There is a point to this. I have no idea what it is.

Among the myriad things that never, for equally various reasons into the showing were the sublimely beautiful Hinode (Solar-B) videos of the sun in X-ray or Extreme Ultra-Violet, we’d talked about being projected on a suitably awe-inspiring scale at the end of the piece…

It’s been some weeks of just thinking about what we have done so far and where to go, and so for me the next stage, besides more funding applications is working on this new stuff for a solo. Also editing of the video into a 3D stereoscopic film.

My last days were spent on occasion doing tests for this, as single frames, and then as short bits of video, getting the separation right, working out how to assemble a stereo film in Final Cut, seeing what peculiarities and oddities emerged when the video was played back through the VR Theatre projectors, and repeat.

Aside from some weirdness, like frame rate irregularities, possibly due to how I exported it from Final Cut, and some unwanted up-scaling in the projection process, there’s nothing that doesn’t look atrocious and Chris is quite keen for us to continue. So while he works on the weirdness, I get to do the cutting. I haven’t done much in editing for a while with my old laptop so geriatrically incapable of rendering at a speed measured faster than frames-per-day, and the precarious assemblage to get it to boot in the first place, but with my new new!!! MacBook Pro rendering to m2v almost in real time, I’m all trembling with anticipation at getting fluent in all the fun graphics and processor intensive editing things… mmm excitement.

But… sadness.

Yesterday was my last at Swinburne. I’ve been there since early December when I had so little comprehension beyond nervousness at what I could possibly do, and in these tumultuous months, for so many reasons, personally, artistically, intellectually such a bone-crushing shove into a precipice, and somehow found it much more to my liking than the fear and nausea on its lip, and then yesterday to say goodbye to Chris and walk down beside the railway lines hummocked above, past Max and Alley Tunes and our small French café, the now autumn sun leaking long shadows through denuded trees, this last time.

And to pack, to entomb these months in boxes that, along with me though via different carriers will arrive in Adelaide next week, to finish. My room in Collingwood soon to be vacant, my life again designed around a suitcase. How unexpected and glorious this all has been.

A week in Adelaide. mmm. Oh! I didn’t blog even. Seeing friends, many meetings, some shows and festivals and then a 6am flight back to Melbourne for the remaining three weeks of my residency.

What to say thus far? I have no idea quite what I have made. I can’t really assess it within the context of previous pieces I’ve made which exist in the world of dance theatre, performance, installation rather than pure dance. I do have some clear ideas where it can go in the coming weeks, which mainly will be research for me. I also plan to make this research into a solo while I’m back in Adelaide. I have an idea of what it could look like with a group of dancers, though not sure of the number. I had an idea that a chamber orchestra of brass instruments would be a fine accompaniment. I have lots of ideas I later regard with embarrassed disdain.

I’m quite sure having projection or dressing it up with the usual accouterments of dance is exactly what I don’t want to do. Nor either to engage with any of the devices of theatre. The problem with this is that in refusing to engage with common structural elements, it leaves a gaping void which needs to be addressed with some sort of rigor.

I was reading about a lecture Aubrey de Grey gave at the BIL Conference, where he said, (paraphrasing from …My Heart’s in Accra) “Be right (diligence before oratory). He quotes Sean Carroll: “Being a heretic is hard work”. It’s not enough to disagree with mainstream thinking - you actually have to be correct. “Galileo was a heretic, but understood the reigning orthodoxy at the time better than anyone else.” Very few people work that hard: “Many casual heretics can’t be bothered.”" At another talk, KV Fitz said, “intelligence is a function of passion.”

I think between these two thoughts much of what I am trying to do here is contained.

During my holiday in Adelaide, I showed the video of Friday night to Daniel, Bonnie, a couple of others. The more I watched it, the more I felt I couldn’t say anything about it. I’m not sure even if it’s any good. I can say though that making dance, seriously investing time, not in a personal style of moving or individual technique, but engaging wholeheartedly in the cultural history of western dance as performance and spectacle, all the way from Louis XIV and even before, and considering what choreography as movement is relative to the contemporary world as dance was 300 years ago to the courts, or as dance was to the Modern world of much of last century, to be very specific in analysing these systems of a body moving and to try and conceptualise where it could go, to not reiterate what has been done before, all this which is really choreographing and making dance and nothing else, is really fucking hard.

Also, I think it does not easily fit into being assessed within the sphere of what contemporary dance is at the moment in Australia. Certainly what I’ve seen in Melbourne is drifting far from dance these days, whereas Adelaide is quite fixated on, in various guises, the dancer as technician, and neither of these things are what I am interested in here. It is a problem with ideas, that if they don’t have some dialogue with the existing field from which they emerge and upon which they somehow reflect, it is tricky to be able to say much about what they are.

Not arrogantly pretending I just changed the world of dance, but the line of research I’m following doesn’t have much room for many of contemporary dance’s current tropes.

