John Daniel 1999 invisible dances...in front of people watching British Festival Of Visual Theatre, Purcell Room, London. This conceptual work-in-progress performance, a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Frank Bock and director and designer Simon Vincenzi, is an intriguing and sometimes frustrating experiment in how far a single idea can be pushed before an audience becomes alienated. The concept is simple: seven performers dance to seven different soundscapes, each only audible to the individual performer respectively. All the audience hear is the continuous sonic chime and the interference from a radio mic., which sporadically receives instructions from a voice offstage. Each performer listens to his or her own soundscape (composed by Luke Stoneham) on a walkman and the resulting choreography runs as a loop of seemingly random movement sequences - each person ‘locked-in’ and isolated by their own individual soundscape. The resulting show is a dance choreographed to music that the audience can’t hear and that the performers can’t share. What’s most intriguing is the movement that Luke Stoneham's different soundscapes provoke - physical jerks, twitches, muscular spasms. The performers writhe about, with their eyes closed, as if suffering from involuntary convulsions. It’s a painful spectacle - not least because it continues unabated (with the same sonic chime ringing in tandem like tinnitus) for the duration of an hour. It was too much for, perhaps, ten per cent of the audience, who had left before the end. But boy was it worth staying. The joy of the piece was in its repetition: sure there were moments when it seemed too much to bear - but the opportunity to observe so closely the minutiae of each movement sequence induced a wonderful hypnotic quality. Observing each of the performers apparently imprisoned in their own internal world, was a moving experience. The moments of communion between the dancers - an accidental mirroring of movements or the slight touch of a guiding hand on the back - were profoundly touching. This is an experiment truly worth watching, and one that deserves an audience, even though they might not all be convinced to stay the course.
Martha Fleming 1999 This work changes dance forever in my mind. Its apparently private vocabulary is so startlingly familiar that suddenly I see and recognise in others a manifest of events which I have heretofore only felt unconsciously in the very molecules of my being. Invisible dances will get right under your skin and move you to the quick. These words are not meant metaphorically, nor are the gestures they are about. invisible dances… explores the explosion that is every nervous tic, showing in each ripple the vast release experienced by the minutest tendrils of the unimaginable net of fine nerves spinning out of every spine, standing or seated, that was present in the confines of the Purcell Room that night. Rigour can be tender. These dances are actually sparked electrochemical acts of the body: they are also a work of art. invisible dances… immediately makes one aware of the fundamental questions: which acts, even the most infinitesimal, are voluntary, and how do we know this? Are ‘involuntary’ spasms actually just thoughts which are truly one with the conscious? What might ‘will’ be, and further, what might it be to exercise free will? Invisible: some of the dancers cannot see what the others are doing – or see us in the audience for that matter. We cannot hear the private music they hear and respond to, their sound packs strapped to them as if it were survival gear. Thus in high relief, with some senses starved and others surfeited, differently for each on either side of the stage, the familiar prismatic rendering of subjective reality as it is moulded by physical circumstance and chosen technologies becomes visibly a strangely welcome purgatory. Here finally, is a purgatory as real as any tube train ride, a purgatory that is not apocalyptic, a purgatory that is truly phenomenological. Where is the mind, and what is it made of? Because each movement in this work starts from the muscle’s nerves, and from where a mind might be located in its very fibre, we can finally ask if synapse is a thinking. How are we conscious, and how can we affirm it without mimicry, that ghoulish doubling? Pared down to its thousand singularities, invisible dances… is that affirmation. With all the stage in its honest nudity alert to each dancer’s particular movement and moment, all are equal under the light or lack of it. And yet, with each body’s every act, there is a strange feeling of seeing multiply in close-up, as if each event of each spasm were getting randomly from me an attention I am moreused to having directed. Echoing in this question of free will that is present as a proposition in every instant in this work is just this very fact that there is no unspoken contract with the audience. With the utterly private work at hand for each of the dancers, a strange freedom is loosed for an audience otherwise trained to respond to a shackling narrative and to a direct address. Some people express their thanks by leaving, as nonchalantly as if this were just their stop on the Underground. Others are hungry to keep feeling free to look or to go, and so they stay. A ligament is a tether like any other – sometimes longer, sometimes shorter than the tether that ties acts to consciousness. It’s not for nothing that sinew is used for all sorts of instruments, musical and otherwise. What does its cell-memory bring to the notes it is made to play? At the end of invisible dances… a harrowing noise to equal the darkness into which we are all plunged surges out, and the dancers are sucked by its vortex into a place beyond the swinging doors. Adieu.
Theo Cowley 2002 For me the whole process of capturing the video journeys in Nottingham was about a shift from capturing gestures, movements and steps to capturing, in addition, interesting characters that revealed indirectly a strange unconscious movement quality. Old man slipping away sitting on a bench rubbing his hands/ taped over/- rubbing him self gently. Reviving himself, his mind heavy, daydreaming, very absorbed. Camel skin coat and cap man by fountain in square / discovered at end of week / -Interesting appearance standing in front of the fountain. He's from a lost era of the past. Rubbing his hands, looking around. Black lady at the bus stop - Suspicious, moving away from me. Very short journey. Postmen - very long journey carefully buying a gift and looking in the estate agent window. Very narrative journey, nevertheless interesting gentle soft physicality of the pair. They seem lost in each others company. Should be able to get a quality of their movement from the long journey. Totally unaware of me. One had a very strange face; very red cheeks and a very strangely scarcely gentile face. The other postman was very nondescript. They bought a silver plate in a velvet box in a tourist gift shop. Business Woman on campus going through tight alleyways and down stairs / not taped / - Reminded me of Leeds where it was more about tracing actual journeys in that there was a lot of turning and marching on the spot. I could imagine us reconstructing this journey in the studio, but the process seems to be about something less literal now? But thought that it would be interesting to have one such journey. Journey very directed by the architecture of the campus. Hyper jumping youth in the shopping centre and street /not taped/ - Basically interesting movement. Very hyper, fun and aggressive jostling with friends and playing cat and mouse with the crowd. Day 3 Strange weighted girl - Not really a character but strange weighted and rhythm in response to finding way through jostling crowd. Not really worried quite carefree but also bit lopsided and haphazard. Very charming movement. I got her twice I think, once with her boyfriend going into Dixons. Both times she made similar movements. Very small woman - Very strange experience, I thought that you would like this one as you like