There is something about working away from where I live that enables me to focus quite differently and more intensively to how I might usually work during a period of development. Away from my usual place of residence I cannot sink into regular patterns, clinging onto familiar relationships with places or other people, my favourite coffee and other distractions. I have to be completely present to the situation, which is both new and strangely familiar. New relationships start to develop with people I know well, different configurations and patterns emerge and other characteristics of colleagues become apparent that I would not usually have the chance to know. Finding time alone takes on some precedence and this becomes a sort of reflection time for the intensive working process. The work never escapes from me.
After one week of this residency with Phillip Adams BalletLab at Centre de Création Chorégraphique Luxembourgeois (TROIS C-L), I am becoming even more immersed in each of the works to the point of them entering my dreams. Already there is a new rhythm emerging to how we are working. I think about this each day as I walk over the Viaduct in the direction of the train station observing the weather, the level of fog or sun and wonder about the day ahead and what might happen- it seems that really anything is possible. Having spent a lot of time in the studio with Garth Paine and Brooke Stamp working together during the first and second stage developments this year, it is the work of Matthew Bird with Phillip Adams which is coming to the forefront thus far. Having been aware of the collaboration between Matthew and Phillip it is really only during this time (the first week of the Luxembourg residency) that I can really understand and witness how they have been working together and this has a huge affect on how I understand and think about Phillip’s work. Being able to see the development of the installation experiments through watching documentation footage taken in the Mojave Desert, the Integratron and through hearing about the planned landing site in Luxembourg has somehow contextualised the work in a more complete way. I doubt this could have happened in Melbourne with more sporadic studio visits from Matthew.
It seems like the most obvious thing to observe but this time forces one to behave differently, or to exist differently. Things become immediately clearer and working with Brooke and Phillip in a new space means that there is nothing else to hang on to, nothing else to work with, except the works themselves. And that’s where things become super focussed to the point of obsessive. It is not about time, not about rushing off to do something else or having rushed from something before in order to spend the day working together. It is not only about working in a different country in a different studio and forging new networks. It is really about residing in the work, with one another.
Phillip, Brooke, Matthew (Day), Rennie (McDougall), and myself have so far have been enveloped by a lot of research including images of alien abduction, writings on The Cosmotheandric Experience, filmic references, textural and experiential modes for engaging with Garth’s incredible sound, sex, fears, orbits, silences, the idea of the individual or operating as ‘one’ and the attempt to transport ourselves and ultimately the audience somewhere else through an experience. It might seem like a luxury to be working a very long way from Melbourne in Luxembourg and in some ways it is. But its a luxury of necessity because through the development of the work it is shown and slowly revealed to an audience who will look a it critically and relate to it differently than if it was being developed entirely in Melbourne. To sit with a gentleman at the end of a showing who gives honest, critical and highly constructive feedback is crucial and memorable.
Being here is about knowing that we can work for longer periods of time, things can deeply evolve, we can break and rest for tea and keep working into the night if the work takes us there. I feel like this. I feel that we could work through the night in the former banana factory, experimenting, watching, talking and analysing the development of two very exciting works.
