was part and parcel of the process that I would be working in ways that were antithetical to me as an artist and therefore also as a person. This required an openness from me as a maker to trouble my own practice and its outcomes, but also led to an over-constraining of the project, at least for a while. The lesson though is that while over-constraining a creative process can be uncomfortable, it can also inspire new approaches. Other practitioners might find it a useful exercise to be open to over-constraining their process as an experiment, perhaps with the goal of reflecting on the steps then taken to arrive at a form of consensus with the material.
Marie: What I think needs to be in place is a conscious balance between over- and under-constraining. The over-constrained process can feel inhibiting and inflexible, but an under-constrained process might lack direction and clarity, but where the ‘sweet spot’ is found will vary for each individual and creative situation. Constraints should be doable in an agreed timeframe and space. They should be interesting/inspiring for the maker and make them excited about going back to work. And they should be worded in a clear, concise, and concrete way.