August 17, 2008

practice the work

We try to make the Imrovisation dance be alive here in Oslo.
For one week now we practiced in the mornings. "Kom igang uke" the good old people of the improvisation community of Oslo..7 of us. We lost our studio some years ago and didn´t find a new one yet
Thinking about pause a lot and how to keep the energy up, and how to change between different states and to stay strong.

May 3, 2008

Grand Unified Theory

tool: anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or a purpose
logic: interrelation or sequence of facts or events
aesthetic: a philosophical theory or idea of what is valid at a given time and place


Those three elements can be the same thing and be given equal status or be completely different.

Questions -
Does your aesthetic determine your logic?
Does your logic determine your tool?
Does your tool determine your aesthetic?
Does your tool determine your logic?
Does your logic determine your aesthetic?
Does your aesthetic determine your tool?

April 16, 2008

Hold With the Open Hand

Something I like to think about while improvising and well, making work in general - hold with the open hand.

Put out your hand palm up. Put something on it. That item is fully supported against gravity. You can move that item where you want to. If you want to drop is, just tilt your hand. If you had been grasping said item, you would have to open your hand and then tilt it the proper direction to let the item drop.

While improvising, support your idea fully but don't let your support get in the way.

As .38 Special sings :

Just hold on loosely, but don't let go
If you cling too tightly,
you're gonna lose control

April 14, 2008

M 2 M '08 and something I want to try

We came, we saw, we danced a lot. Last night Kelly and I watched some of the afternoon working sessions. Clean spatially...could see the duets, trios, clumps how we were all working spatially.

Couple things I noticed - events kept unfolding almost always at the slightly faster than a glacier impro pace. This is not to say that people were not dancing quickly, but the chapters (for lack of a better word) came and went at a similar pace. Scenarios were presented but not investigated for long. Vocabulary was brought back but a scene is more than just its movement vocabulary.

A score I would like to try is have a group of people working, let's say 7. One person is designated the observer (Though all are observer/participants...) When the observer sees a situation/scene - example: standing slow quarter spread throughout the stage with wild CI duet up stage and solo downstage - s/he tells everyone to pause and identifies the situation.

How much can the identified scenario be investigated? How much can its boundaries be stretched before it morphs? How much material is there in that one scene? Does the ensemble need to move on so quickly

April 1, 2008

Opening the blog to all March to Marfa crews

March to Marfa 08 is now over. It was again a great experience. It has been suggested to open this group to all different crews: 2006, 2007 and 2008 as a communication link and continue the discussion. 

I suggest using the label options to sort different discussion and use the comment options when a subject is interesting to you.

Labels suggestions:
unapologetic self-promotion
communication link
opportunities
tools
science
links
...

September 16, 2007

short post

Hi all,
found my passwords again and re exploring blogspot this sunday afternoon. But just wanted to let everyone know that we are in the midst of organizing March 2 Marfa 2008.

Shelley Senter will be leading the mornings and afternoons will be in the theater. The dates are March 24th - 31st 2008. It's Monday to Monday.

Will send more info when it is available

Andrew

January 10, 2007

Dancing the brain

I have been curious about neurones, brain and pattern recognition because of Nina's "dancing the brain" idea. Here some interesting radio shows about that subject.

On Radiolab, WNYC: Stories of people whose brains and bodies have lost each other. They ask how does our brain keep track of our body? They examine the bond between brain and body and look at what happens when it breaks.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/05/05

Again Radiolab, WNYC:
"We examine the line between language and music, how the brain processes sound, and we meet a composer who uses computers to capture the musical DNA of dead composers in order to create new work. We also re-imagine the disastrous 1913 debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring…through the lens of modern neurology."
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21

On our beloved Canadian CBC Quirks and Quarks Radio Show:

  Knowing Me, Knowing You
One of the hallmarks of being human is our ability to empathise with others – to read people’s expressions and emotions. Even with complete strangers, we somehow understand how they are feeling, what they are thinking and what their intentions are. But how do we do it? Scientists have been grappling with this for ages. There just didn’t seem to be any obvious mechanism to explain it.

But then, about 15 years ago, something weird happened in a monkey lab in Italy. Scientists there discovered a new type of brain cell. They called it a “mirror neuron”, because of its ability to mirror the activity of those around it. The neurons were firing not only when the monkey itself performed an action, but when it watched an experimenter perform it as well. So, even when the monkey was completely still, and did nothing but watch someone else pick up a peanut, its brain fired as though it were picking up the peanut itself. And that got researchers wondering if this could be the key to our exquisite mind-reading abilities. Toronto science journalist Alison Motluk set out to explore the implications of mirror neurons, and prepared a documentary, called Knowing Me, Knowing You. Here are the people she spoke to:

Dr. Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has been studying these neurons for some years now. He says they have the uncanny ability to mirror or mimic what’s going on in the brains of others.

Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the Brain Mapping Center at UCLA, had had a hunch that imitating other people’s facial expressions was somehow linked to feeling what they were feeling. This turned out to be true.

Dr. Mirella Dapretto, who works with Dr. Iacoboni at UCLA, immediately began wondering if malfunctioning mirror neurons might explain the problems that autistic people have.

Dr. V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. He thinks the combination of language and learning by imitation that mirror neurons seem to enable may explain why humans have such a rich and rapidly evolving culture.
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/05-06/apr01.html
Dowload that mp3 here: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2005-2006/mp3/qq-2006-04-01c.mp3