A letter to Ana
Athens, January 2011. The fire has started in the Mediterranean. The bodies are collapsing. Are we waiting? It got cold but the sun of the east never gives up. Max Richter plays on the cd and I am thinking of...
Who am i? I am the story of humankind. I am the standing animal. I am the poet, I am the fear, I am no body, I am all bodies… A sand storm is coming that will transform everything in its passage.
Living, experiencing, lightening up the world around me. The borders of things are challenged again and again, and it is there where this new-old-infinite dialogue occurs. It is in the space between the breaths. In this perception the intangible starts to become tangible.
The dialogue continues like this:
Lying on the floor, becoming weightless, your eyes are closed and you see a landscape, you are a landscape. You are an island, with mountains and canyons, with forests and birds and all sort of animals and you can see everything from the sky, it’s daylight.
A fear comes then and says “you are the base of the island, you are underwater, you will drawn”, but then again “ I am the island, I am the landscape and I can be deep in the sea , up on the highest mountain, on the surface “ and then I’m breathing calmly again. Immediately everything in my body is something, my breasts and knees are the mountains and waters run through the island. The ground as I’m touching it is getting warmer and then a great change comes, a big earthquake, the earth’s crust is moving ,tectonic transformations occur.
By now I am with my hands down on the floor, I’m touching other ground, I feel like a new thing ,an it, an animal perhaps that is curious to be alive, bigger movements, small jumps until the head comes up and I start to see outside from within and then all over the space. The sensation is still there, the thread between the worlds is there. The journey continues and I am on my two feet, human but primitive. Where to go? Back and forth, I return to the earth, silently as before.
We go back and we do the journey again and again. Touching with the whole body, the colors of the island change, I see more red and the air is thicker. The first time with Androniki doing the duet feels so warm and infinite, filling the gaps, listening and answering to a story of a finger, shoulder, energy. And in the end it is so interesting to talk about what we saw in each other’s personal journey. Androniki had all this limitation and a very clear use of her weight and all these created a very vivid and bizarre new body.
We talk and decide to start together. Two bodies go forward and backward their journey and the dialogue continues like this:
We are now side by side but we can’t see, it’s like we don’t know how to use vision. We are in the dark but we sense and touch and react only in some things. We play. The reactions –actions seem random, it is like we know something is there but we don’t know the name of it. We keep our centers but we our also open to the other. Only in the end the two bodies become one another’s limit in space and create a new land . This last time that I do my journey I don’t return to earth , I stay with Androniki.
Some last thoughts:
The lab is a life process and It is part of my life’s process. I recognize that through touching another kind of space is created. The mind slowly can be free from comparison and criticism. New relations are created in and out and in an unexpected way.
I felt alive and my focus stronger. Being in dialogue with myself and the world again. Finding oneself and not be self absorbed and compact but open and giving space, is like walking on a fine line. Through the work /through this life process we gain new spaces ,and this fine line is transforming also, sometimes it feels like you are surfing on this beautiful wave… Balance is ever-changing, you lose it, you find it.
The experience of the journey was deep and the traces that it has created gave me the confidence of a well sustained trail in a foreign land. What will happen next I don’t know yet… Intuition and intellect together may lead me to the heart of my idea.
Everything I find is creating another question in this process, life process and I can’t think another better way to be.
'TOWARDS THE LIGHT'
How can you describe a journey? All the different landscapes, the joy,
the excitement, the fear, the surprise, the sounds, the colors, the breaths?
Which details from this experience are meant to be shared? Boris Cyrulnik says:
“memory is not a return in the past, it is a reconstruction of oneself who
seeks in the traces of the past images and words”. And so we begin…
Creative process as a life process. That was the key idea and practice
of this journey and that was exactly what I felt the choreographic piece should
echo. Questions, interactions, proposals combined with old sounds, words,
moving patterns and images. I asked myself where I am ,what kind of landscape
my body forms , if I am open, when the dialogue occurs, what is an impossible
task for me, if I am authentic, which events I want to explore and create cells
of experience?
In the beginning I had all these fragments and I searched for something
to unite them. I couldn’t see yet the obvious. I thought about this train that
travels along different landscapes, unites different cultures, transforms time
and space, bridges the unknown. Yet I still saw this train from outside, but what
if I was on that train? I remembered this old favorite story of V. Pelevine
about this person living on a train and it came to me. Yes all this different
things belong to a person, a character that questions his position, his
authenticity, the impossible of things and starts slowly again to be in
dialogue with oneself and the other. I am like this person, a passenger, on the
move. It is a game of reflections, a theatre in the square.
