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Modul-dance offers selected dance artists the time, space and economic structure to develop their work. Modul-dance has decided that the creative processes they encourage artists to embark on consists of four chapters; research, residency, production and last presentation. Each chapter with it’s own structure and economics surrounding them.

I didn’t get to do all modules within modul-dance, but none the less, I kept the form that was suggested to me to create within. The piece The Mob developed through modul-dance is called BABY IT’S YOU NOT ME. Having only premiered the piece less than a month ago, I will try to sit here and contemplate my experiences.

Trailer for Baby it's you not me from The Mob on Vimeo.

Since modul-dance has been in my life since spring 2012, I start to think; which one of all the million feelings and thoughts I’ve had in the last two and half years do I want to write about? Professional life: opportunities to work and get to places and meet people I haven’t met before, laughing, crying, work in new contexts. Private life: travelling, eating food I’m not used to eating, breathing unfamiliar air, missing home, laughing, crying, making love, missing my bed and friends + having loads of Skype dates.

How did I experience being a part of modul-dance?
What is my life now?
What was it before modul-dance?
Did modul-dance shape the piece I developed?

I will use the module titles suggested by modul-dance below to represent a timeline and map of fragments of my mind from summer 2012 to the present.

I wrote within these suggested modules to guide both me and you through this brief attempt to write about creating BABY IT’S ME NOT YOU, modul-dance, life and dancing.

Ok, lets go!

1. Research
MONSTER AND THE MONSTROUS. A big unknown. Stockholm, Poznań, Maribor.
New collaborators. Black metal. The monstrosity of the norm. The SHADOWS of our minds. What we can’t speak about. THE WHITE MALE = SCARY! Christianity really made things complicated for our bodies and us.

2. Residency
Let’s embody all the above-mentioned Lyon, Dresden! We have so many answers to all our questions now! Lets make make make play play play. Gold is a fancy colour.

3. Production
What the f**k am I doing? Copenhagen. What is monstrosity anyways? And who thought it was a good idea to do a dance performance based on that anyways? Oh my goddess! This is brilliant. I’m nervous now. I feel like puking. Everyone else in the team is awesome. Nobody understands me.
MONSTER MONSTER MONSTER.

4. Presentation
Are you a monster?
Is it in your nature to never succeed?
Do you have difficulties communicating with others?
Is your form constantly changing?
Is it true that you live in the shadows?

BABY IT’S YOU NOT ME is a search for the monster, a performance that materializes on stage, in the imagination of the audience and in the exchange between those two. Through an exploration of recognizable movements and inundating live music, the choreography and performance structures dissect the qualities and aspects of monsters and the monstrous. The audience is thus invited to spend some time with the undefinable and the nameless.

BABY IT’S YOU NOT ME is also a concert. In a simple, blunt yet playful way it unfolds through speech, dance and music that stays short of expectations.

Functioning as a fluent symbiotic trio, performers Emma-Cecilia Ajanki and Piet Gitz-Johansen along with saxophone player Otis Sandsjö move through elements of sound, light and body in a way that affects, confuses and blurs the experience of the audience.

Conceiving and creating a new work is like capturing the detailed minutiae of a dream, except it’s in the future… I don’t think we surrender ourselves to the wild plains of our imagination enough. Art is about creating an elemental experience of life, which the audience is invited to participate in along with the performers.

Within modul-dance, I’ve had research modules at Art Station Foundation in Poznań, Poland and at Plesna Izba in Maribor, Slovenia; and residencies in CSC Bassano del Grappa, Italy and CDC Toulouse in France.

In Poland, in March 2013, I spent half of my time in Poznań, writing, working alone in the studio, chatting to other artists and spending time with an enthusiastic ethnography student from Adam Mickiewicz University, listening to polish lore and folk stories; and the second half in Warsaw, dwarfed by the wind-chilled, wide grey boulevards, and felt the constant shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Science and Culture, absorbing the vibrations (and -8 degrees celsius temperatures) of this multi war surviving “phoenix city”.

In May I travelled to Bassano del Grappa, where I worked alone for the first 5 days of the residency, which I often find difficult to do, particularly as I don't usually choreograph for my own body.

