Workshop with Charlie Morrissey

Chisenhale Dance Weekend



9.4.10

We begun on the floor- of course. Rolling and descending portion by portion. Finding comfortable zones to fall into on the black floor. Than moving into that a bit more. Settlement. Affinity. Surface to surface, giving way to depth. A falling containment. Black hole, flotation tank.

Lingering here and there, rolling some more. Something about stretching out yet containing within. A kind of rebound spring whereby the extremities- the fingers and toes calibrate the stretch-contraction torsion of the central junction points. The tummy that flops on to the floor. That gives and then minutely vibrates to push away. Between the two tendencies, something catches in and in the cross-over there is both leverage and an outpouring. Both focus a certain contraction of the body and an instantaneous falling and spreading through the ligaments, through the floor, through the atmosphere surrounding.

A dissipation and filtration system that is also all about the body holding to a position. The mark of enquiry- a questioning. The interplay of portions not one after the other but as a set point immediately exploded into multitudes over and over again. A decision. An idea. A sense of compulsion acted upon. A need. Intimate enquiry into the minutiae of a certain holding. The catapult out from here is instantaneous- multi-directional. Spherical.

Patterns that do emerge. In the space surrounding. In the space contained. Breathing- threshold between the two. Planetary systems that affect one another but of a very particular gaseous exchange. Small affects tumble into events. Cataclysm or staying put. Simply a question of these minute pressure gages. Containment, the body pulsed- stream-lined in hands feeling the area of resistance in muscle groupings on another body. Hands the last point of contact in a moving through of one body into another. From centre to centre. A falling though, catching and giving some more. Slow, ponderous, padding. A gradual disturbance. In affects that build out of this nothing into stretches, turns; a yawning body that rolls and pours, then curls and twines around itself to builds out of this fickle introversion upwards by degrees. I feel my body almost buckling with a slight touch, like a spasm that I stay aware in and follow into the ground. Into stillness, then rise up out of the pressure point of that very descent. A partner who tweaks this on the way up, like a branch suddenly twisting in speeded up growth towards a light source now revealed, whilst simultaneously rooting down. Now an admixture of this lean in/lean out as slight inclines of pressure give way to release and a spinning and buckling torsion into a sudden outgrowth. That followed through. Extended or curtailed. Here and then there, widening and containing again; a pump that is now the traction and release between the two of us- this furling and unfurling that makes pattern- it rolls out into the wider scope- our bodies are not always touching- they are following through the conditions of the patterns that they set in motion and that then we ride upon- slight brushes, collisions, near misses, turn-around, falling as one, splaying apart, splintering into shards sent out into the room, drawing the room into us- winding and unwinding continuously. Emotioning. Universes pulsating.

Over and over something builds. A capacity to breathe. To take in and let out. Opening/closing. Can you speak of one without the other? Meaning needs something to work against. Bodies operate through the same tendencies. They are that tendency. To spread and contain. To flow and to buffer up against. Or to shore up. Against surfaces. Now bodies, propping each other up from the hips back to back. The push-me-pull-you central ligament of two backbones articulated as one. A central pulley. And the lifts go up and down. That jamming in place- two directions coursing through and stuck- hips bound in unity, creates a light-touch in the feet, the hands, the breath, all the tendrils- each individual hair on the head, flying up, circulating around a face with open pores. Sweat, movement, coolness. Smell. Each turn and re-equation offers up new possibilities in this circulation system. The eyes are awake now- alive, fueling responsiveness in the shards of light the shadows of moving figures like cloud formations that we pass in the breeze. We go down together. Rise up. How do we know? What is it that we feel together. Some kind of transmission across the skin- slight indentation, a door-crack of aeration- almost between the cells. Nurturing that containment, that letting go. On-off pressure – an idea. A thought process. And so it gets going. Follows the pattern of this continual re-distributed weight. Really gets going into movement itself. Effortless. Who decides? The deciding of each new arrangement- the molecular jostling spins into momentum- looks from the outside to be a plan. But there is no maker. No made. We are not inventors. We are participants. Reading the messaging that culminates out of all the particular instances of settlement and unsettlement, the state of play.



So it moves on. From the sharing of burden as in a drunken stagger- two bodies heaved up on one another, giving in to this support. Now a lessening. A dissipative outreach, not in the hand; the hand on the chest. Not anymore this time as a follower and an instructor. This time a movement of particles that affect a shifting tendency. The a shoring up not as pressed bodies that can not get through but as a coming to rest. A lightness in this natural entropy. A dissipative stature, where the senses widen with an alert ease. A figuration of all the players in the room- conjunctions and compositions- avenues to move through. Vortices and nesting places. Tumults and spins. Lighter and lighter the contact becomes, fuelled by the patterning that is both something else and something generated between. Where is the point of exchange, the threshold? That is impossible to say- it is the playing with this threshold that makes the dance. The dance tat in the end makes itself. Riding on a Breeze generated by the physical sensation of bodies under pressure. That pressure diluted again and again like a homeopathic solution until only the ghost or memory or idea of that pressure remains- the body as falling, as bounding up again. This flickering between the two becomes the magnetism; a kind of spark constantly re-worked into the conditions of its firing up. Those conditions worked up as much out of negation, constraint, inhibition as out of flow, expansion, liberation. One without the other unthinkable. So we articulate a freedom- a kind of emotioning, out of the roles and rules that initially lock us to the ground.

Contact dance about using our human conditions- our limitations. Questioning and riding off of these from one tendency into the other. Never having to choose. Using the meshing of these differences. Learning from the generative propensity of the two in one. The one in the many.