Then there was the discussion on language and structure with a couple of people, and whether pure dance can indeed say anything. My first thought on this was that if it really can’t say anything without being dressed up, perhaps it shouldn’t try to articulate anything in the first place. What does all this training and attention to corporeal aesthetics count towards? I suppose the answer therein in my continued preference for working only with dancers, and, well, very particular types of dancers at that.

All this to say, there is something in here that counts, but perhaps it is beyond my ability to make sense of.

A peculiar week. I haven’t been too intent on planning for the showing, the idea all along was to continue playing with stuff up till today and then whatever we have, tomorrow we for once stick with. So in a way it is finished but in more ways oh very much not.

Unexpected not-happening. All the Hydrogen shell stuff, based on the absorption lines, didn’t work. I mean didn’t work in one of it’s possible manifestations as a method to shuffle us closer or further from our centre based on the size and shape of various orbital shells. To wonder what I’m talking about and sometimes pictures are good, look at these Hydrogen atom orbitals. So we thought, oh well, save that for me alone for when I return to the centre.

That is to say, will work in a different way, but it was surprising to see the complexity of the piece disturbed and broken by adding just a bit more.

Altogether, it has reached a level of complexity that is pointless to add to as there isn’t time to fold new things into it, though I do have a couple of clear ideas where it will go in the coming weeks after the showing, and need to work this out myself through my favourite rehearsal method, lying down and dozing.

Gideon came in to watch us do a run today. He won’t be here for the showings, and we were, well, ready to be seen, and certainly by the end knew what it’s going to feel like to perform in two days. I need to learn to breathe differently, but it’s far too late for anything else. And remember everything else as well as how to improvise, and the other way too.

I don’t want to get into an analysis of what the work is viz. what I imagined it could be yet, though it now has the feeling I always get around here, a bit of emptiness at what could have been. It has to, at some time collapse from all the myriad possibilities down into the one thing it will be seen as, and watching it on video, I do enjoy, like endless rain in sheets beating the surface of puddles.

“In so far as the concatenation of their perceptions is due to the principle of memory alone, men act like the lower animals, resembling the empirical physicians, whose methods are those of mere practice without theory… For instance, when we expect that there will be daylight to-morrow, we do so empirically, because it has always so happened until now. It is only the astronomer who thinks it on rational grounds.”

— G.W. Leibniz - La Monadologie 1714

monadologie has been:

choreographed and danced by Bonnie Paskas, Frances d’Ath, Lina Limosani
an ANAT/Arts Victoria Arts Innovation Residency (AIR)
at Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
and Maximised by Chunky Move

important things:

when: Friday 22nd February, Saturday 23rd February
what time: 7:30pm
where: Napier St Theatre, cnr Napier and Church Sts, South Melbourne

what else: blogging at www.supernaut.info and www.anat.org.au/blog/dAth and dance stuff at www.francesdath.info

contact me: frances at francesdath.info or 0419 586 227

Please RSVP by email or SMS

Much confusion and anxiety.

Which is to say, we tried to run it all today. 41 phrases unfold to nearly double that and in an instant we have almost half an hour of something that more-or-less is what it will be in another week. I realised that these unfolded phrases could serve as a basis for another set of series that operate on them which we never got to, and then thought about equations, and how through a process of eliminating, swapping around, balancing, it’s possible to make it more simple, which gave me the ghost of a sense of something further away, where pockets of emptiness would appear just from these eliminations.

I suggested this to Bonnie and immediately declared it’s something I’ll work on on my own in the final weeks of the residency.

We still have about a week of useful play time left. Lina returns tomorrow and I hope is not too horrified by what we have done. It’s all lurching into production time now, thinking about more than just making dance, and having to divide my attention elsewhere.

It’s become an extremely intense piece, something I’d imagined, after all my visual aesthetic for this was inspired by black metal and doom … ok … photographs of Sunn0))) playing live. I think also my turbulent personal life has seeped into it too. I wonder if when astrophysicists are having a bad time, they write angry and emotional equations?

I’m blogging the entire project and residency at supernaut … i whore for art … which is my usual blog that seems to have been going for years. It’s the same entries as here, just cross-posting, but with additional and occasionally salacious other stuff.

And now another week.

Personal hysteria aside, (and dissociation, haha), last week was the hardest so far in the process. This wasn’t because Lina is away, though the dynamic in the studio of two verbose coffee drinkers trying to remove ourselves from catatonia was … mmm … amusing. Things nonetheless have been coming together.

This week, after lying in bed all weekend reading Matter, (Oh, yes, is good and gnashing of teeth and wailing that I’ll finish it in the next couple of days, provided the sleeping pills don’t banish me first), was physically gruesome. We finished learning all the phrases, 41 of them, some fifteen minutes of movement that leaves us in a rather exhausted trance. Physically it’s not very aerobic in intensity, but it’s certainly something to endure.

Last week I started thinking about series, and out of nowhere said, “Fibonacci sequence, that is, 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34…”. On the weekend, after talking with Chris who said, “f_t =a₀f_t-2 + a₁f_t-1 + a₂f_t+1 + a₃f_t+2“. I thought about that for the weekend and on Sunday, decided, “n = n + n + n_-1 + n_-2“, more or less the same thing, really. Except mine makes sense only to me.