And again I go back to go forward as Ana Sanchez says, to a material that
I had created through the first phase of her workshop and I evolved it. It had to
do with recognition of my body and its pressured relation with space and I felt
that this was my heroes starting point. Following the sequence of events in the
book, the first picture of the piece is in the morning and my character is in
his bed. The movement is restricted in a rectangular. The idea of Michael Klien on creating cells of experience along with things I
know from my theatre studies helped me and led me to the creation of more cells
of the character. In the meantime Kyriakos along with Olga and Maria helped to
record certain passages from the story which I had selected. I improvised whilst hearing these pieces and a certain atmosphere and gestures occurred that were
new and interesting. I asked myself if I wanted these pieces to be heard but I
felt the right thing to do was just to communicate the work that they evoked.
And that’s how the second picture of the piece was created. It’s now
noon and we are in the dining room, my hero sits at a table. A light forms a
circle and around of it unfolds his inner struggle to identify with something,
a sunbeam… All this play with the light convinced me that the train passes from
Africa. I have dreamt before of this different light and the uprising of people
in so many countries in Africa influenced me deeply. How will all these sound? In the beginning I used music from Mali but
after talking to Ana I knew I had to search deeper and open myself again. I
remember going to a party of a friend and as I was walking up the stairs I hear
this melody. I recognize it, I carried it within for a long time and I knew
that it had all the rhythm and poetry that my character needed to do his
journey. It is Lily Boniche’s song “Ana el owerka”. I knew that this music
would come and go, as a remembrance, as a call, as something that will remind
my character of his dreams that became nightmares and then again make him dream
again. Towards the end of the process when Kyriakos Spyrou and I talked about
it, he had the idea that the music would come every time from a different
source for example a radio etc, relevant to the different spaces of the piece,
for example in the open air, recognizing and attributing to the atmosphere of
the different spaces of the choreography.
It was a Tuesday morning and the
process as always went on. I observe the people around me, their gestures,
their encounters, their need to communicate and their success or failure to do
so. My character also interacts with certain people and those are the people
that will lead him eventually to his next dilemma. We are now in the third
picture of the piece and here we see a dialogue with a friend. A friend that
questions the position of the characters in the world, their position on the
train, because in Pelevine’s book the whole humanity lives on this train. ‘Do they remember they are passengers? Can
they see the world differently? Could they live outside of this train?
Until now this piece is a solo piece but I found it very interesting to
place a fantastic person and try to talk, move and relate to him. Now I am
leaning against a wall of the studio and continue to work, trying ordinary
movements in relation to another body but also using the vertical surface. I recall
an improvisation we did with Olga and how we used space and forms. As I
continue to search I have an unexpected quest. We are doing lights rehearsal
and it is then when I come face to face with my shadow. Time is running by but
this was very important for me. Nevertheless by now we are three up against
that wall, altering roles and playing with time, until we reach a decision to
change space again and climb on the top of the train.
This is the fourth picture of the piece. My character now is in the open
air, but again he is restricted by the size of the roof. In the beginning he is
more vulnerable, he is like an animal in the dark, hands and feet on the ground
and slowly again rising on his two feet. A standing animal who explores the new
territory, right and left there is chaos but also lights shining from far away,
smells, sounds and music. As it is written in the book, other people are brought
in the choreography. Now I hear L. Bonishes song louder. I dance to the music.
A pause. In an unexpected moment my character sees a person jumping of the
train into a lake and then disappearing in the woods. A pause. This is the
impossible task of my character, to get of this train. X. Leroi said “the more utopia seems impossible, the
more necessary it becomes”. I run backwards to my first position. The circle
closes. From day to night. Twenty four hours of a life in eight minutes. In the final picture I stay still and I’m looking from left to right and
then I see in front of me. We hear steps on the ground.
Is these all happening? Is my character dreaming or he is awake for the
first time in his life? How can you create such worlds?
I close this small journey in the creative process quoting Francis Bacon
words. “In one of his letters Van Gogh speaks of the need to make changes in reality,
which become lies that are truer than the literal truth. This is the only
possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality which he
is trying to capture.”
Thank you fellow travelers.
Emmanouela korki
