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TRANSLATING IMAGE INTO MOVEMENTS: VISITING 1 1/2 DAYS OF A COACHING PROJECT BY HOOMAN SHARIFI
By Sabina Holzer
The participants selected 3 images from books chosen by Hooman Sharifi. (“I just was leaving” by Richard Coleman and another book by the visual artist Herbert Baglione).
The embodiment of these images, at first, lead to certain spatial positions.
The work started with and in these positions, in an embodied shape.
The three images were not supposed to be made into one, but placed into the room separately.
Assignment: Let time happen. Feel what the image is doing to you. Don't shift to neutral if you move from one position to another. Find other ways of how you can transport yourself through space.
What does the image do? It provides a shape. The shape gives information about sensation and movement to the body. In these positions of almost stillness, the circulation of gravity and suspense occurs. Weight is shifting in different ways. There is a notion of movement happening, an invisible appearance, a tension and expansion of presence.
Leaving this presence, this shape, this figure almost seems to mean to be leaving somebody, to interrupt a potential lifeline, which is taken on again in another place, through entering another shape, another line, another body. Still lives unfolding in space which becomes time.
There are different ways of embodying an image: by remembering parts of it, by working on the presence in the shape or by experiencing the movement that helps to define this specific shape. [1] Weight is travelling through the foldings, the curves and extensions, connecting to a time related to physical realities.
An image is an assumption of something which becomes manifest, an event which steps out of convoluted, continuously dissolving, sensory stimuli and gains visibility.
These embodied body-images throw a strange intimacy into the viewer's face. One seems to connect to a vague event surrounding the image, not just to the image as a sign or surface.
The body's empathy recognises breath, heartbeat and gaze.
How will this image move? How can this image move? What could be a necessity for movement?
Assignment: Move without destroying the image, destroying what the "image constitutes". If a head is bent backwards, maybe the rest of the body can move, shift through space. The head, the stretch in the neck, in the upper body should be kept or reinforced. This is what makes this body a "specific body image."
Nevertheless: how will this figure move? How can this figure move? A state of mind is emerging through the strong concentration on the shape. Movement which comes from these moods provides a weird spaced-out quality. In the slow moves, weight and suspense are permanently balanced and this rather creates a notion of design than of necessity. Locomotion seems very risky. What are "practical", "physical" movements? If the weight shifts through the different centres, the whole figure stumbles.
An exercise is inserted: Falling through space, catching oneself with soft knees. Falling in different directions. Playing with the falling weight.
This falling and catching is used to make the image move.
At the beginning, this is applied very carefully, to prevent the whole figure from shattering. As this gets intensified, the playing with weight in different body parts starts to expose a certain human condition. Strange tableaux of somehow distorted bodies shift through space. Every move seems to be a crisis for this construction, a destabilisation.
Assignment: Stay real. Let the eyes move. Look what you are doing. Know what you are doing. Be real.
The emphasis on "staying real", "knowing what you do", and "choosing what you do" brings in another interesting, essential layer. You see people in extreme physical conditions who seem to be constantly negotiating whether they would be able to move and whether to move would mean to fall and whether they could prevent this fall or not. And even if they collapse, they continue considering possibilities of how to continue (to move). As if the shifting of weight was related to a shifting of thought, and, thus, different states of mind become apparent. You see individuals negotiating with forces, sometimes in command of them, sometimes not.
All this requires time. "When you feel something is long, it is not long enough, if you think, it is slow, it is not slow enough, if fast, it is not fast enough. Mostly, the feeling from the inside is wrong and it differs from the audience's perception. You can count to get a sense of time. For one minute, count till 60, two minutes to 120", Hooman suggests.
There is a clear distinction between research and performance. The people have time to work on their own and then present the material to each other. "Continue to research in front of the audience", Hooman stresses, which implies understanding or working on the understanding of what this research is. This is something he takes on for himself as much as he is demanding it from the dancers.
It is a complex dialogue which appears, in this short time of one week, of two sides trying to touch something which has not been formed yet.
Hooman Sharifi's research is of course profoundly related to his work on the influence of politics and violence on the body in a global society. And within this very practical stage work-oriented research project, elements of micropolitics are inserted, such as:
"Of course we have to have restrictions, if we want to communicate something specific. Decide for your restrictions in relation to what you and we are working on. Never let a choreographer or system put you in prison. Choose your own prison, because then this is something you choose and which you are responsible for. If you give away your responsibility, you give away your freedom of choice.”
Footnote:
[1] Participants' statements
(July 29, 2008)
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