Ruth - Notes on Book Task

Research and Development VDT

Book Task 24th July 2007

Task 1

Book 1 Lust Elfriede Jelinek

‘the Woman goes for a walk with her child she goes out walking with the child for a good hour’

Q setting of durational tasks.. time/action
thinking about form and content- adult/child – whats the performative questions in relationship to children … how little/small/simple does a task need to be if the ‘performers’ aren’t professional ‘dancers’ – what happens to us the viewer if we start with adult/child working together/doing a task together… how does that change the starting oints about tasks


‘the Direktor does not know his workers as individuals.But he knows their total value as a work-force.. A works choir has been established. So the Direktor has something to keep him occupied.

Q whats the total value of a work that has more than one performer- what does having more than one person bring

‘
‘I’d like to meet the person who could make a new woman of me out of the things I say’

‘Youth is its own performance. Everything belongs to it and nothing belongs to us, not even the place where we sit in motorway restaurants…… all things present are fine by youth’

‘These people barely feel theneed for rules. After all their feelings regulate their lives’

Q I was interested in the notion that has been discussed in the last few days that there is a desire to get away from emotion.. is this really the case? Or is it about a different relationship with emotion.. a different way to present it, create space for it…’








Book 2 what are children for

‘one of the great pleasures of having children lay in the confident expectation that they would be inheritors of ones moral code or ideology….
..apostles for the cause in which they believed…
..people who would finish off the job’

Q – choreographer/directors to performers – how do we pass on ideology/ideas…..

‘there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him. I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up the rules I lived by will be meaningless. The world will be completely different. If a man accepts the fact that the world must change then his life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience- past and future generations mean nothing to him. That how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world is meaningless. ‘ pg 96 from Atomised…

Book 3 – William Forsythe.. improvised technologies

‘The purpose of improvisation is to defeat choreography, to get back to what is primarily dancing. I consider choreography to be a secondary result of dancing- there is a truce between choreography and dancing. IN the kind of complexity that I use, I want to make things that are irreproducible due to their temporal complexity. That’s part of the goal. So in my solo’s is an attempt to defeat choreography… I think it would be impossible to get that much co – ordination properly timed together.’

Task 2

Q1 what drew you to the book

Book 1 – title – lust.. and the quote ‘extraordinary violent’.. and the fact it was fiction and the fact it said nobel prize… drawn by idea of its critical recognition..
Book 2 – In morning I was thinking a lot about the what/if of having leah and Nom in the process… and in first book happened to pick bit about child/adult so went to the book about child in the title…
Book 3 – deliberate attemp to Zone in on ‘performcne’ after 2 books of non performance.. I was drawn to forsythe.. know of him… title improvisation… the synchronicities with this process

Q 2 how did you approach the book

Book 1 – curiously, quite open.. then Patrycja in passing said something about the book bein hard and tough.. so then I approached it cautiously with a bit of exitement/trepidation…being influenced…
Book 2 – closed eyes flicked and stopped randomly.. then immediately started making connections out of it.. followed a task I had set ie random and expected to see the synchronicity somewhere in the text
Book 3 – closed eyes flicked choose from random… then read that page

Q3 Did the way you approach the book differ from the way you approach dancing.

I substituted the word dancing in my mind for the way I approach making work….
Yes in many ways it did echoed that process.. ,
I set myself a task ie eyes closed random… and followed it.. I often set tasks/frames/for investigation..
I tried to opening my thinking but not think too much about what I was doing…... allowing in the connections between my personal inner interests, the words on the page,,, the collective topic under investigation…. Often this method of making connections, links, ,,, following own flow but also absorbing, filtering,…is how I approach work
Finally I took for granted that there was ‘perfection’ in the random choice… that in every choice random or intended there is something of value……

Q4 How did you document
Copied down quotes that interested me then wrote Questions underneath that came to mind.