A Rehearsal for Mortals

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Notes

¹Body-Mind Centering (BMC) is a bodywork practice developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a practice applying visualization techniques and hands-on work (Bainbridge Cohen 2001). I have my background from teachers and practitioners like Erika Berland and Wendell Beavers, supplemented with related bodywork practices like Kinetic Awareness (KA) (by Frances Becker, who studied with the founder of KA, Elaine Summer) and an ongoing practice of Sensory Awareness (by Gro Torgersbråthen, who studied with Elsa Lindenberg, who studied with the founder of the practice, Elsa Gindler).

²Horgen, Mo and Mossige had all previously worked with profiled Norwegian choreographers. In the case of Horgen with Hooman Shariffi / Impure Company and Heine Avdal / Deep Blue; in case of Mo with Ina Christel Johannessen / Zero Visibility, Jo Strømgren, Eva Cecilie Richardsson / Kreutzer kompaniet; and in case of Mossige with Carte Blanche, Ina Christel Johannessen / Zero Visibility, Ingunn Bjørnsgaard Project / IBP, and his own well-received company, Toyboys.

³See <www.jolstad.no>.

⁴Light design was made in cooperation with BVLK, costumes by Ebba Johansson, while project coordinators were Cathe Sjøblom (2004–5) and Sandra Sandbye (2006–7).

⁵See <www.khio.no.

⁶See <www.kunststipendiat.no>. Supervisors were Professor and Choreographer Efva Lilja, University College of Dance, Stockholm, and Lecturer Ingunn Rimestad at KHiO. The project was funded by Arts Council Norway, Fund for Performing Artists, Fund for Sound and Vision in Norway. I am mentioning all these factors to underline the fact that stage productions like this one result from a joint venture by many competent and highly specialized professionals and is dependent on positive assessment and support from several major funds for being realized. I will refrain from discussing the implications these facts have for the production, as it lies beyond the scope of this article, though they constitute the structural conditions for the work made.

⁷See <www.teak.fi>.

⁸Even though I have sympathy with their bereavement and loss, I am stirred by the coverage given to such statements and find them harder to take on.

⁹The reason for this is obvious (Bauman 1992: 15): Death is an obtrusive contrast to the value assigned to freedom of choice and choice-making in our societies, and hence is an even grimmer fact to digest.

¹⁰Macrophages are a ‘type of white white blood cell derived from monocytes that engulf invading antigenic molecules, viruses, and microorganisms and then display fragments of the antigen to activate helper T cells, ultimately stimulating the production of antibodies against the antigen’ <http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/aculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookglossM. html#macrophages>.

¹¹The sound exploration was conducted in cooperation with sound-artist Trond Lossius. (For more information about his work, see <http://www.trondlossius.no/>). We investigated sound as a partner and subject for the performers on stage by exploring its weight, texture and direction in space.

¹²By then we had built a body of experience, and I had developed a ‘sign language’ to indicate the different bodily systems or functions we were focusing on. This sign language allowed us to play around with improvisational scores more simply as they were easy to read from afar and could hence suffice as memory for hour-long improvisational try-outs.

¹³The phases of bodily disintegration are rigor mortis, putrefaction, liquefying, bloating, drying and brittle (Mims 1999: 119–24).

¹⁴The compositional structure of the dancers’ movement paths evolving out of this process became a journey through our bodily autonomy from its cellular life and cell migrations to the heart and the cardio-vascular system and subsequently to the lymphatic immune system, its defeat and collapse, and the body's process of dying, followed by the phases of disintegration of the body before its return to dust.

¹⁵Based on video recordings of previous explorations I edited individual video sketches for each of the dancers of what movements to re-obtain. This material was finally moulded and set in time and space together with me. The video sketches provided a transparency where each dancer could instantly get the overall picture of their part as well as trace their sequences back to the original explorations they came from. This created a work situation that empowered the dancers.

¹⁶See archive <http://www.intermedia.uio.no/wp-docudance/>.

¹⁷However, in our conversations the dancers firmly expressed that these encounters were crucial and very important for their exploration. Despite the demanding tasks of gaining bodily awareness of the autonomous processes in their bodies, and the brutal confrontation with sensorial aspects of dying and death, one of the dancers said, ‘How can I return to dance for other choreographers after this?’