Anne O'Keeffe
In July this year I had the privilege of attending Wendy Houstoun’s workshop in the International Workshop Festival, held at the Victorian College of the Arts. In the spirit of investigation, the workshop explored collisions between movement and text for dancers, choreographers and physically-based performers. But the workshop was also a journey through the creative process of a highly accomplished artist: a celebration of the quest and the questioning, the faith in the journey and the craft of deepening and refining. From the fog of confusion to the blue sky of creative clarity, the week affirmed for me what it is to be an artist.
Wendy Houstoun is an accomplished dancer/choreographer based in the U.K. A member of DV8 since the mid-1980s, Wendy is featured in Strange Fish, a Lloyd Newson piece rich in dreamlike, emotion-charged imagery. Wendy is the powerful central character, abandoned by her lover and flung into a journey of self-discovery, with floorboards lurching violently beneath her feet and mysterious strangers drawing her into pools of dark, murky water. Today she works mostly as a solo artist, creating humorous and deeply personal work - a dynamic interplay between dance and text, autobiography and social satire. She last appeared in Australia in the 1998 Adelaide Festival and her latest solo is currently touring pubs in the U.K - small, intimate environments that place the audience hard up against her technical virtuosity and verbal irony.
Beginning at the end of
the week’s workshop and working backwards, I’ll start with Wendy’s
Forum - a question and answer session allowing us to dig deeper into her working
methods. She began with a demonstration of her own work, a continuous monologue
while dancing, the personal made physical. A mixture of stand-up comedy and
dance, she spoke directly to us, immediately engaging our attention and establishing
a relationship with her audience. Later, she spoke of her association with DV8,
the work’s emphasis on the psychology of movement, on darkness and light.
She spoke of the problems she set herself to stimulate her solos and of the
political, social and personal content in her work. I was especially struck
with the intimacy in the first section of her performance. It was autobiography
– her life’s journey demonstrated in movement and text – told
and danced with a wry humour.
The Forum caused me to reflect further on the week’s activities. Beyond
the specific exercises in movement and text lay something deeper –THE PROCESS
OF CREATIVITY itself.
The tasks Wendy set us were clearly her own choreographic research. By participating in these, we gained insights into the ways Wendy took herself into her work and the challenges she set herself to generate material. The performance in the Forum had allowed us to witness the product this process lead to. So the week had also been an intimate experience, with doors flung open on the life, process and work of the artist. Having just come out of a two-year research, rehearsal and performance process myself, I found this fascinating, enlightening and rejuvenating.
Often when we participate in workshops (or take them for that matter), we expect a series of lessons which culminate in jewels of knowledge - in answers, in revelations revealed or uncovered. In Wendy’s workshop, however, THE QUESTION WAS THE THING. We were on a mission to discover interesting choreographic material, all equally in the dark. For long periods of time we stayed with the not knowing, taking delight in the questions, the shared journey and sometimes the discovery.
There is something about THE QUEST, the questioning, that is intensely joyful, intensely liberating for me. It found it enervating all week that the answers were not as important as the questions, that the arrival was not as important as the journey. The process of creativity is primarily about the journey and if the journey (question) is satisfying, then the arrival (answer) is equally satisfying. Wendy throws us a gesture-based score that we construct in pairs. She then directs us, manipulating the score in space and time to explore its potential. It is performed in open space and in the restriction of a doorway, each yielding different results. We perform to a text soundtrack, the gestures only surfacing on the words ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘there’. Wendy is playing, experimenting. Music is on and off, silence entering and leaving, restrictions opening and closing. The space is full of ‘what ifs’, with all of us, including Wendy, searching for the good stuff.
Inherent in all of this is the idea of TRUSTING THE PROCESS. Wendy’s devising of solos involves setting herself a task, trusting that the problem will find its own answer. So she set us tasks - each one taking us into our bodies and into the present moment, generating its own material. While focused on the task, we had to trust that the research we were doing had the potential to take us to a deep place, to yield fruit. The creative process is about going into a sort of a fog not knowing what the answer is going to be, a place of confusion, frustration and even fear as we sift the wheat from the chaff. It’s about trying to make sense of the material inside and outside of us. There were times when we went down blind alleys, only to find brick walls ahead of us and material that was surface, rather than that rich mother-lode we all seek, full of layers of meaning and layers of mystery.
Beyond the setting of scores, the task of choreography is about DEFINING THE MATERIAL. It’s about stripping away, manipulating and directing. The core material is revealed as the score is refined, the restrictions themselves generating content and creating a set of boundaries, a form that allows for a vertical exploration rather than a horizontal one. Perhaps, if the right question is posed, the right answers will emerge. Relating a dream verbally, one of the workshop participants is instructed to copy movements improvised by another person offstage. The movements are not intended to demonstrate the text, but begin to add another layer of meaning, reflecting an emotional response to the dream - a sort of physical demonstration of an internal state. Wendy directs the juxtaposition of elements, often revealing unexpected meaning, until we find something interesting, until meaning is made.
The activity I most enjoyed
during the workshop is something I’ll call the danced answer. Wendy instructs
half the group to get to their feet and dance their answer to the question ‘Why
do you dance?’ Flinging the movement into space, I jump and whirl then
run around the space joyfully, eating it up. Coming back to the starting place,
I circle around myself, doing lots of short movement experiments and gleefully
throwing each of them away.
All the lessons Wendy’s workshop held for me were somehow distilled in
this activity. There is such delight in dancing and making work, in the freedom
and experimentation, in the joy and exploration. There can be delight even when
the work is thrown away.
This is the process of creativity and Wendy’s workshop was about celebrating these things. It was also about celebrating the shadow side too, the difficulty of the journey, the confusion, the blind alleys, the fear of not knowing where you’re going, the being lost in the fog. In being involved in the creative process, we have to accept the good bits and the bad bits, the frustration of the questions as well as the joy of the answers. Doubt, uncertainty and vulnerability are all real and human and must be embraced within this journey. Wendy reminded me, consoled me even, that the spirit of investigation is what the creative process is about – and that in embracing its shadow side, we actually increase the joy of discovery.
The process of creativity is for each of us a sort of aesthetic evolution. And the work we finally arrive at, like the solo Wendy performed in her Forum, is unique to each of us, based on our own lives, our own values, our own autobiographies. I am grateful to Wendy for her generosity in sharing her process with us so fully – making for a meaningful and intimate learning experience. Wendy reminded me of the universality of this wonderful creative life, but also of its uniqueness to each of us.
Anne O’Keeffe
is an independent dancer/choreographer and teacher based in Melbourne. Her company,
Sirensong Dance and Theatre, recently performed Walk on Water at the Melbourne
City Baths and is currently investigating its touring potential. Anne performs
regularly as a dance improviser and with Wendy’s inspiration, has at last
begun her solo work Sex and Death.
The Australian International Workshop Festival was presented by Monash University,
with Artistic Directors Nigel Jamieson and Malcolm Blaylock. Its aim is to provide
high quality professional development for performing arts practitioners. To
be put on the mailing list for the 2001 Festival, ring Jan Clancy (Project Manager)
or Tim Clarke (Project Coordinator) on (03) 9905 1674.
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