I spent a lot of time reading and writing, and being in another place without the everyday burdens, really helped. Roberto arranged a trip up the mountains for me, led by a young academic fountain of knowledge, Sebastiano Crestani, to see some ancient etchings. Unfortunately the Alpine rain cancelled our hike, and instead we went to Padua, where I saw an exhibition on the ancient Veneti people and an amazing 6 mt wooden horse made in 1466.

For the second week I invited Justine Cooper to join me, a performer with whom I already developed some ideas. We shared some ideas with a wonderfully engaged and generous audience there before we left. We also got to sit in on a rehearsal of an all male choir, singing old Italian and Alpine folk songs, a real treat to watch a committed group of mean aged 30-80 singing like angels!

My 4 day trip to Maribor (Plesna Izba) in June was planned to coincide with the annual FolkArt Festival, which is a bit like the dance version of Eurovision in it’s presentational format. Mojca had arranged front row seats for the 3 nights, and I sat there, blown away by these massive ensembles of predominantly amateur dancers (some pretty hefty guys) doing amazingly complex things, passionate about preserving their national dances. I got a private lesson from Vaska, a Slovenian dance historian, choreographer and choreologist of folk dances from the regions. It was here in Maribor where my attention began to focus more towards the crazy music of the Balkans.

My final 2-week residency took place in Toulouse in December 2013, and this time I brought along 5 dancers. It was the first time for us all to be together, and we spent the entire 2 weeks working in the studio. The facilities at the CDC were wonderful, in that we spent most of the time dancing, eating and talking, which resulted in a sense of ease in our environment and explorations. This ease allowed me to go places artistically I’d never been before. Newer, darker, funnier, stranger places. We had some visits from school children who sometimes joined in the warm ups and university students with whom we shared and discussed small segments of our work.

With Tundra I wanted to explore a familiar concept/myth/truth, depending on one’s beliefs, to reveal the poetry of “heaven and hell” and the instability and abysses that exists within us all and in everyday life. I wanted to somehow work with the potential of an unseen world, and feeling the breath of “the ideal”, without wanting to impose any sort of didactic notions on the work. But I am drawn to thinking about reason and logic being overcome by internal and external forces. By that I’m talking about intuition and the connection between our own instinct and a greater external force outside of our control and indeed understanding. Not wanting to sound too esoteric or ethereal, Tundra is a world that’s cosmically misaligned, where time and space lose their boundaries, inhabited by characters who are confronted by fear -of themselves, their existence, their actions and of the unknown, but ultimately they want to break through those barriers to a higher plane. I’ve been thinking about the cyclical nature of time, and how, historically, we can see patterns emerging, where at certain times everything goes into a state of flux and volatility. It looks like we’re in that state right now, and it is a time of insecurity, change and we have witnessed the exposure of a huge amount of human suffering and darkness. I'm endlessly interested in talking and exploring human nature but in particular our chaos, and struggle with desire and death. I enjoy delving into seemingly banal moments, which our mind and imagination has the capacity to make extraordinarily beautiful or horrific.

I like to allow the spectator to receive his own interpretation of each moment for her/himself, and to allow the mind to organize it in it’s own way. It’s an innate process that we naturally do anyway, so it’s not that any special intellectual treatment or analysis is required. But the aim is to allow the arrangement of all of the components of our creation to have an individual effect or Gestalt in the eye of each spectator.

Each piece of work requires a specific language, a movement one, a visual one, a musical one and sometimes a spoken one. And so for me the “sequence of steps” has to take a secondary position to the people who are actually doing them. An intelligent performer requires much more to keep her/himself stimulated than just repetition. And so that’s when the work becomes much more interesting when the performers are also creators and bringing themselves to it. I was really buzzed by the performers that I worked with on Tundra, which demanded a mutual act of searching from us all. They really brought themselves, their experience, memories and, most importantly, their imaginations into the room. The characters are emerged from them, which felt more truthful, than imposing mannerisms and alien stories on them. The performers are paramount to the work- they are the ones that distil, embody and deliver the energy to the audience, and I have been very fortunate to work with some really wonderful artists.