dwarfs and other such things! - I felt that she was leading me somewhere like she wanted to show me something. Gets money out at ATM then walks very fast through crowded shopping centre very fast. Incredibly unflinching into shopping centre, very specific hairstyle. No interesting discernible movement as such but whole package something about her quickness, manoeuvrability, control, power and her small statue. Tall gothic girl in shopping centre - Rather suspicious, very interesting short follow. Lanky, quite male gait, dyed black hair, walking with big bag, changes walking pace frequently fast turns into slow. Straight direction knows where she's going. She does not see me at all while walking, then stops outside shop, looks around, and sees me almost immediately. Leather jacket gentleman walking to the toilet in Shopping Centre - Great movement, a true gentleman even in a crowd. Ushers youths past that walk cross the front of him. It's all in the shoes very flat I think and also in the jacket, very graceful, macho, v relaxed character. Movement quality comes from character. Very slow man walking to the toilet - Truly invisible. Walking on a completely different timeline; people walk almost through him. Have I discovered a ghost? I was very surprised when I saw him. There is not much movement, a few small interesting gestures if I remember and a small limp. He has a persistent and constant slow movement. Two girls bitching on a street corner - no discernible journey but a lot of movement. Very funny and carefree Plus various other people I forgot. The camera battery or tape ran out, I have no idea if those journeys were good. Out again in the afternoon, not so good, but feel a sense of pushing through something. Start waiting at points where lots of people pass through, sifting, and analysing their looks and movement. It’s getting harder because I’m picking carefully. I take a few journeys at random maybe I’ll find something by chance, but I usually don’t. Off-weight girl is the exception. I’m trying not to be noticed by the security guards in the centre. They must recognise me by now. Maybe they think I’m a professional thief, and they would be right but not the thief they think. Everybody finds it amusing watching my videos of the people back at the studio but they are using that to hide a general discomfort of videoing people secretly. But that annoys me because I’m the one doing it and it’s serious, and although it is uncomfortable following people with a video camera I am immersed in that frame of mind now, focusing on them not me. It has become about finding characters for me. Obviously there are still the steps and gestures of the journeys but they take care of themselves and the work in the studio which is about a certain unselfconsciousness, an internal journey, a letting go and a movement quality, feeds the work I am doing outside, which weirdly and paradoxically seems to be about finding almost theatrical characters. I certainly didn’t think it would go that way. After a while filming and wondering the streets is very alienating, where do I fit into this – ‘not too close’ says the human camera. My body is forgotten. Smoking is something to do and a reminder that I am here breathing. I am capturing your spirit at a shopping centre near you. Watching the video is like watching and imagining in smoke past dreams. I became invisible I became a camera following people, a chest. It’s about capturing everything I see that’s interesting. Not someone performing something more unconscious or banal. How do you recognise that? It’s instinctive, sifting through hundreds of people and summing them up. Subtle theatrical characters became the way I chose people; the weird and the not so weird but not the mad. The out of place but also in a firm place in the mind, unselfconscious characters. It is all about movement revealing. But the movement is not what you start with it was usually a coat or something specific about the person, an attraction, Its very much a process of discovering what was interesting and what S&F were looking for. People who were out of place, find a character and you invariably find an interesting quality of movement still trying to get a meaty enough material, I usually stopped when I felt I was about to be rumbled. Breathing, smoking, eating, walking, ok, on, go, that’s good, turn away he’s seen me, ok I can’t go any further. Some people disappear before you can gasp them. There was a moment of recognition and engagement and a moment of disengagement which is instinctive. Stealth hunting – what the hell am I looking for? Not a gesture, not simply journeys, more complete people. A world of a select few, strange characters a 10% and normal characters 90% in this smoky video dream. The people in the frame and to a certain extent the immediate background create the world, country, city they are moving through. A weird fiction of setting, character and costume is taking place on the streets of Nottingham. It is something specific to journeys caught on video.
Martha Fleming with Frank Bock & Simon Vincenzi 2023 Molten All the Time “Where is the mind, and what is it made of? Because each movement in this work starts from the muscle’s nerves, and from where a mind might be located in its very fibre, we can now finally ask if synapse is a thinking. How are we conscious, and how can we affirm it without mimicry, that ghoulish doubling? Pared down to its thousand singularities, Invisible Dances is that affirmation.” Martha Fleming (2000) www.artsadmin.co.uk I have been watching invisible dances from its inception and as an audience member for the Nottingham Block of Invisible Dances in March of 2002, I was struck by the subsequent build-up in this complex experiment of what could only be described as a repertoire. It seemed that Bock & Vincenzi’s project was even able to take on and grapple with the ‘ghoulish doubling’ that I had seen as an impediment to an affirmation of consciousness. Or perhaps I had been wrong all along about this supposed ‘impediment’ ... perhaps it is actually a precision instrument in the right hands: certainly philosophical issues relating to representational forms fold in, a priori, aspects of phenomenology. I began to think about these questions in the light of the importance I ascribe to the work they are doing with Invisible Dances. I believe that this work is of considerable significance to what I predict will soon become integrated, interdisciplinary scientific studies of consciousness, undertaken in respectful and highly productive collaboration with artists working in a number of different forms. Currently, however, there are very few serious research arenas in which cultural acts are understood to be evidence of how we are in the ‘physical world’ -- by which I mean Physics and by which I mean Physiology. The research context in which the parameters that Bock & Vincenzi (and the dancers with whom they work) have set for themselves would be respected rather than forcibly altered or garlanded with electrodes does not yet exist. But the work does, and it is calling attention to itself. In isolating certain sensory experiences -- say, depriving an audience of light with which to see dancers who dare to dance in spite of being blind; or playing music only to dancers through headphones which their audience cannot hear -- they echo Galvani’s experiments with muscular electricity, but on a grand phenomenological scale with major implications. Here we cannot turn away from the evidence that body and senses are an integral part of understanding and not just a conduit for information synthesized in the cortex; evidence produced where experience and experiment overlap. As you will see in the following interview, issues of incremental difference such as those that might be measured by micrometers in another discipline are explored in Invisible Dances without creative compromise -- indeed, as part of creative acts. They have embraced both variables and rigour, and they have embarked on an experiment that encompasses its own observation. It is this last