Another splendid train journey

Welcome to another Thursday with south west train services. The 10:58 was cancelled which was a main train to London, the next train a local service 11:42 to Plymouth. Unfortunately the 2 carriages are not big enough to fit the 10:58 passengers and the 11:42 passengers. This left me thinking about the news report this morning on breakfast about the south west growing faster than the rest of the country and the train service is up for sale. I do hope a little more common sense is used to deal with cancelled services, I can literally only move my head right now and sardines come to mind. What’s interesting though is how space is allocated and designed for us. Our necessity to be somewhere is more dominant than the need to provide adequate space. Prediction with rail services would play a large role as its impossible to know how exactly how many people will travel but surely it makes more sense to provide a replacement rail service or add an extra carriage? I would dearly love to know how space is allocated in public spaces and transport. Next stop Plymouth, must get a cup of tea and reclaim my feet from the pins and needles!

Bibliography addition

I have decided to start a dedicated page for the bibliography. It’s going to be a working document which I will update regularly. I can already see Foucault and some psychogeography literature isn’t on there so I will try and add this by the end of the week. Here’s the link or just press the Bibliography tab above.

Bibliography.

Also this evening I’ve been in touch with an old school friend who is a very brilliant landscape photographer (personal preference obviously, but please see for yourself), please check out his website http://www.garykingphotography.com/ Below is a picture taken by him of Strangles Beach, its available as a download for your desktop for free. He has written articles and given interviews for various magazines and publications.

I’ve been talking to him about the way he seems to capture the space moving and evolving on camera. I’m interested in the structuring of the composition and whether sited dance can convey the same space as accurately as the picture. I may well be setting myself a lifetime’s worth of research but for now this element is relevant for my negotiated project proposal that I submitted last week. I will detail the experiments and reasoning as soon as the project has been approved.

Bogged down = No Blogging

Hello and welcome to the week from hell should have been the heading or prediction last week! Apart from the usual heaps, ever since Friday those heaps got heavier and heavier and heavier. There are things I don’t wish to disclose to the world but snippets of the last few days would be like this: Missed trains, bathroom ceiling fell down, puppy started first season, another wall came down, have to get glasses, may have a shoulder impingement and we’ve used 17 months worth of water in 7 months (water meter faulty or internal leak, place your bets now!). So as a result of the massive surge of bad luck I have deprived myself of blogging. I’ve also had a rather productive week apart from the luck issue. Finished Exim contracts and job descriptions and I’m planning on entering a 60 second film submission of Bleak. The idea is to condense the 06:16 minutes into a short (60 second) film taking out some of the more repetitive sequences and slowing down and speeding up. My degree is not in film but I love messing around with it and seeing what the outcome would be, if I could get paid to make dance film and dance outside for the rest of my life I would be the happiest woman alive. The only trouble is I now have to drag my external hard drive to Plymouth for the editing as my friend with a Mac no longer lives around here and is 250 miles away in Hampshire.

I thought that because today I don’t really have anything precious to add, I would start putting some books into this site. After all its primary aim was site dance not my procrastinating ramblings…..

Books coming soon…. lunch first I think before the bibliographic frenzy commences.

Weekend, water and waffling….with a slice of dance.

Apologies for a shortage of words to say over the weekend, I’ve been terribly busy. A friends birthday, Exim company meeting and oh the small matter of an internal water leak that has caused us to use 17 months worth of water in 7 months! Slightly excessive is an understatement as well as making me feel awful about wasting so much water. The meter was only fitted in June and because the account was in credit the water board didn’t flag it up, but hopefully all will be ok soon and I’ve sent for a a water saving pack with lots of gadgets for hubby, C, to install next week when he has two weeks off. So my thoughts now turn to my negotiated project and then this blog will most definitely begin to log the developments of my research. I’m aiming to put the project on here to help me process the findings.

The basics of what I shall divulge later are:

1. A series of experiments conducted in a site with participants
2. a visual document/anotated text to support the above
3. A journal article based on both of the above, my own experience and that of 2 site dance artist

For now, I need to finish my ethics form and resource audit sheet….and have a cup of tea with a few malteasers 🙂

‘thick, unctuous and thoroughly dollopable’

Irrelevant info alert: this post has nothing to do with dance but lots to do with my other passion Cornish clotted cream or Kernewek Gold as the lovely people of Rodda’s describe it. I cannot stand any other passing of clotted cream and it has to be Rodda’s! When I lived in London I used to get it delivered as I was horrified that it didn’t exist in the shops in Putney at the time. But my biggest pet hate is people constructing a cream tea wrong…it’s jam first and then a large helping of beautiful, delicious mouth watering clotted cream! Please I beg of you everyone north and east of Cornwall try it you might like it. The title of this post is quoted from Rodda’s packaging 2012, it is the most lovely way of describing one of my favourite delicacies.

Woke up to this today, some very inspiring pictures

Terminology…

My most recent revelation caused me some controversy within my original research. In my undergraduate dissertation I was convinced (and happy) that sited performance/dance was categorised under a general heading of ‘site-specific’ that had a series of sub headings based on what the work was about and in order to own the prestigious and coveted title of ‘Site-specific dance’ the definition of this was that it had to include every aspect about the site . I am now in the opinion realm that no such thing exists!! Crazy I know but bear with me…

A site/space is made up of many things, based on the idea of perception, a viewer will not ever notice everything, just what is relevant to them. This may be based on how they feel at the time, their interest or hobbies or something they relate with. With this in mind, a choreographer can never create something that is specific to everyone apart from their self and that of the dancers they work with. Elements of the site will be found out from research but ultimately the ‘response’ will be just that a reflection of the knowledge gained of the site, so surely ‘Site-reflective’ would be a better generalised title? Looking at another side of site dance, performances that are moveable to any location without the meaning being lost could be called ‘site-universal’ dance?

So you would have the overall genre of site dance and within that 2 further categories; site-reflective and universal site dance. The latter would be its own entity and not really the focus of my research as it merely describes the use of a site in a performance or dance performed outside of a theatre, however site-reflective would have sub-categories based on the translations conveyed by the choreographer, in this I mean, historical reflections, aesthetic and so on.

I will of course research this further to see if anyone agrees or disagrees with this idea, back this up with evidence if possible and discuss this with my supervisor.