Making and Unmaking: Part One

15.4.10




I come into the dance studio from the park. There has been much time to spare. A lull or interim, between an earlier warm up and the cooling off before the final score in the late afternoon- a score by Nancy Clark Smith which is pasted on the bare wall at the back of the space and runs the width of the upper floor warehouse adapted many years ago into a dance space.

In the interim when people were dissipated- some in the park, some making their way across London, others idly eating from the mass of supplies crowding a table in the room next door, I have been standing by the lake in the park. It became too cold to dance in the park as arranged and so I gave up even trying to find the group, then spotted them between some trees but did not make my way over because the cold put me off. Instead I watched the single stream of water spouting from this reduced water-feature and splaying out on the wind into a thin film almost like a partition across sections of the lake. Kids were throwing bread at the birds, sometimes whole slices. One child stares into the middle distance, resisting parent’s requests to move on, then glancing and burbling at a nearby child so that they time their throws of bread with one another. Other things play out. There’s a row of chairs. A child picks up the end one and drags it off; I sit on the next one then get up again. It is cold now even to sit down and be still. In the loo, a kid keeps repeating “It’s dirty, it’s dirty, it’s dirty” as she waits her turn with her mother. I’m about to go, then sit down on a high stool by the café that wobbles because of a dip in the tarmac. I am facing the man-made lake again. A small dog finds a strip of black plastic in the water picks it up with its teeth and deposits it by the foot of its owner. The owner ignores both the dog and the plastic. The dog keeps picking it up again, re-positioning it a little closer and backing off. The owner still ignores the dog. A man behind me approaches another man who is sitting down on a step off from the round café building. He has noticed a tattoo on the man’s arm of a famous surrealist artist and comments on it. The man explains in a deadpan and bored tone why he got it done. Later he disappears from the step, enters the café and re-exits with a large hamburger on a white plate. Kids run around him blocking his view of the lake, looking for sticks in the water to give the small dog that has the plastic strip. The man ignores them and continues to chew on his hamburger. I continue to wobble on the chair. I feel a bit out on a limb in my dance gear, feeling cold suddenly. I have not brought any money with me. I would like a coffee.

Earlier I had been watching foxes on a piece of scrub-land out the back window of the main reception area to the dance space at the base of the canal. Because it was a warehouse it was a long way down to where the foxes and cubs were. They were small moving animals in amongst the foliage, occasionally tumbling out across the pavement, tearing at old plastic bags, letting them fly up, then pouncing on them. Wrestling one another too, tearing the bags to shreds. I watched for the patterns they made, not really with any sense of why they did what they did.