that is key to understanding the way in which repertoire has been transfigured in Invisible Dances. In mainstream dance culture, repertoire is a consensus with an audience that there is a right way to do things which involves a familiar story, ‘authentic’ movements endlessly and painstakingly repeated -- over centuries sometimes -- and staging all of which reflect an authorial intent. In Invisible Dances, the very act of repeating a gesture is examined from within the experience itself at a visceral and a phenomenological level, and observational tools that might otherwise apply in the study of relativity, such as the warping of time, are applied to it. Since completing this interview two years ago, invisible dances has evolved rapidly as an experiment. It has produced the telphone piece “from afar” with its prismatic, extreme distantiation from an audience and also “prelude” at the Royal Opera House, in which characterisation exploded back onto its otherwise ascetic scene, rendering an epic from the minutiae of the material. In “prelude,” all the meticulous work of interpretation discussed in the following interview coalesced in a logarithmic randomness to show how ritual is created out of repertory. The precision attention, strict methodological parameters, and skilled technicians of invisible dances give Bock and Vincenzi and their collaborators the authority of their intuitions. Their patience and follow-through is now beginning to pay the experiment off, and through their forensics, it might be possible, say, to grasp what must have happened in the Villa of Mysteries. “From afar” is now available for viewing to anyone who wants to close their eyes and listen, a ‘dial-up’ of a very different kind. An invisible dance was performed on the stage of the Arts Theatre in London’s West End in March of 2003 to an audience of one. Multiple interpretations of the work are ‘translated’ to its audience via telephone and in a book -- much as the dancers themselves moved to a disembodied voice heard through earphones. As if to make the point that even when all senses are engaged, our understanding can only be partial, “from afar” reminds the audience how far it always is by pushing it so much further away than ever before. It may yet reach round to touch the dancers’ backs. Martha invisible dances . . . is now exploratory of subjects far beyond internal body functions you began with and the way that they manifest themselves in physical gesture. It also seems to me that the overall project is also concurrently – and even through those functions – exploratory of dance conventions themselves. As the blocks build up, there’s a sense of certain gestures and acts which spring from the internal body physical research that are then repeated: that then brings to mind the whole idea of repetition and repertoire that is at the basis of much dance – rather much of what people generally understand dance to be. People think that dance is a series of set gestures that are repeated in the framework of a consensus created by and played out on an agreed narrative, even in works as different as, say, Gisele and Viktor. That idea of repetition that is based on a narrative and also on a series of movements – and people come to expect forms of repetition. But what’s exciting to me about the repertory that seems to be evolving out of invisible dances . . .is that it’s a repertory that is born out of the involuntary gesture of a nerve, and not driven by a vocabulary that might be mimetic in some way. It’s born of gestures that come from individuals rather than gestures that are linked to the relating of a story. That was particularly interesting to me in the Nottingham block, because it was most clear that in a number of cases you were mapping the same ‘voyage’ onto a variety of bodies: the same voyage with different timings, different bodies. Over the period of the last bit of the dance, with your own ‘chorus’ of dancers from the University College of Northampton, there was an opening out to an idea of repertoire within the work itself for the observing audience. I want to start with a description of how, technically, that came about. Simon told me that you had slowed some recorded dances down on digital video in order to ‘replicate’ them, and also that there were walks through town that had been described in words, and then those words were in turn followed as if they were ‘marching orders.’ Can we take some examples, and describe how you set about making the dance that people then followed in this repertorial sort of way? Frank The work you saw in Nottingham was a kind of translation; it took on the idea of being repertory in terms of revisiting a dance as a text, whereas before the starting points for us were much more to do with states of the body, and pathways through the body. Through working with the senses alone, and altering them, we sort of found a way to ‘imprint’ the journeys onto the body, and then to follow those journeys or the sounds that the journeys imply, right through the body itself. With the first block of work, we started late, and didn’t have our music from the beginning: so as an exercise we did lots of tracing journeys on the body that you then follow. That’s something that we’ve done all the way through the process from the beginning, and we keep going back to that like a sort of training. By physically ‘putting’ a journey onto somebody’s body – with emotion, with pressure with textures – and then leaving the dancer to follow those pathways on into the body itself the journeys somehow take on their own life. Martha It sounds like a sort of mapping that becomes a circuitry that follows a filigree of nerves right into the body. So invisible dances . . . first began as a quest for an originating movement from a nerve synapse and then developed into a pathway process by which other movements could then come ‘in’ along that route from the outside or from another individual’s body. You started out with a plan for making movement and then the way you got to those movements was discovered as a process to enable the inhabiting of other kinds of movements that could even be repertorial in structure – for example the city journeys. How did you work out the city journeys? Was there an original video of the journey made, and then a voice transcription of what took place during the journey? How did it work, step by step? Simon We started that work in Leeds in the third block, about two years ago. We started exploring outside because the internal body work we were doing had become quite intense and so we thought that since we had two weeks in Leeds, rather than spend all the time in the interior of the body that we might just go out on the town. And steal other peoples’ journeys. We began by going out and making dances that you could perform in the street that no-one would see. Like using a bus-stop pole, or organising movement in a public space that was invisible as a dance and then bringing that back to the studio. Going out and trying to recall the directions of the streets you were going down and then bringing that back to the studio. People had three minutes: I’d say go out on a journey in the city and come back so that you can describe that journey exactly. But people would come back and the recounting of their three-minute journey would only last half a minute. So we started to look at ways of documenting the journeys and being more precise with that. We ended up following other people and recording their journeys for three minutes. Just following people with hidden microphones or Dictaphones. The recordings became more and more detailed – left, right, left, turning right, step, step, step. Martha What invisible dances . . .seems to be exploring is the precise measurement of how difference enters every repetition. It becomes a kind of micro-measurement of subjectivity, rather than a striving to recreate. The strength of invisible dances . . .has to do with its embrace of minimalism, that in an art form it’s still worth measuring with precision something that minute, that moment of bifurcation between things that are the same and things that are not the same, where difference starts to appear. Simon During that process it became evident, we realised, that the activity was only interesting when approached from the point of view of minutiae – otherwise it was just ‘left, right, left, right.’ For the first week in Nottingham, Theo Cowley, with whom we had worked before in Leeds – when we first began this work – went out with a hidden camera. We used a hidden camera because there was a difficulty with actually being able to speak fast enough into a tape recorder to describe the journeys of strangers who were being followed. Frank Yes, but also words are so inadequate to describe the event in a way. We could produce quite crude transcriptions of journeys, but we needed to translate them into sounds, a sound notation vocabulary, that would enable us to reproduce the journeys, and in actual fact we needed to have a visual reference to keep relating back to while we were learning the journeys. You need as many things as possible to rely on, stimuli to memory. For Nanette, it was essential to watch the video of Navraj’s dance immediately before performing it again so that she had something to hang onto, as the dance itself is so complex and ephemeral. She could reproduce the dance, which she knew really well, and which had a sound track she could hear while dancing it, but in actual fact there are so many things happening in it... And reproducing the City journeys was similar in a way: in each case we needed to go back to the video. … Well, you’re also being driven, of course, by the sound, the audio tape. For me one of the things that was exciting was the impossibility of the task, as well. Particularly in relation to the reconstruction of the Navraj Dance – an interminable job. Watching the video it’s just completely molten all the time... you think you’ve got it, that you’ve grasped this or that moment, and you try to find some words or quite often, as a dancer, think some thoughts about the moment that could link it to other dance forms you can ‘use’ to describe that moment, create some sounds to lay it down in memory in the form of text and then the next time you actually look at it, it’s something else. And it constantly eludes you... In fact it is a project we once almost abandoned because it seemed such an impossible technical exercise. When we started, we were working on it for five minutes a day, and we would look at the video and gasp, asking ourselves ‘What are we watching? What is it? Where is it? Where’s it gone? It’s gone! Where do I find it?’ I mean normally as a dancer you learn a work in part by orientating it in space, with blocking, with geography... But this dance is somebody falling in the interior of their body. Trying to reconstruct something like that from the outside inevitably feels impossible. But also there was excitement about the challenge, the idea of working on this one impossible task for three years that involves something just over two minutes long. How would that be? And through slowing down and speeding up the study video it’s become more possible, it’s become a kind of translation project, or rather it’s shifted into another thing, another kind of activity beyond re-enactment. Martha Well, this is the way in which I believe that invisible dances . . .is a kind of physics experiment, in that it is exploring time, movement and mind all at once. When you speed something up or slow something down, you literally move it into another realm. I don’t believe that adjusting the speed of the video of Navraj’s Dance is merely something that you’ve done to make the ‘learning’ of it easier: I think that it is a logical step in the ‘physics’ aspect of the experiment in phenomenology that you are undertaking – actively or inadvertently – with this investigation that is Invisible dances. With all reconstruction, that question of difference we talked about is at issue, and perhaps part of the ‘difference’ is something that might be registering in another ‘possible world’, something which we might only be able to see or perceive as a different time frame or a different spatial construct, or even a different dimension. This is why I think that invisible dances . . .is important for science – it does actually explore embodiment, consciousness and physical acts and a human perception of time in a way that is precise and has set parameters without necessarily even having a research context or framework yet. It employs similar devices and references about time and space which are used by theoretical physicists, but in the structure of an art form. These sorts of methodological cross-overs are, in my opinion, the future for any intelligent study of consciousness. Your commitment to exploring difference and repetition phenomenologically is exemplary – it’s something that is not taken seriously enough in either art or science. I mean when one thinks that Deleuze, after finishing his doctoral thesis (published later as Différence et Répétition in 1969), did nothing for seven years – or so he says, I think in the Dialogues with Claire Parnet – the enormity of the task is indicated. In science, everything depends on the exact repeatability of an experiment – that’s proof, but proof of what? What might be proven by studying the impossibility of exactrepetition? Simon Frank and Nanette got to the point, after about two years, where their re-enactment of the dance was more or less technically correct, but there was a feeling that it would never be exactly the same as the original. So we became interested in looking at the material in a different way, because we realised that it would never be the same and I felt freed up to suggest that we then adjust the video’s speeds. Because the Navraj Dance is completely out of control, so abandoned, I wondered what it might be in a different experience of time. And it began to make much more sense, because you were able to bring so much more to it. … Frank I suppose it’s a way of taking control of that phrase somehow, either by speeding it up and just making us more driven in it, or -- because it was so far out of our grasp -- by slowing it down to give us more control over it. We had to just chase it, and fall within it, fall into it. Simon Which is a very different sort of falling than in the original dance, which was something that was just about momentum. Even with the eleven minute, super-slow version, there is an amazing stamina required to keep a precision in the slowness of the re-enactment. That’s the version that Nanette has to watch each time before she performs it, psychically preparing inside the recording of the dance so that she could then be within the dance itself. It is very hard to do. Frank Yes, painful, having to squeeze your muscles in that particular way for eleven minutes... But it’s another way of gaining control, you just push something through a very small hole, and that’s the thing that drives you – trying to grab onto something of it. Martha So each of the three different time frames gives you another ‘aspect’ of the work you are re-enacting, this thing that can never be repeated, but that can you persist in attempting to remake ‘correctly’ in order to explore in depth . . . invisible dances . . .explores ideas of repertoire and technique in extremely rigorous and pared down way that has big implications. What does it mean to emulate, or to create something one way and then re-enact it in another? How can we possible imagine re-presenting anything? What is representation in movement? What does it take to represent? Do you actually have to go out of body to represent the body? These questions brought up by invisible dances . . .impinge on the entire history of dance. It is exciting to see that you can ask these representational questions from within the work itself, in a way that I had seen other art forms challenge themselves from within about representation. I had never seen that in dance before your work. It’s as if dance is a last frontier for this self-reflexive exploration because there only is the body and re-enactment to work with. How do you represent a body with another body? ‘Representation’ in this instance becomes practically existential and the resonance between idea and experience is almost without intermediary other than the observer. A phenomenological question about this work and the idea of repertoire might be: what exactly is being experienced when repetition is taking place? Or emulation? Or following orders? Frank I think that for dancers – or certainly from my own experience – there’s a lot of programming that you’re having to dance in and working within a similar vocabulary, finding an anchor is so much about ‘how it feels.’ So if you are working in an improvised manner the tendency is to therefore try that mechanism, and to go back to ‘how it feels’ – ‘I’ll do it again, but I’ll do it more’. There’s a language to improvisation and there’s a fine balance between that and being true to what the tapes were telling you to do: and as soon as you start to enjoy the experience and realise that you are doing something again, you realise that you weren’t being true to the work anymore because your ego has somehow become involved. Involved by going with what felt nice and consequently having an idea of what looked nice rather than abandoning yourself to what that moment on the tape was. There are constantly these little internal dialogues going on about how things felt and how to reproduce the movements and how to follow the tape’s orders and you could never get rid of them completely because some part of you always had to be conscious of what you were doing. The question for me is rather: how do you give yourself over to something? At the beginning we talked about it a lot: how can you keep in dialogue with that thing? How can we get back to that specific state that we all understood as being the closest to being true to something, true to being abandoned within the body? But at the same time still be standing, having the consciousness to stand. Martha That’s almost tantric: a state of being fully awake and yet void or available. Frank Yet there’s a strange contradiction: I think with more tantric ideas there’s a sense that you ‘relax into that world.’ But here you are driven – you’re still a driven consciousness, and that’s where the key dichotomy happens. You’re going into these voids or spaces within the interior body, and normally one wants to just float off into these spaces, even in mystical ways, but because of the orders you’re receiving from the audiotapes, you’re still driven.
Matthew Hawkins 2002 From my Calvert Avenue, I head off for an engagement with work-in-progress in a Choreodrome. First I pass through Hoxton and the detritus of its play-in-progress pavements. The Friday night revellers are gathering amid the redeveloper’s rubble and their zeitgeist jangles my nerves. Why this mass delight in cackled conversations with those who are not there? Cellphones imprison us all in the sound world of strangers and their banal exchanges with ex-machina forces. Lately, the hands-free innovation adds a grisly dimension. Staring straight ahead, those in possession shout the gratuitous one-sided chat, their faces contorting in self-important parody off enthralled listening and tart response. Such is the impression that I carry with me. Tonight’s passing social lions proffer a sense that I am excluded, But from what? Merce Cunningham once said (though did not advocate) that “Joy, love, fear, anger, humour, all can be ‘made clear’ by images familiar to our eyes…The muse of theatre could languish. Her life could be so much easier if she just dealt us the known image by recycling the archetypes that lace our memories. In slovenly moments, she does just that. Or do we just think that this is what she is doing? Frank Bock and Simon Vincenzi are the movers and shakers behind tonight’s studio presentation. Their pursuit resembles that of Merce Cunningham. They use technologies to take their work beyond the presentation of known theatrical forms. The great beauty of such a pursuit is that it might generate unexpected and entirely new energy in the response of the viewer. Most of us in the audience are eternally grateful for the nourishment of the new. It is a visionary thing. There, in the abundant quietness of Flaxman Terrace, looms the Choreodrome. I gain the brightness of The Founders Studio and there are the performers, readying themselves on a bench. They are adjusting their technologies – the performance involves their being wired with headsets. Yes, more hands-free innovation and (I suppose) ex-machina voices ringing in ears other than my own. It seems we cannot begin until all are present. It feels like a séance, or a Friends meeting or a flight. The dancer steps out and fixes a black chiffon scarf to unsight herself and conceal her entire face (all the performers will do this). Her top rides up as she moves and a band of her midriff is exposed. My focus narrows right down to the soft strip of skin. The absence of her face allows me my objective regard and her bare hands also beckon my gaze. Our eyes are so conditioned to the expectation of a bare face that its concealment sends their beam glancing off, in search of other skin. Where there is no barrier to the energy that beats within the body, these are the significant sites. Next is Frank Bock’s turn and his solo is an illustration of the deeply troubled motor-neurone, coupled with arms and legs akimbo. Audiences have always been enthralled by the vision of ‘the struggling creature’. Do we remember Pavlova’s ‘Dying Swan’? Another swan struggles more terribly at the close of Nabokov’s Madame O. A community ‘spazzes out’ in Lars Von Trier’s ‘The Idiots’. Frank stops and walks back to the bench, now a barefaced study in insouciant grace. My mind is still marooned in the margins of the show. During the beautiful, detailed and perfectly synchronised trio that follows, I start dreaming… Time was when we would seek out a performance of this calibre in an alternative or ‘underground’ venue. We would not have needed to blind ourselves to the ad hoc of informal nature of the event. We were once delighted to buy tickets and take a raw show at face value. The enjoyment of such a phenomena energised our city’s bohemian life and this was a special buzz. The former gratification (and contribution) is eroded by the current work-in-progress scenario, with its fuzzy evasions and pre-emptive obfuscation’s. We are glancing but not looking. The egg is not yet laid. We are not being an audience. We are guests; executives – the bland looking at the blind… The whole edifice teeters with a sense of its own ambivalence and the trio undulates on, in all its alluring mystery. I am not yet brought to the present moment, but I begin to enjoy myself. Surely some quality in the ‘voices’ the dancers are hearing brings about their hypnotic level of synchronisation. Meanwhile, I am aware of a number of dancerly skills that could also be viable in the cause of bringing the performers in time with each other. I wonder whether the use of headsets is enabling the movers and shakers to side step the traditional skills (which can become a tyrannical end in themselves). On the other hand, I question how much ones belief in traditional skills is being compromised here. The question may arise (productively or divisively) for future audiences of this work – or any work that doesn’t show the skills we know, thus threatening our hard-won tenets. Suddenly there is a halting male/female duet. By now their uniform headwear begins to give the cast a familial resemblance. Having been violently brought ‘to the moment’ I fully enjoy the subsequent episodes of freer dancing and a sense of escalation in the presence of hands, arms, shoulders a throat and even a neck; all bared. Thence a prolonged solo summarises all that has been harmonising and compelling. The dancers ever-nodding head and the configuration of her arms places her in a mode of endless humility, supplication and invitation. Throughout the event, I have been aware of the life in the performers’ hands. There has also been an ambient sound-score. Finally all is wedded in such a way that the sound becomes music and I am no longer a wallflower at the invisible dances. An abrupt halt.
