The Book
Everything I gathered from the collection process, became the raw material for the construction of a score: a book titled Blue-Purple, Purple-Blue. A dance score is a set of instructions that inform the reader/performer about the actions, circumstances, elements and their composition that will result in the execution of the performance. Similar to a music score. Dance scores vary in form and character. They can be extremely specific and detailed (closed), or abstract and sometimes incomprehensive (open).
Scoring functions as a method to merge documentation and improvisation. Scores have the privilege of serving both as archives and as instructions for the performance of an improvisation. It is this dual nature of scores that I believe can make embodied documentation possible. Because of its duality, scoring provided me with an outlet, a fertile ground where I had the opportunity to experiment and explore documentation.
The aim of Blue-Purple, Purple-Blue is to take advantage of the gaps and overlaps and lead its reader through an improvisation that will reflect and re-present MANIFESTO. It is an attempt to rediscover meaning, not as something provided but rather produced by acts of creativity executed by the observer (von Bismarck).
It is poetic, interactive and at times incomprehensive.
Inspired by works such as the poems of E.E. Cummings, the Autobiography of Red by Ann Carson, Deborah Hay’s My Body The Buddhist and Motion Bank, the text itself is designed to give the sensation of movement and flux.
I made the book as I would go about making a choreography; a choreography of gaps and overlaps. Parallel universes coexisting and interacting with each other and with the reader. I made the book as I would go about making a choreography: I asked questions, I explored, I gathered, I de- and re- constructed and most importantly, I improvised.
Blue-Purple, Purple-Blue is by no means an attempt to solve the problem of documenting dance improvisation. It is merely a chance for me to better comprehend dance and the ways through which it travels through forms, from one body to another, from one space/time to the next one. It is a play of movement, words and gaps.
It is simply a score.
It is part of dance history.