Arrived late, joined a circle of Tales of Worst Injuries. Circle of Pain Ice Breaker. Then Anna led a bodies-in-the-space ensemble warm-up, starting with hand rubbing, heel stamping, locating ourselves using the sounds we could hear inside the room, outside the room, inside ourselves.

Walking. Simple instructions, building up a palate of options in the space: Changing pace, change direction, be between two points. Follow someone. Focus within yourself. Aware of someone else. Bigger than the room (think Circles of Concentration). Only do one thing at a time. Be aware of being watched. And being worth watching.

With Sian we worked on some step sequences. Okay, you Arthur Murray fans...

Hold hands, starting in a circle. We're moving to the right. Step right, step left, step right, kick left, step back left, right tap-close, step right, close left, rise onto the balls of the feet and back down. This is nine counts, I think. Then we broke the circle to become a chain, Lizzie leading. Then we spoke some nine-count phrases while stepping the steps.

The phrases were:

• monster slept/ bits of men/ on his chin
• eagle came/ seized a goose/ in its claws
  

Another Sian routine. Starting with feet in third position?(is that right? Please correct me if I'm writing bollax) Right heel snuggled into left arch. Right shoulder leading. Right step forward, left close(tap), left step back, right back but behind the left (Sian called it a swivel).Left forward, right close tap, right back, left back and behind right.

Step right, tap left, step onto the left.
Step right, tap left, step onto the left.
(that's right, we do it twice, and we have used those steps to walk a semi circle in a clockwise direction)
Six steps to complete the circle(strictly speaking, it's five steps and a close)
Lunge to the right (Jazz hands optional)
drag the left foot in
Three steps to have turned 270 degrees(three quarter turn)clockwise
Same again.
And again.

Step and a full turn(360 degrees), right hand offered across the body, left over right, then raise them both.

Counting? Don't get me started on the counting.

And you have a partner!

AND I haven't mentioned where the hands go!

There will be an instructional 'these are the steps' video posted soon.

Reuben then led a session on Similes, or Smilies, as I prefer to call them. Jonno tried to slip a metaphor past the group. I expected no better of him, to be honest. In the circle we told a story, odd numbers telling, even numbers saying "like...". Then another story, sitting in the similies a little more, digging a little deeper with them.

Then telling Book 15 the same way. Then taking away the word "like...", so the smilies become more of a parallel narrative. Then two groups. Five minutes. Story group working with one Similian. Simile group working with a story bod. Oh, and you can of course incorporate any of the movement work we've done so far.

We talked of omens.

Story Group opted for moving in the space as in the warm-up, and singing our phrases of the story, while Jonno spoke the smilies. Last minute decision to shed the shackles of chronology, deconstruct, events any order.

The Smiley group did snapshots. Clear instructions from Jennifer. Close your eyes. Clapping. Open your eyes. Tableau. Not a literal presentation of the action narrated. Close your eyes. Clapping. Narrative. Open your eyes. A bit like Stations of the Cross, or a religious pageant, or something.

Don't apologize. No retreat, no surrender. Stop stressing about getting it right. There is no wrong (unless penguins are involved).

A lovely session. Thanks to Simon, Fed, Sian, Anna, Reuben and the tooth fairy.

(above by Colin Hurley... )
__________________________

(...below by MaryJane Stevens:)

It was my first session with the Factory last Wednesday but it feels a bit like coming home. I was shown the gracious acceptance and hospitality that the Greeks are (still) famous for. Working/playing with this creative and big hearted bunch reminded me that it’s a joy to be in a room in which the focus is on process; the attempt - your contribution - is what’s important and communal creative build is what’s going on.

I’ll try to add to Colin’s descriptions and hopefully not repeat too much. There were about 20 of us - performers, movement directors, writers, directors - all of us ready to jump in. We started with a round of names and the worst pain we had ever endured - this prompted by Simon who has done his back in and wasn’t able to join in with the more physical parts of the session. Descriptions of terrible accidents followed; not just “when I broke my leg” but “I snapped it clean through...”

What came out of the exercise for me was the power of certain words, words which elicited group groans and “ohhhs” - snapped, sliced, popped, blood, burnt... (Later we were to opt for seized over grabbed to describe the way the eagle catches the goose) I was reminded that words can zap you into a physical response. All words are equal but some are more equal than others.

Anna started by running a physical warm up which placed us in our bodies; in the room; in amongst each others’ bodies. We played with a limited number of ways of moving around the room; were reminded to be precise: then to move our focus to being aware of working as a group - we had a shared physical language; a connected, physical communication with each other. We began to shift occasionally in and out of a straightforward warm-up exercise to being watchable, with a meaning above the sum of the moves.

Later, Sian went over the movement phrases of previous sessions, moves which are precise in themselves but which have a universality that can make them transferable to different tellings or contexts. A 9 count step as described by Colin, which we did holding hands in a never-ending circle, until Lizzie broke out and led us in to the centre of a spiral and then out again. Then we added a nine beat sentence from the Odyssey - I think one sentence was: “the ea-gle seized the goose in his claws” (over 9 beats) The weight of the words were magnified by the moves punctuating them, and stylistically we were in another world. Then a section of Sevillanas which could be flirty and coy, or aggressive and arrogant. They reminded me of a jig, of the tensions within flamenco, of squaring up for a fight, of ritual, of courtship and seduction.

Then Reuben talked about similes - the vehicle and the tenor of them. We practised a few from our own world - “like a nurse administering a jab of morphine to make everything alright”. When a simile works for you - and there is a certain amount of the personal in it - it really takes you to that place of understanding, you stop thinking about it and feel it, join in with it - “Ahhh, yes...”

The inevitable inclination to focus on the words of the story was tempered by the prompt to focus on the actions of a book, to show the feelings in it. And a need to get the parts of the story out, in the ‘correct’ order, can be inhibiting but again getting it out became a group responsibility which was liberating.

So we become two groups, with nine ‘bits’ of book and about 5 mins - super-fast, no faffing - to come up with a telling of it. One group used a clapping rhythm of 6 into which they wove images or tableaux. They also used an editing tool - a repeated “reveal” - of the narrator instructing the audience to open and close their eyes for certain sections; snapshots of a moment, hopefully not always obvious.

The other group returned to Anna’s early exercise of placing the telling - or the showing as it became - within the world of a limited physical language (Stop, Start, Change-direction, Follow-someone etc) and layered over that the harmonic singing of JOx’s session. This physical/visual/aural world was very powerful; within it, moments and gestures were clearly displayed to forward the story - this, despite the order of the elements being re-arranged from the written down version; a layering of images which the brain makes it’s own sense of, like a dream.

Finally, have I said I really enjoyed myself? It was hard work but enormous fun. And it feels important to acknowledge the warmth, generosity and creativity in the room.

Like a simile that works for you, the session made me go “Oh, yes, that’s the way I want to be working...”

Maryjane Stevens 3rd Feb 2011


Reminder from Fed: next week Books 17 & 18. For those who are flummoxed reading-wise here is a link to a pithy precis (ignore the kiddy illustrations, the text is fine) The print version is very short and does not cover everything by any means but may give you confidence when reading the full text, if confidence is short. http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/