Martin Hargreaves Engaging Absence: Tracing Bock & Vincenzi’s invisible dances… In 1999 Frank Bock (founder member of The Featherstonehaughs) and Simon Vincenzi (designer and theatre director) embarked on a three year project entitled invisible dances… which set out to explore notions of ‘nothingness’. They had no idea what the end product would be or what form it would take, choosing instead to focus on blocks of experimental work looking as processes based in sensory deprivation and technological amplification. Their research into the darkness and empty spaces at the heart of performance enquires behind the spectacle that presents itself to be fully consumed by an audience into the realm of what they have called ‘invisible dancing’. This article is based on information gathered from interviews with Bock and Vincenzi and reports on the various stages this project has gone through. I want to suggest that as well as pushing the boundaries of performance, the research to date has also thrown up questions for critical writing on performance concerning notions of presence/absence, the live and the recorded and the audience/performer dynamic. Working with blind performers and 'deafened' audiences, stolen stalkings and phoned-in journeys, technological loops and recorded internal noises, Bock & Vincenzi have continued to explore the margins of theatre dance questioning whether we can ever really see all of a dance or if there is always something disappearing before our very eyes. Indeed their work questions the metaphysical order of appearance and disappearance and engages in a critique of physical ‘presence’ and full presentation. Many of the themes explored in invisible dances… have their origins further back in Bock & Vincenzi’s collaborative history. Memory, communication, a divided self and disappearance were all explored in their series of pieces from 1995-1998, the ‘Forest Dances’. The attention in invisible dances… has been on process and formal experimentation rather than on producing theatrical pieces and this has allowed their investigation to dictate the structure of following research blocks. The end performance is being kept at arms length so as not to pre-empt the work carried out by all the various collaborators in the project and invisible dances . . . will no doubt continue to elude full presentation until spring 2002 (and even then will interrogate this ‘fullness’). Simon Vincenzi has stated that the invisible dances . . . investigation focuses on two key points of dance performance — the dance is always happening in some way that you can’t see and what you can see will disturb your attempt to perceive it as a whole. Often dance pieces, and dance writing, will try to suture these disturbing absences with promises of a dancer’s presence, a body fully available to the gaze through translucent choreography. By resisting the demand to fully express the dancer’s presence, indeed highlighting the impossibility of that expression, the phases of invisible dances . . . have explicitly placed the availability of any performance under question. They also suggest that both a dancer’s and an audience member’s engagement with dancing is always marked by the dis/appearances and traces inherent in the acts of representation. Andre Lepecki suggests that these elisions are the ‘in between’ space in dance performance; "the space of apparitions, of ghosts, of illusion in representation." He goes on to argue, "The choreographic play of invisibilities challenges the critical fetishism of thinking, writing and seeing dance as that which pertains only to the visual." My article in taking up this challenge therefore encounters the invisible dances . . . but does not attempt to arrest their dis/appearance, to resolve their difficulty or to make manifest their spectrality. Instead it acknowledges that writing, like dancing, negotiates memory, the traces of bodies, the movements between blankness. It is itself a kind of invisible dancing with elisions, theoretical loops, and mnemonic traces — writing the invisible not to bring it to present account but to engage with the challenges it sets us. March 1999 London Following on from their collaboration with composer Luke Stoneham for the 4th ‘Forest Dance’ piece, Being Barely There I Saw You Too, Bock & Vincenzi started work with a group of dancers exploring soundtracks that only they could hear composed of recordings of internal noises from their bodies. Wearing personal stereos, the performers physically explored ‘internal worlds’ and ‘tracing journeys’ whilst the audience, invited to observe an hour of experimentation, were effectively deafened to the motivation of the sound score. The focus for the dancers of these journeys was always inwards, tracing the sounds fed through the headphones or dancing in ‘chambers’ created by the internal noises. The choreography negotiated the private soundtrack with shuddering, spasmodic twitches that seemingly rendered the aural loop into a neural reflex arc. Although based around notions of private performance and internal journeys that remain invisible, the work arising from this workshop was neither as expressionistic nor metaphysical as it might sound. Effectively putting the expression of internal landscapes, so important to Modern dance choreographers such as Graham and Wigman, into quotation marks, the work places itself at the limits of representation and at the boundary between inside and outside. The ‘internal’ noises are neither strictly speaking interior, having gone through recording processes and Stoneham’s composition and editing to then be fed back into the dance, nor exterior since the observers cannot hear the soundtrack nor be fully aware of what is being expressed. The resulting dancing is therefore not communicating truths about the internal biological or emotional state of the performers but is suggesting that there are ways of interpreting sensory information into movement which are not translatable into conventional performance practise. By focusing on those elements of performance which defy vision or hearing, Bock & Vincenzi are confounding the modernist discourses of choreography which demand the performance to be presentational rather than private to give the illusion of the full availability of a dancer’s body to the audiences’ gaze. Breaking any clear continuity between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and rendering both open to enquiry, these tracing dances enquire into the limits of the expressionistic dialectic and suggest that in this movement between inside and outside certain remainders of non-representation will disrupt performance. Jacques Derrida has suggested that metaphysical notions -such as internal and external - attempt to disavow the trace, that which resists representation and separates the present moment from itself. This trace needs to be disavowed to construct the illusion of a self-present moment but it will disrupt any attempt at metaphysical closure. Mark Franko has engaged with Derridean theory to suggest that "the disappearing presence of the trace— unrepeatable but not for that reason culturally irrecuperable — is the "being" of performance, its "once" as memorable." For Franko the trace enables an understanding of dancing as an impermanent enactment or re-marking of space which is not brought to full presence but is meaningful in its absence. Bock & Vincenzi’s ‘tracing dances’ are not collapsible into Derrida’s notion of the trace but their research does interrogate that which haunts performance as the inability to fully present itself, that which is disavowed in any attempt to fully express a body in time and space. The tracing, private performances, together with the other phases of invisible dances … engage with memory and repetition to interrogate the self-present moment and the absences inherent in performance. As Franko