voi Cesaccessing the discontinuities of experience in general as the basis for a performance
of self in particular.
saRa giddens: as we reflected on all of our work (giddens and Jones. 2001) we came
to understand more fully that what had been drawing our attention, fuelling our
desire, was this re- combining of choreography and text to create opportunities for
articulations ‘when words move and flesh utters’. Being at once fully and wholly
in and in- between these technologies allowed an opening up of space- time that
revealed those rich and fascinating blind spots. i was where i wanted to be: here
with these real, fleshy, sweaty, wondrous bodies amidst the sound of [t]his poetry:
the image and the sound, seeing and hearing, a making visible and being heard – a
duet.
simon Jones: This separation hear- see became the fundamental principle of Bodies in
Flight’s work: from it flowed not only a working method, but a series of philosophical
enquiries into what it means to be human amidst the technological.
saRa giddens: in Constants (1998) two different performers were up close and very
visible. This time the audience- spectators were seated individually in a broad
sweep spiralling inwards, with She[ila] gilbert and patricia Breatnach moving in
between them. She finally reaches the spiral’s dead centre as patricia exits with a
final magnificent rush of youthful energy out of the furthest door. Constants was a
show about memory and love, and, of course, that inevitable coupling – a loss of
love.
The palpable presence of sheila (then in her seventies) is my own overarching
memory of this show: as i close my eyes i can still sense her. The frailty of a body,
now more present than ever, a body beginning to fail, to fail to behave how its owner
wanted it to behave, technically anyway. She used the walls and backs of chairs for
support and her own physical ‘capacities’ became one structuring principle for the
work itself. The other was the creation of the material through duets.
emerging out of a later work – Who By Fire (2004) – we made The Triptych:
Who by Fire to try to understand, to find out more about how i make live work.
ironically it brimmed over with the most personal, most human, most emotive
material i had ever worked with – the movements and sounds of my daughter in
and alongside these big emotive scenes full of power and movement and immense
beauty (in its deepest often difficult form). it became a space- time for a gathering
of memories of my own and others. it felt like we were finally dancing in time.
simon Jones: With Who by Fire we began to understand that this double work of
separating and then bundling back together was a rich and powerful means of
accessing or disclosing a generalized mood of together- aloneness in contemporary
experience of self, enabled by the ubiquity of media technologies, of apparently
increased intimacy and exposure and exacerbated feelings of disassociation and
isolation. We combined our various concerns – the dissolving of the body’s integrity,
the opening up of the senses’ aporia, face- to- face with our auditor- spectators. our
primary principling became a de- second- naturing – in effect a deconstruction of our
commonsense of the everyday, an extension of Brechtian estrangement into the
very interiority of the self, so that everything we thought we knew so intimately we
did not even have to think about it, we simply did and felt it, is de- naturalized and
once more made strange to us, even the very way we each walk or talk.