Coventry I

I am sitting in the living room of a small apartment in Coventry, England, looking out on a small lawn and garden. There is one purple foxglove, a hand full of yellow poppies, a couple of white, daisy-like flowers, and something that might be a stunted princess bush. I will have to investigate. This is the beginning of a seven week trip, the first one I have ever taken that is devoted entirely to dance.

The apartment is about a 20 minute walk from the University of Coventry which is where the “Summer Dancing” festival is taking place. Coventry is an industrial city in the Midlands of England. It is where Lady Godiva lived and it was heavily bombed during the Second World War. Every day on my walk to the “Uni” as it is called here, I pass a statue commemorating the inventor of the bicycle. It was also a famous site for mystery plays during the Middle Ages, but only fragments of the texts have survived.

I am here with Caroline Waters, one of my collaborators, who is an Artist-in-Residence at the festival and we are working on a piece that uses video taken during a 23-hour performance of Erik Satie's “Vexations,” a piano score which can be played one time through in under two minutes, but asks for 840 repetitions. The 20 minute video was made by Barbara Bridger, a playwright, writing teacher, dramaturge, videographer, and colleague and friend of Caroline at Dartington for many years. Caroline and I doing research here on using this video as a starting point for an improvisational structure that can be performed in different sites with different numbers of people. The first performance was with just Caroline and me at Dartington College this last weekend. I will write about that in my next blog.

During the piece, the video of the Satie performance is projected on the wall, and the performers do ordinary actions on the stage in front of the images. In the studio, we worked on selecting which movements to use. We have a list of eight, walking, sitting, lying, standing, crawling, rolling, leaning and hugging. All of the actions that we are using occur in the film. We arrange them in an order and then we perform the actions in that order and when we come to the end of a sequence, we begin again at the beginning. When Caroline and I perform it alone, we talk from time to time, but with the students, we are probably not going to include text. Tuesday we did a sharing here where we did three successive performances in three different spaces. A very funky domed area at the top of the building, a beautiful white room with windows and a piano, and the studio where we have been working. We are now working on adding objects that are seen in the film such as back packs, pillows and coffee cups.

One of the main questions that came up in the discussion after the sharing was what is the point of the video in relation to the performance as a whole. I came up with three different foci that can be used both in watching and performing the piece.

A focus on watching, performance. When are the performers viewers (since from time to time we watch the video)? When are we performers? Is there a viewing space and a performing space? How separate are they? How integrated? Are the performers ever audience?

A focus on mood. What creates mood? How do actions create mood? How responsible are you individually for a mood?

A focus on form. “Vexations” is a piece with 840 repetitions. How many repetitions does this piece have? What is a repetition? What is the role of repetition in [your] life?

Yesterday, Caroline and I found time for a walk around central Coventry. Because of the bombing, Coventry is one of those places, much more common than I used to think, where everything has been restored. Dartington is another. Most of China is another. I find the center of Coventry moving. There is a range of buildings from the medieval period through the 18^th and 19^th century that are very nice. The post-war architecture isn't always up to the mark, but the overall impression, once one leaves the heavily trafficked streets, is peaceful and, too me, comforting. We had tea, well, coffee, at a very nice cafe/bar/bistro in a quiet side street at the end of our journey.

At the beginning, we paid homage to the statue of Lady Godiva. Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom are ever present in Coventry, in images and place names, and Coventry probably has more nude performances than any other place in the world since so many performers here want to reference the good lady.

Then we moved on to the cathedral which surpassed my expectations. The original cathedral (actually the second since it had been almost completely rebuilt in the 14^th and 15^th centuries) was bombed and the ruins have been left as they were. The walls are complete all around up to about twenty or thirty feet and in some places, such as the west end of the church where the altar is they go much higher. As you enter, at the east end, the walls are quite high and there are bits of glass left in some of the tracery that I found moving. The interior area is large and open to the sky and retains its sense of a sacred space. There will be a performance here Sunday afternoon and I am looking forward to it. Starting tomorrow, Caroline is taking a three-day intensive workshop and I will come back and explore the cathedral more, including the new cathedral which stands beside the ruins. There is also a church very near the cathedral that is intact and I hop to visit that too.

Then we went home and cooked. That has been one of the great things here. We have our own apartment and markets nearby so we are cooking our own meals. It's been fun for me figuring out what is and isn't in the markets and working with a minimal but serviceable kitchen.

On to Dartington next.