suggests, "Dance performs still non-existent social spaces constructed from the memory of what is not, and never was, under a false appearance of a present." May 1999 Nottingham and August 1999 Leeds The notion of internal journeys were further workshopped and given a second work-in-progress showing as part of the NOTT Dance Festival. Bock & Vincenzi then developed the idea of private journeys made public through ‘stolen journeys’ - the dancers would choose to follow an anonymous person, audio-recording the pathway in a series of spoken directions. These would then be reconstructed in the studio, exploring the hidden choreography of movement through public spaces. Again the dance was engaged in tracing the non-existent spaces of performance. These reconstructions however did not and could not re-present the stolen journeys directly in the studio but were works of translation, negotiating the elisions of dance recording, reflecting upon how the processes of observation and reconstruction are never just about repetition but are means of re-writing and re-marking. The dancers worked with the spoken archives of stolen journeys as a set of instructions without fixed responses and therefore had to interpret them in order to repeat what in some ways was already invisible. Similarly the dancers worked with what Bock & Vincenzi call an ‘abandoned dance’, a sequence from a video recording of dancer Navraj Sidhu’s internal dancing. Again the reconstruction of the private dance (which both Bock and Vincenzi remember as being a torturous process!) emphasised the impossibility of the self-present moment and was complicated by those elements of performance that remain invisible to the eye of the camera. Reworking the internal ‘expression’ of the previous research into studied observation of recordings and attempted recitation abstracted the dancing further from the certainty of full-presentation and reinforced Vincenzi’s assertion that dance is always happening in some way that you can’t see. September 1999 London Taking this key element of invisible dances … further Bock & Vincenzi worked with blind performer Tim Gebbels, turning their attention from sound and deafness to sight and darkness. This block of research investigated the unseen space’s effect on movement and reconsidered the physical mediation of visual and spatial appreciation. The workshops approached the idea of dancing based on non-visual perception - neither beyond sight nor instead of it but working without sight as a reference for movement at all. Gebbels’ movement was therefore a different kind of invisible dancing — it is the non-visual invisible, the physical journeys that negotiate a space that remains unseen. Bock undertook to learn this way of moving not as a form of disabled tourism, a spurious journey into the land of the blind, but in an effort to research further those elements of dance performance that are resistant to representation. October 1999 - London ‘invisible dances…with people watching’ was a work-in-progress presentation at the Purcell Room as part of The London Festival of Visual Theatre which combined strands from all the previous workshops - the silent internal dancing, the stolen journeys, the non-visual invisible, the learnt ‘abandoned’ dance - and introduced an absent performer telephoning in a performance from Brussels asking ‘Is anyone there?’ Lasting exactly half an hour the performance provoked extreme reactions, proving to be a difficult, challenging piece. The stage was repeatedly plunged into darkness by Tim Gebbels who operated a lighting plan that he could not see. The audience could not hear the soundtrack which was placed inside the dancers personal stereos but instead heard the chiming of the auditorium bell that theoretically called them to a performance which was happening in another space and another time. This disrupted the here-now of the performance and challenged the audience to rethink the self-present moment of presentation, asking them to focus on what they were not seeing. Bock & Vincenzi commissioned Martha Fleming, an artist and academic, to write a piece about the evening in which she suggested that "the familiar prismatic rendering of subjective reality as it is moulded by physical circumstance and chosen technologies becomes visibly a strangely welcome purgatory." This purgatory of sensory examination showed how far the research had moved dancing from familiar forms of theatre presentation and some audience members left very noisily disappointed by the refusal of invisible dances . . . to entertain. Fleming also noted however that, "a strange freedom is loosed for an audience otherwise trained to respond to a shackling narrative and to a direct address" and many stayed, excited by this freedom and the interrogation of their role as viewer of an invisible event. October 2000 Norway After a break of almost a year Bock & Vincenzi worked with video artist Andrew McGregor on the idea of movement lighting itself through the looping of infrared night vision and a video projector. Bock would move within a darkened studio, picked up only by the night vision surveillance camera and the resultant image would then be projected into the space. The dancing was effectively doubled resulting in the technological ghosting of movement and the projection of virtual auras which illuminated Bock with his own strobing likeness. In this research the live event is rendered momentarily visible through the recorded as the spectral night vision loop lights up the movement between darknesses. This loop enquires into the time of a performance - is it the moment we can see, which is illuminated by that which has already passed or do we search for the original moment but end up staring into darkness? Also during this week in Norway, where Vincenzi works as a lecturer, the theme of journeying, began in London with the internal tracings, and developed both with the stolen stalkings from Leeds and the phone-in absent performer from Brussels, was further elaborated upon. Bock was blindfolded with a small camera strapped between his eyes and sent to record a journey through Norway at night, a journey he could not see. Drawing upon the work with Tim Gebbels, the choreography of Bock’s journey was dictated by the fear of the unseen alien space and the threat of the darkness, only later did Bock get a chance to see the pathway that he had taken. November 2000 Zangezour, Armenia and Nottingham In the most recent research block the attendees of the Vital Signs seminar on arts and disability in Nottingham were given a warning letter which partly read He is blindfolded He is trying to find Zangezour, a remote southern region A land of legends Zangezour means the bell that cannot be heard. A warning bell … A bell that could not be heard A journey that you cannot see He will try and talk for five minutes He is worried about the phone lines He will ask you to do something You must think about it What it means This is a warning True to the letter, a blindfolded Frank Bock phoned into the seminar from Armenia, somewhere en route to Zangezour. He attempted to describe his journey whilst the audience watched themselves on a video monitor. This intervention was in some ways a complex reworking of all the key themes of invisible dances… to date. Journeys that can’t be seen, the non-visual invisible physicality, technological mediations, spacings and delays, audiences caught inside one loop but left outside another, bodies with histories disrupting the present moment - all these key elements have run throughout the various workshops, guiding the project which is itself on a blindfolded journey, trying to find alternative means of arriving at its destination. The next block of research will return to the infrared projections, collaborating with three blind performers to investigate non-visible invisible dancing which lights itself. What space or time the final performance of invisible dances . . .in 2002 will occupy, or vacate, is still uncertain but it seems it will be in the spectral light between darknesses, across the metaphysics of dis/appearance, calling us on a journey to negotiate invisibility and to rethink both our critical response and our sensory participation in performance practise.
