COLOR BUBBLES
Description
This is the name of a set of movement phrases developed from prose poems written from the maps, and also short-hand for a set of iterative processes that generate set written or choreographic material collaboratively, passing authorship from person to person.
Process
The material for Color Bubbles was created through a series of small processes, each stage creating material (drawn, written, moved) that could be processed or edited in the next.
The first stage was the creation of landscape prose poems generated by the maps. Karinne directed a guided writing exercise linked to the “seeing and naming” work, in which each person considered first their map and then another’s as images (rather than, say, notes from or for storytelling). Considering the maps in terms of surface level details (quality of line, color) and page structure (are there segments to the page? What words or images neighbor each other?). The poems were freed from our knowledge of the stories into which the images were embedded, releasing the burden of relaying narrative truth. We focused on the spatial elements of the document, which naturally oriented the language they prompted toward choreographic concerns. Karinne then distilled the poems further.
Example:
Eun Jung’s poem of Meg’s map, distilled by Karinne:
Seven heads and seven bodies standing next to each other occupy the room in Toronto. Toronto, an old school shouts.
Written in blue, with determination, AWAY is tagged over the word Toronto. Liz lives there, perhaps. Perhaps in a horizontal apartment behind vertical bars.
Four blue containers are distributed, contributed, scattered evenly, strangely on the beige surface of breath. Three squares and a square/circle are dominant throughout.
LA is oriented toward east. Different than everything else. Criss-cross multiple colors. Green arrows connecting green squares, which lead to “never stopping.”. Continuum, never-ending, everlasting, infinite struggles, a black hole.
Pink flowers live between Zani and working, walking… what? Flowering close to working, walking, what? A pair of flip flops laid on top of multiple words. They are located on the southeast corner of Spruce and faintly written street, above a parking square. Side, down, across, up, and across again. Two parallel strikes filled with orange diagonal lines. A curvey line turns into a spiral and splits into two lines hanging down toward the words: Capitalist and Feminism.
A cascade falling from a Christmas tree in the city of Philadelphia lands in an empty room in NYC. Linda fixed it.
We then used the prose poems as springboards to create movement phrases, opening up an iterative process, allowing us to adapt one thing as a set of instructions for the next, arriving at movement from directives of language. Interpreted through the mind and body of the dancers, the original stories pass through the group to arrive somewhere new. A trio (Scott, Eun Jung, Guillermo) translate another prose poem (opening with the words “color bubbles”) to create a set movement trio. Other translations are composed. This becomes material we can store and retrieve that has become separated from personal story in a way that the feedback structures of other language-related scores doesn’t allow. This also becomes movement material that we use to build layered performance scores such as the “interview structure”
Questions
What is the frame for this iterative process? How many translations or transpositions do we want to go through? Is Color Bubbles the material arrived at, or the process of being prompted incrementally onward? Could the interviews come back into the process? Can these prose poems become song lyrics? They fill up the room with images.