Taipei

After a move to hong kong in June, I find myself now in Taipei helping to manage and observe 10 choreographers create 10 minute dances over the course of 3 weeks. Watching the performers and the choreographers work together to establish a meaningful connection and a special bond that will be translated into a piece, makes me very much long for my colleagues in London. If we were all together for 3 weeks everyday in a new context and new culture, what could we create together? What will are next theme be? After working together in June and July through cinematic and digital dialogues, the group performed a new section of a developing work, flesh and bones, and reworked our first piece, Phoenix. The feedback was very positive, and interesting to read as I have yet to see anything more than still photographs of the work we developed with our new process. Many people related the essence of the work to Greek tragedy and a few people mentioned the poet Lorca who I have been inspired by in past work in relation to his concept of duende. Perhaps we should revisit this concept together over the course of the next few months. Most importantly, being here in Taipei and considering my very new personal/ professional circumstances I have been contemplating and trying to articulate the value of absence rather than presence in human existence. We place so much effort and emphasis on presence and physical proximity that we tend to forget that such focus is only made on this because of the possibility and the reality of absence in our lives...especially in an age of travel, but always in the human experience, it is because everything will at some point lose physical presence that it becomes tremendously fragile for us. How do we balance presence and absence or remote and proximate? How do we retain a value for flesh and bones and still embrace the bonds that exist without them? I look forward to stewing over these ideas and having them burst into future collaborations near and far....