Sophie Travers with Frank Bock and Simon Vincenzi 2024 For the last five years, Frank Bock and Simon Vincenzi have been immersed in their Invisible Dances project, a series of investigations into dance which have had various manifestations in the UK, provoking mixed, always passionate, responses to their uncompromising experimentalism. In 2004, just as they were about to complete the fifteenth and final block of their research, Bock and Vincenzi found that the funding goalposts had moved and their plans for a climactic completion of the project were no longer possible. I caught up with them as they prepared a new piece for The Snag Project at London’s Clore Studio of The Royal Opera House, and upon the announcement of their inclusion later that year in London’s prestigious Dance Umbrella festival. Frank Bock: We had considered making the Clore piece a memorial to the whole Invisible Dances project. Because at the time of the commission we thought that the final stage of the project would never happen. As the weeks went by however, the commission became more charged and turned into something positive. This piece has become not an end but another beginning. Simon Vincenzi: The piece is called Prelude and is the prelude to the idea of what a show might be. It started off as a small commission, a one person monologue, but has become something much bigger. There are now eight people involved and we have a specially commissioned score…We were inspired by the film The Red Shoes, which was also made at the Royal Opera House. At the end of that the leading lady dies, but they present the ballet without her. This has become the prologue to the large show we were intending to make. It was going to be quite operatic, with 25 performers and all the technologies we have used. FB: When the funding fell through in March and we had done so much work and people had given up things to be there, we were really heartbroken and angry. But you have to come back from those points and continue working. You realize you are not owed anything. Rather than building castles in the air, we are now simply staying with the work. We have tapped into a new energy. SV: The Invisible Dances project has always been about finding a way of continuing to work that isn’t product led, that isn’t about knocking out a show. Throughout the five years the main aim has been to find alternative ways purely to experiment, to find situations in which you don’t have to know what is going to happen. We have always been quite surprised by the outcomes of each block. We have never had criteria about what will be produced during each period. So it has become about hanging onto that, honouring that goal. We have become good at responding to the different situations in which we are able to make the work. FB: For the Clore piece, we will work individually with people and won’t know what the piece actually is, until those people come together at the end. This is partly pragmatic, but also the way the work develops, in that the performers are usually quite isolated within the work. They don’t share the space in the same way. They are very self contained. They inhabit their own worlds within the work. It then becomes about the way in which those worlds bounce off each other. When and how they meet. Sophie Travers: How have you decided what to keep or to discard? SV: Certain things haven’t found a relevance. It became our intention to build on a portfolio of different vocabularies or texts, so they could always be interchangeable and we could always find new relationships between the work and the situation in which we were showing things. FB: The texts we were using were always translations of something else. We have looked at ways of getting people to use the same text in different ways. For instance, we would ask a blind performer to work with something sighted people have worked with. We were always looping to produce another document. We might work with a video recording or verbal transcription of what somebody did. It might be about restructuring that and creating another soundtrack to transcribe that. SV: There have been a few stopping off points along the way, where we have placed several materials together or side by side. Last year, when we did the telephone piece, (Invisible Dances from Afar; a show that will never be shown), in Nottingham was when they existed most theatrically together. Even though we were using very different materials, there was an interesting overlap. It was almost like people existing in each others’ dreams. They were all very isolated yet all inhabited the same world in a really exciting way. FB: That piece began as an abstract idea, through working with Tim Gemels, the blind dancer. We had talked about the idea of describing dance to Tim as we did in rehearsal studio. We were interested in having some sort of simultaneous translation in the big show that was much more poetic, more about someone seeing or responding emotionally to the work. The issue was the idea of describing the show, but it became inevitable that the show was the important thing. So we presented a two hour piece with costumes, lights, sound etc that only one person saw. SV: The show became about showing. The performers knew that if they weren’t showing something to Fiona, who was speaking the descriptions, the show would disappear for the person on the telephone. The performers were feeding Fiona the show or the idea of a show, and Fiona was feeding an audience an idea of their relationship to the show they couldn’t see. ST: That sounds like hard work. FB: It was a hard show to do and to appreciate. We have been lucky in that the collaborators we have been working with seem to have a sense of ownership and a strong relationship to the work. It is wearing for us to be constantly asking people to work for a hundred pounds or less after all these years. But it says something about the work that 99% of the people still come back. ST: Does that loyalty extend to audiences? FB: We have some avid followers but I can’t really say if we have an audience. People come up to us and say, “ are you still doing the Invisible Dances project? “. It is a bit of a joke. It is so mystifying where we sit in the dance world. Sometimes it bothers us that people ask, “is there any dancing in it?” There is loads of dancing in all our work but some people appear to want specific kinds of dancing. SV: Because of the nature of the work, we try not to talk about what it is about, so that people can have their own relationship to it. It is all about watching and listening and we know it demands a lot of an audience to bring themselves to the work rather than to sit outside it. You have to decide whether you want to do that. If you do, you are going to have very different responses to it. Which is also what the work is about. FB: There is a certain amount of information we can give people to contextualise what we are doing. When we did Block 5 at The Purcell Rooms people had no background information and felt really excluded. That was interesting, in that it was such a provocative act, but at the same time we know we need to try to contextualise the work without giving it away, without doing the work for the audience. We are launching a book during Dance Umbrella, based upon the whole five year project. This will give people some insight into our processes. We had planned to present the big show alongside an installation, the book and an exhibition of photographs and the telephone piece. ST: What lies ahead? SV: We are very excited about the next stage, and because we have been asked to take part in this festival, the work has been able to respond to that. The work has always been made in response to the time and space it has been given. We won’t go out of our way to force it where it is not wanted again. FB: We want to finish this work. We need to get this done. We haven’t talked beyond that.