Tundra premiered at the Dublin Dance Festival in May 2014 and was packed up after it’s successful 4 -show run. What next? There’s a new work on the way in 2015, there’ll always be a new work. But it can be exhausting always creating new work for just a handful of performances, and hoping a DVD will magically enable a longer life for it or garner interest in the next new work.

As I Iook back on my modul-dance experience, and attempt to measure the result my participation has had on the work, there are of course lots of interesting and fruitful moments that come to mind, many of which I mentioned earlier. But I also wonder about how the participating artists affect the partners and modul-dance as an organization. This remains a mystery to me. And although it was an enriching experience to develop the piece in new, unfamiliar places, the question of "what next" will not leave my mind.

Picture: © Ros Kavanagh

How did the following aspects affected my work:

General:
What has affected my work more than anything in modul-dance could be summed up with the word "tailoring".

As I have joined modul-dance a little less than 2 years ago my main topic (apart from my project proposal) was how to tailor this opportunity to my real needs. I suspect modul-dance as a supporting network is introduced differently to different artists depending on their own home venue by which they were suggested and the role and the production conditions of that venue. In short, an interesting realization was that artists adopt the kind of approach to this opportunity that is suggested or presented by the home-venue. I am mentioning this as my situation was a bit different – suggested by Plesna Izba Maribor as my motherboard organization, yet based in Germany, in Frankfurt at the time of being introduced to the network.

This presented me with an interesting insight at the very beginning, starting to understand that although modul-dance is an umbrella for independent dance artists, with a concrete proposal and a fixed system of nominating, awarding membership and supporting the production of their work, it is also an experiment, experiencing it much more alive when understanding it as proposals and suggestions, trials, showings, gathering and exchanging rather than rules and regulations, requirements and criteria.

Development / Modular system:
Personally I have struggled with understanding the scope and the concrete possibilities the network can offer. Although very suggestive with its name, modular system was something that seemed to me a “solution” to something. It sounded as if there was an estimation of the then current productions and residencies and perhaps an observation that the artists lack a clearer vision or articulation of their process, therefore a modular system could be something to give a little push or present a suggestion/advancement of their methods and processes. It would simultaneously help the productions houses themselves to get more suitingly involved. It seemed as an encouragement to deepen one's interest and work and go pass the one-month processes where things are rushed and squeezed in. That is how I perceived it at the beginning. In that regard I must say that “insisting” on one project for 2 years proved to be very fruitful in defying the normal time-conditioned production modes. However, I had some issues with it; extending a project over two years, with a residency in every 5-6 months affects the continuity heavily. My personal practice already incorporates involvement with a specific project for longer period of time, so sustaining the focus and engagement with the subject is not a problem. The purely practical level, hardware of it however is – the project grows and changes thorugh time and the venues cannot always meet these new requirements of one's development. I found myself often compelled by the conditions to rigidly insist on my initial proposal, when in fact the phases of research or residencies brought about new, more suitable pathways to pursue, demanding different conditions than speculated at the beginning.

I have envisioned my proposal with three people at the begining; I have then started a research phase alone, continued with a residency with two other persons, the next one with only one, ending with another research phase where I was working with a group of local dancers. An obvious break in continuity here was due to many reasons – the conditions and possibilities of the hosting venues, the misalignment of the time schedules with the performers I have invited to work with and similar. Although not leading me to the desired outcome, each of the opportunities was still a step forward, expanding and enriching my proposal. Tensions between the aforementioned factors resulted too often in a compromise I had to reach within myself to progress instead of an act of balancing.

Speaking of different phases (research, residency for example), as much as it seems like a good model, it hasn't proved to work well for me. A matrix how a process is unwinding comes across as a valuable suggestion, yet it is something individual, very specific in each case. As it may be beneficial for a group of partners supporting an individual artist to bring about a full-fledged production, I found the modular system a bit over emphasized as it had little correspondence with the phases my project would have undergone otherwise, more organically I assume. On the other hand, it has worked wonders to be practicing such adaptability – using conditions to serve you and not the other way around or simply looking for the best in every opportunity. To conclude on the modular system, I have found myself to start considering the needs of my project and design necessary stages a bit late in my “modul-dance time”, focusing more on how to meet the ends – my needs and venues' offers. So after a year and a half of residencies I am only now at the stage where I'm clear with what is absolutely necessary for the project to be realized and what is less urgent and can be compromised.