I was interested in a sequential recurrence of phrases that had some kind of pre-determined die-off, that is to say, rather than a single step iteration 1st, 2nd, 3rd … nth, each n that was a significant number in a sequence would refer back to a certain number of earlier steps with each successive n losing the last of the previous steps referred to. Or in our case, playing with the Fibonacci numbers, (which incidentally, while occurring in the natural world in abundance don’t seem to figure in astrophysics. Bummer.) to cause recurrent cycles of the 41 phrases.

Or to make sense of it, with my formula, each phrase that corresponds to a Fibonacci number repeats itself and then the phrases corresponding to the previous two Fibonacci numbers. Confused? Only because it’s me explaining it.

Additionally (haha, yes, additionally), we’ve tied in the less-than-1-second unfoldings, the re-improvisings to the reiterations of phrases and also somehow including a bunch of text on one of them. We tried it today and got hopelessly lost and anxious and who knows what would come next and seems like we’re caught in an endless loop of one phrase, and then we got it kind of working. The original 14 phrases, some 3 or 4 minutes with all this unfolding becomes 11 minutes. It’s quite creepy to do and has a … it’s hard to tell if we’re far too close to what we’re doing to see what it really is, but seems to be rather intense to watch.

No, I’m not finished. We did realise yesterday that all this together pretty much constitutes the piece some of you will see in two weeks, but there’s a couple more steps yet.

The original idea, I’m still working with Chris on was a correlation between the various series of Hydrogen absorption sequences and the phrases. Variously this would cause certain of the later phrases under certain conditions to collapse back to one of the first five or six phrases. This could work quite well with the Fibonacci sequence which decreases in frequency as the number becomes larger, as the Hydrogen series tend to occur further up the spectrum. Anyway, fun for me, pain for others.

11 minutes, 30 seconds of video below … un0)))joy…

Yesterday afternoon, Cobie came in and we played with the 3-D camera set-up. Lots of very particular things involved to make the eyes, which it is quite easy to reveal are remarkably lazy in accepting what they see, not do what they do when there is just too much variation between what one eye and the other see and then everything goes, “owwwww!!!! pain!!!!”.

Today with Chris we got to see the results, about 10 seconds of footage in the 3-D Theatre of Bonnie. All quite successful, really. No, you can’t see what she really looks like in 3-D, but this is what the screen looks like without the 3-D glasses.

bonnie 3-d stereoscopic test

I wasn’t sure how useful me being in a studio on my own would be, despite a short list of schedule that I knew would take hours to make sense from. I surprise myself. Quite fun and I feel like a despotic scientist doing something resembling computational demonology.

This was a carryover from yesterday and the slight grimness I felt from watching Bonnie and I go through the whole thing and what was missing, why was it hollow like a zombie corpse? So I decided, having no one but myself for entertainment (poor choice of companionship, no?) I’d try and not induce crying by trying to do too much.

(Also pretended I was Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker making her solo Once.)

Things to do: Watch video from start. Try to get through the first ten phrases. The word for today is deliberateness. Find all the detail that has got mushed into choreography, decide - in a purely dictatorial fashion - what is going on, what operations are happening and on what body parts. Make pages of notes (feels like work, but in fact merely a precursor to). Do it a few times and video (haha, really, yes, actually dance a bit, Frances, on your own, with deliberateness).

Bonnie and I decided the first block of five phrases were more-or-less ok, though in watching the video on my own with no real time I have to finish by, I found some stuff that just makes it more … coherent or something. It’s just being accurate about what we’re doing, even when that happens to be a decision we make for ourselves every time we do it. The aim then was to find this level of sophistication in the next lot.

Partially I don’t know the phrases too well, a residue from how we assembled them, with me watching the video and describing it, and partially it was how we learnt them, with a slipping of focus into just choreography, empty steps without the blood that interested me in the first place.

So now there are pages of descriptions, a vague and general plan on how to do this for the other fifty or sixty phrases, and the first ten as a block I feel ok-ish about. It only took four hours or so. (Oh but Bonnie and Lina have to know what I know next.)

It looks as though I’m watching myself while video-ing, like staring in the mirror. I’m actually watching a bunch of maps of the Large Magellanic Cloud and mapping all my body-parts, in a strict order to them. It’s kinda fun, that there’s a progression of movement I go through, but also these maps, what I choose to pay attention to, which ones materialise, all changes what I do on a quite subtle level. I think this is getting close to evolving movement that isn’t a corpse or shell, that has the pressure inside of something living.

Tomorrow I do this with Bonnie, and Friday then (I don’t like to predict how my life will be even that far into the future) I get to do another ten on my own. It’s like learning to dance, or something.

Anyway, a little piece of me dancing for three and a half minutes.

(And big surprise, I found a print of the first page of Leibniz’s manuscript of monadologie, so beautiful to look at and read.)