Today in the studio I felt a particular familiarity with the space I was moving in, whether it was during the warm up, during the breaks, group dance exercise or research. I wonder if it takes this amount of time for someone to be fully comfortable in a space. And I don’t say I wasn’t feeling comfortable in the studio before, but now I feel such a strong sense of belonging to or ‘owning’ it, and a huge ease in thinking and movement. And then I thought about what it is that changed how I interacted with the space. Then I remembered I had come there two days ago late at night to rehearse my Medea piece. But why didn’t the change occur the following day and it did now? Maybe it’s the same process that Trajal was talking about when you do your research, gain as much information as possible, and then let it sit and come back to you; we don’t know when or how it will come back.

In the 20 minutes of  ‘studio time’ I tried to document feelings, ideas and impressions through drawing. I’ve been slowly trying to switch to this kind of approach over the past few days, as it’s much more intuitive for me and I think it is very compatible with dance – and I’m going to give probably the most relevant example for this. When drawing from life, artists are not really supposed to look at their strokes and hand moving on the paper, at the image they are drawing. They try to look at the subject as much as they can and the hand intuitively and directly produces the image down on paper. It is that if you’d look almost all the time at your drawing on the paper, you’ll distance yourself from the essence of the subject and unconsciously modify it, even in the tiniest change. That’s why something ‘clicked’ for me when in our lecture today we talked about our approach to taking notes at the O Medea study. Closely observing rather than interpreting and quickly writing stuff down seems the ‘purest’ way of dealing with this flow of information that is happening on stage. If you first filtered in your mind what you see and then put it down on paper, how much of that holds the essence of the act?

That’s why part of my reflection for today is a bunch of drawings on the computer. They are takes on certain rhythms, arrangement, steps, the fluidity or rigidity of movements. The black and white drawings are based on Ondrej’s class.