Community of artists / Network of trust and colalboration:
Another point I would like to comment on is the community of artists. I have to say it was something I would have wished for more opportunities to engage with others. Meeting people at conferences made sense for me when the format was flexible enough to allow both – a presentation, performance as well an insight into individual's ways of working. I have been inspired by so many artists, connected with few and will for sure keep in touch with them in the future. It has been of great help to meet the rest of 50 something artists and exchange a bit on our development during the modul-dance support. This was the eye opener on how to use or benefit even more from the network, how to “tailor” it individually as I mentioned before. It seemed to me a bit like hearing the testimonies of other's “rules of the game” they have created for themselves.

Also very important was connecting to the programers or let's say everybody else involved that are not the supported artists, from different environments. It was definitely “insider's” information in sense that I got to learn how production is approached to and tackled. What is the venues' approach, values, requirements and criteria, how they treat the audience, and similar for sure expanded my own understanding and influenced not only my future management skills, but artistic approach to some degree as well – be it opening it up to new factors considered in what contributes to dance-making, be it becoming more protective and appreciative of my own artistic visions and beliefs.

However, not only community of artists, but the whole modul-dance community is something I did not expect to start to feel part of. Having heard negative experience of the past generations, jokingly naming it a "market for the programmers", I had my doubts of course, left a bit confused about what to expect. In retrospective, believing one only gets what one expects, I did get confusion, but also and most importantly got the support to develop my work. Both through time & space enabling 'em to work as well as developing skills needed for independent dance maker to create and expand. Although the premiere is not on the horizon yet, I can see already the development of my work and the side-effects of it on a broader scale – how I communciate and integrate in my current environment. All these changes and opportunities were however possible only through a good personal contact I had with each of the partner, mostly finding a common interest and therefore a good connection purely on a personal level, engaging in a chit chat, sychornizing energetically more than any kind of pre-concieved plan and aimed for connection.

The only thing left to add is that this experience has vastly influenced my “positioning” in the most broad sense of the word, to even think of it as a part of my vocabulary when reflecting on my work, it had been testing the range of my permeability – how, when and for what purpose am I exposing my artistic process intentionally or unintentionally and it added sparks to the already ignited desire of mine to have a future opportunity to be part of a tighter artistic community, where the flow of exchange is the motor, curiosity the fuel and integration and support the destination.

Picture: © Zoe Alibert

Conceiving and creating a new work is like capturing the detailed minutiae of a dream, except it’s in the future… I don’t think we surrender ourselves to the wild plains of our imagination enough. Art is about creating an elemental experience of life, which the audience is invited to participate in along with the performers.

Within modul-dance, I’ve had research modules at Art Station Foundation in Poznań, Poland and at Plesna Izba in Maribor, Slovenia; and residencies in CSC Bassano del Grappa, Italy and CDC Toulouse in France.

In Poland, in March 2013, I spent half of my time in Poznań, writing, working alone in the studio, chatting to other artists and spending time with an enthusiastic ethnography student from Adam Mickiewicz University, listening to polish lore and folk stories; and the second half in Warsaw, dwarfed by the wind-chilled, wide grey boulevards, and felt the constant shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Science and Culture, absorbing the vibrations (and -8 degrees celsius temperatures) of this multi war surviving “phoenix city”.

In May I travelled to Bassano del Grappa, where I worked alone for the first 5 days of the residency, which I often find difficult to do, particularly as I don't usually choreograph for my own body.

I spent a lot of time reading and writing, and being in another place without the everyday burdens, really helped. Roberto arranged a trip up the mountains for me, led by a young academic fountain of knowledge, Sebastiano Crestani, to see some ancient etchings. Unfortunately the Alpine rain cancelled our hike, and instead we went to Padua, where I saw an exhibition on the ancient Veneti people and an amazing 6 mt wooden horse made in 1466.

For the second week I invited Justine Cooper to join me, a performer with whom I already developed some ideas. We shared some ideas with a wonderfully engaged and generous audience there before we left. We also got to sit in on a rehearsal of an all male choir, singing old Italian and Alpine folk songs, a real treat to watch a committed group of mean aged 30-80 singing like angels!

