Making a new piece of work, a solo for lovely dancer Annie Lok. These are just a few video stills from the current ideas we are exploring.
Annie moves and as she moves she tells me where her attention is –
“Internal” she says, if her awareness is on muscular or skeletal or a proprioceptive focal point.
“External” she says, if her awareness is outside herself… on something visual within the room for example, or on a sound or texture…
This gives me as the onlooker a way into her movement and strangely, after watching for some time I find myself disagreeing with her. “Hum, I think, that movement actually looked internal.”
Or laughing out loud in absolute agreement as Annie works through a feel-good stretch in her hip, “Internal.” Internal.” Internal.” Internal.”

I devised a ‘score’ for Annie to improvise through:
Internal – External improvisation of movement until something external takes your attention strongly.
React, through movement, to this external stimulus.
Wait, in stillness, in a state of being ready, alertness, in a state of what I call “readiness” like a cat before it pounces…..whilst waiting in this state mentally ‘replay’ the movement you made in reaction to the external stimulus.
Repeat this movement (as best as you can remember it) over and over, letting it naturally shift and evolve until you get bored of it and then enter back into improvising around Internal – External and repeat the whole process.

An interesting ebb and flow of movement dynamic was created out of this which let me see glimpses of Annie’s thought processes as she was challenged by both remembering the score and maintaining that sense of moment to moment liveness but also reflecting at the same time. Difficult. But good to watch!