Izkraso Pats
Date
2004-01-16
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Other
Peer reviewed
Abstract
Description
Izkraso Pats was commissioned in 2004 by the British Council in liaison with Latvian educator and choreographer Olga Zitluhina, for her company in Riga, Latvia. It was made collaboratively with the dancers through improvisation under my direction.
Izkraso Pats (Fill in the Gaps) refers to my previous work, most notably Walk up behind me (2003). Building on my ongoing choreographic research, I identified several key movement themes and questions that I revisit in many of my works. These include ideas to do with lines, collapsing and echoes. These ideas have developed from the work of post modern dance makers, providing me with a greater context for my own investigations of fluid, economical and directed movement. Trisha Brown in particular has heavily informed my choreographic developments with specific reference to repetition, folding/unfolding and achieving a certain ‘human’ quality in her work, whilst Steve Paxton’s lengthy (and ongoing) investigations into activities such as walking promote the importance of a concentrated examination of one’s practices in order to rethink common assumptions.
The research questions informing my work at the time I made Izkraso Pats were to identify, document and develop creative strategies and themes that I use in my work in order to acknowledge these more fully and thus be in a better position to move forward to new ideas. Finding a way of working with repetition, folding/unfolding, and collapsing with a company of dancers who had not previously experienced my (or collaborative) creative methods allowed me to challenge preconceived ideas and expectations about performance making. Thus, for example, dealing with ideas of collapsing produced original content that collapsed upwards, as opposed to the habitual collapsing downwards. Izkraso Pats, particularly at the level of processing abstract movement material, heavily informed the development of a dance for radio.
Keywords
RAE 2008, UoA 65 Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Citation
Doughty, S. and Olga Zitluhina Dance Company(2004) Izkraso Pats.