My 4 day trip to Maribor (Plesna Izba) in June was planned to coincide with the annual FolkArt Festival, which is a bit like the dance version of Eurovision in it’s presentational format. Mojca had arranged front row seats for the 3 nights, and I sat there, blown away by these massive ensembles of predominantly amateur dancers (some pretty hefty guys) doing amazingly complex things, passionate about preserving their national dances. I got a private lesson from Vaska, a Slovenian dance historian, choreographer and choreologist of folk dances from the regions. It was here in Maribor where my attention began to focus more towards the crazy music of the Balkans.

My final 2-week residency took place in Toulouse in December 2013, and this time I brought along 5 dancers. It was the first time for us all to be together, and we spent the entire 2 weeks working in the studio. The facilities at the CDC were wonderful, in that we spent most of the time dancing, eating and talking, which resulted in a sense of ease in our environment and explorations. This ease allowed me to go places artistically I’d never been before. Newer, darker, funnier, stranger places. We had some visits from school children who sometimes joined in the warm ups and university students with whom we shared and discussed small segments of our work.

With Tundra I wanted to explore a familiar concept/myth/truth, depending on one’s beliefs, to reveal the poetry of “heaven and hell” and the instability and abysses that exists within us all and in everyday life. I wanted to somehow work with the potential of an unseen world, and feeling the breath of “the ideal”, without wanting to impose any sort of didactic notions on the work. But I am drawn to thinking about reason and logic being overcome by internal and external forces. By that I’m talking about intuition and the connection between our own instinct and a greater external force outside of our control and indeed understanding. Not wanting to sound too esoteric or ethereal, Tundra is a world that’s cosmically misaligned, where time and space lose their boundaries, inhabited by characters who are confronted by fear -of themselves, their existence, their actions and of the unknown, but ultimately they want to break through those barriers to a higher plane. I’ve been thinking about the cyclical nature of time, and how, historically, we can see patterns emerging, where at certain times everything goes into a state of flux and volatility. It looks like we’re in that state right now, and it is a time of insecurity, change and we have witnessed the exposure of a huge amount of human suffering and darkness. I'm endlessly interested in talking and exploring human nature but in particular our chaos, and struggle with desire and death. I enjoy delving into seemingly banal moments, which our mind and imagination has the capacity to make extraordinarily beautiful or horrific.

I like to allow the spectator to receive his own interpretation of each moment for her/himself, and to allow the mind to organize it in it’s own way. It’s an innate process that we naturally do anyway, so it’s not that any special intellectual treatment or analysis is required. But the aim is to allow the arrangement of all of the components of our creation to have an individual effect or Gestalt in the eye of each spectator.

Each piece of work requires a specific language, a movement one, a visual one, a musical one and sometimes a spoken one. And so for me the “sequence of steps” has to take a secondary position to the people who are actually doing them. An intelligent performer requires much more to keep her/himself stimulated than just repetition. And so that’s when the work becomes much more interesting when the performers are also creators and bringing themselves to it. I was really buzzed by the performers that I worked with on Tundra, which demanded a mutual act of searching from us all. They really brought themselves, their experience, memories and, most importantly, their imaginations into the room. The characters are emerged from them, which felt more truthful, than imposing mannerisms and alien stories on them. The performers are paramount to the work- they are the ones that distil, embody and deliver the energy to the audience, and I have been very fortunate to work with some really wonderful artists.

Tundra premiered at the Dublin Dance Festival in May 2014 and was packed up after it’s successful 4 -show run. What next? There’s a new work on the way in 2015, there’ll always be a new work. But it can be exhausting always creating new work for just a handful of performances, and hoping a DVD will magically enable a longer life for it or garner interest in the next new work.

As I Iook back on my modul-dance experience, and attempt to measure the result my participation has had on the work, there are of course lots of interesting and fruitful moments that come to mind, many of which I mentioned earlier. But I also wonder about how the participating artists affect the partners and modul-dance as an organization. This remains a mystery to me. And although it was an enriching experience to develop the piece in new, unfamiliar places, the question of "what next" will not leave my mind.

Picture: © Ros Kavanagh