TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Friday, July 29, 2005

4:01 PM
Posted by jodi rose

in response to a close friend, who email and asked: 'where are you, are you really in adelaide, and what are you doing? I need to know, it keeps me vaguely sane!'

oh dear thanks for that email, it made me chuckle to think that my demented ramblings could be contributing to anyone's grip on sanity - but am very glad they do!! yes it is all true, I spent two weeks in glorious adelaide staying in apartments at the dodgy end of hindley street, doing art camp with 20 artists and 5 facilitators. sorry in advance for the following lapses in punctuation - set off a stream of consciousness rave.

during one of our daily feedback/critique sessions Kirsten - one of the lovely artists - came up with the term boot camp and it stuck. we also called it artists big brother - just without the tv show. the facilitators put us in groups and gave us tasks for the first week - we had 24 hours to go away and come up with a performance for the rest of the group. my first one was with elka (video artist and rave organiser from darwin) and sam (theatre director and performer from adelaide) and we all swapped roles - had to be 'out of our comfort zone' hmmm that was tricky! -so I did images and she wrote and he did sound. theme was 'water' from a tourist point of view, and so we took it very literally and made a cheesy travelogue presentation of our day trip to the beach at glenelg with the audience sitting in bus formation seating and elka as the surrealist tour guide.

next day worked with greg and noelle, we weren't allowed to use any technology and had to transform the space in some way (we had the run of the entire adelaide school of art facility - pretty wild, lots of dance studios and theatres and other spaces to play in). so there was this dark corridor that reminded me of a mental asylum, and we devised this performance with noelle as the mad scientist and me as the aslyum warden, walking along checking the narrow windows in each door and writing notes in my clipboard.

for our last group project, we got to choose our own collaborators, so I played with ingrid, brownyn, elka and steve - the theme this time was anything with a 'dramatical arc' (poetic translation by threes anna - hardcore fabulous facilitator who directed dogtroep theatre spectacular extravaganzas for 12 years - we think she meant 'dramatic arc' - http://www.threesanna.com/ - see theatre projects link for more info)

so we had a johnny cash man in black moment and decided to do a butoh style western showdown - while hanging out in my new favourite cafe/bar cherry bomb, which had it's official opening a week later - the adelaide locals were amused that we kept finding and taking them to these new cool places they'd never heard of - drinks and dancing at lotus lounge later in the week to farewell julianne pierce from anat - had kava on the last night after our farewell dinner, with fiona; and pole danced during our blue light rave with sarah... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

ok back to the butoh guns at sunset - bronwyn and steve devised this great slow moving shootout culminating in her killing him with a hoop - this was filmed and projected over the two of them sitting at a cafe having a romantic dinner - looked amazing, their bodies rose up from the projection behind the real people and had this internal fight while they chatted and pretended to like each other. I made the soundtrack with lots of snippets from flamenco to serge gainsbrough - but we got totally slammed in our critique for being cliched and weakening our dramatical arc with the pacing of the fight. but it was based on butoh, I wanted to scream, we were playing with cliches and twisting them - I got in trouble for the music being too 'cinematic'... whatever that meant - tugging at people's emotions, I think. ..but...but...but it was all about manipuating the audience...

anyway, we had a great time, and I learnt some hoop tricks from bron for my solo performance - it was very cute you would have laughed - made a video of me doing ridiculous ott performance with the hoops in a long flowing black and pink dress - every time I dropped one, bron would throw another in and I'd make big flamboyant showbiz hand gestures - this was shown on a monitor in the empty dance studio, and the audience then came through a door into the tiny dressing room, which i'd set up with pretty things (makeup, hair clips, drawing from ari, card from mum) on the classic mirrored lights dressing table, and was out the back in my jeans and enid's horse t-shirt, trying again and again to get more and more hoops to stay up around my hips. the crit for that one was good, people got the sense of being invited into a personal space, and having been given permission to be voyeurs by watching me on the screen, felt that it was still a privilege to be watching the sweat and tears in the backstage area. two of the dancers said they really empathised with me, having the experience of trying to get a particular physical trick over and over themselves. I was really happy that the sense of intimacy and vulnerability came across.

so that was the birth of my new career as a hoop artiste!
then led to directing a fabulously obscure movement piece with 8 dancers for the final days presentations - ohmigod it had contact improv, interperative dance and impulse work - don't know what came over me. trying to articulate an idea about the way people connect or stay on separate paths, which didn't quite work but it was a good excercise for me in directing. really enjoyed playing with a whole new form to explore ideas, based on movement and not text or sound. all part of the grand plan to direct a theatrical specatacular on 12 bridges in 5 contintents sometime in the next 2 years. threes anna promised to give some mentoring advice on the process, and I've worked out a rough idea based on macabre/grotesque images for the world under the bridges, and aerial tricks with projections for the parts taking place in the cables above them. it's all very european.

steve, elka and I made a fantastic rave party happen on friday night - it was called 'blue light rave 2005' and we took it out to the streets of adelaide, filming mtv style vox-pops with passing kids and convenience store owners - asking them what dance styles they'd expect to see at a blue light rave (luke from cherry bomb said 'scrabble' and someone else 13-15 year old dance steps) - then asked if they'd come to a free pole dancing workshop, which people were very excited about.

so for our presentation, we set up 3 video projectors and lots of speakers in the experimental theatre space (black box) and showed 5 minute of the interviews, then steve led the pole dancing workshop - it was amazing, all the artists and facilitators got totally into it, we gave them a chopstick each to simulate the pole, and they kept doing the routine with each other until we told them to stop - then played pumping house music for an hour and everyone danced wildly. fabulous. dance activism at it's very best!

so, it's been a completely transformative experience, on some very profound level, which I really wasn't expecting. feel that I've understood some lifelong patterns, and can step back from them now and not be driven to repeat those particular energy flows. hope to notice and neutralise them next time and get on with having fun.

have been getting up an hour earlier going for a walk every day for the last week - amazing how much it energises me, and already feel fitter and more alive and confident.