the tendrils around angkor wat

Before my free day turns into a totally wasted do nothing day (although "doing nothing" does not always equal "wasted"), I've decided to blog. (As if these words contribute towards the day's productive output.)

(Then again it's not really a 'free day'- I still have to teach for one hour and perform at night.)

Today will be the second and final day of the "9 Temple Graffiti" run. Yesterday was a lot of fun. Working with dancers is quite interesting because after you've gotten past reading their movements (which feels a bit like reading Chinese poetry with a smattering grasp of the language), there is the whole unpredictable element of The Moment, in which spontaneity and 'art' dictates that anything and everything that can happen will happen, to the detriment of prior set plans or cues or masking tape markers on the floor.

The language of the body is new and strange. I don't know where it begins, or ends, because every movement that appears insignificant might be staged, although the staged movement may at many times appear rather plebian.

The label "experimental open rehearsal" really takes the stress off the quest for the perfect performance, and leaves everything to the unpredictability of The Moment.

And music making has been deconstructed to noise producing.

(But interaction with the dancers seems to give meaning to all noise. Maybe because they need to impose meaning on the sounds to dance to it?)

And then there is the fading of the boundaries of each discipline - at the end we are left with the crudest, rawest, or as She would put it, "the organic material", through which we attempt to connect with the other, despite having physical walls separating the musician and the dancer.

Perhaps the set structure of form lulls us into a complacency where we assume the meaning of the notes will get across, like words in a sentence. But when you have only four words with which to speak for three minutes, the only thing that you can vary is the gesture, the manner of speech, and now I think that is where the communication begins.