Estudios Previos al Ingreso de una Central de generación con recursos No

The Insomnia Poems return to extremely specific thematic material, all of which can be traced back to the practice dancer Katherine Tait and I maintained over an eighteen-month workshop series. Our process kept returning to sleeping patterns, because Katherine often doesn’t sleep well, which meant her energy levels were low. During our process, Katherine was consistently monitoring sleep to energy ratios, to ensure she could sustain everything she needed to do in a day. As we began working together it was always a rule that we would focus on ease and sustainability, with an overall sense that we’d work towards acknowledging and undoing ambitions towards producing or performing our work, even though we were both aware of the inevitability that we would at some stage want to take our ideas further towards performance making.

Priorities of Practice 1.Sustainability

2.Release of ambition/ Doing less 3.Laziness

4.Organic development

5.Process orientation/ no expectation of performance outcome

6.Intention to follow our shared interest in somatic body-work, Contact Improvisation and to a lesser extent, choreographic phrasing.

We embraced things that are often considered trivial or in excess of serious dance work: we talked for as long as we felt inclined before starting to move, we’d go to eat instead of beginning dance work, we’d spend the majority of our three hour session swapping massage. We allowed one thing to lead into the next, and resisted fixing our outcomes, even though we both had ideas about developing strands of the work choreographically or performatively. Throughout our conversations I took notes here and there, just noticing what I was noticing. It turned out that these noticings accumulated into one another, often becoming improvisation

frameworks or source material for solos.

The topic of sleep, the effects of lack of sleep, the bodily sense of exhaustion and rest, images around waiting for sleep to arrive, observations from watching each other moving in different states of ease or unease, became a developing theme in our improvisations. The integration of writing into the ongoing workshops gave an increasing sense of structure and a specific tone to our work.

I agreed to perform in an improvisation event hoping that Katherine and I could work together with this material, but Katherine, true to the rules we’d established when we began our work, considered performance to be too big a commitment. We wanted the work to continue its focus on undoing ambition and privileging process over product. So I asked myself; ‘How can I translate the logic of our work into a performance environment without having Katherine there with me?’

I turned to our notes, to things we were talking about before we began dancing, responses to bodywork and to watching each other move. The sense of our words being two parts of one stream of work was very evident. Often the experience of moving and the experience of watching movement supported each other via journal pages. The sense of our practitioner knowledge streamed through these notes and I decided I wanted to accentuate this sense of practitioner knowledge by developing our journal writing into a form designed to fold back easily and pragmatically into the studio setting, for further workshopping and performance making. There were three key considerations that were central to the development of the

Insomnia Poems.

1. Mobility. A primary motivation in creating the Insomnia Poems was to make scores for collaborative performance events. In order for the ideas to circulate around a group of dancers or an audience, this artist book could not have a spine holding the pages together. The pages would need to be loose and of a size and paper type that was mobile and durable. 2. Abstraction. I wanted the writing to be evocative, abstract and open to interpretation while

potentially focusing dance tasks in a very specific way.

3. Device for Structure. I wanted the writing to be able to be used to structure movement scores for both choreography and improvisation.

Artworks that influenced the development of the Insomnia Poems as a deck of cards were George Brecht’s event scores (discussed earlier), the manifesto of the site specific performance group Wrights and Sites which utilized the structure of a card deck and a post card collection made by The Museum of Lost and Found as part of the Melbourne Festival of the Arts in 2005.

Wrights and Sites are a theatre company who specialize in having audience members

experience and interact with their environment in unfamiliar ways, in order to made the city a “real, yet imaginary, space of play” (Wrights and Sites, 2006, p.115). Wrights and Sites created a manifesto of their work in the form of a deck of cards. They write that using a pack of cards as a medium to articulate performance concepts “gave us the structuring guide we needed” (Wrights and Sites, 2006, 121) in a link with game structure as an “active and creative form of artistic manifesto” (Wrights and Sites, 2006, p.121). To find the order of their presentation the members simply had to shuffle the deck. I wanted to take this idea into my own practice, to have a set of cards that I could use to develop the ideas Katherine and I had generated in our studio practice.

By chance one day I had stumbled upon the Museum of Lost and Found as part of the

Melbourne Festival of the Arts. This exhibition had published a series of postcards in a packet, with each side of each postcard presenting someone’s memory of losing something, and a related image. In teaching choreography to first year students, I often used the cards for dance making, as they gave a tangible starting point, I could give small groups a card each to work off, so students worked on a similar theme in different ways. I decided that if I was to make my own card deck, generating movement from the cards themselves would be step one in a longer process, as the cards could then be used for organizing movements, just as the shuffling of the deck chose the order for Wrights and Sites presentation of their manifesto.