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Posted on behalf of Participant - Lecturer Nigel S...

Posted on behalf of Participant - Lecturer Nigel Stewart
Movement + Drawing Workshop at Parasol on 15 July 2015.

I made a late decision to stay on in London for two extra nights to attend the workshop. I am glad that I did.

In establishing a score through which movement and drawing can take place (viz. the five frames , phases or concepts of horizon , ground , within , climb , and height ), the workshop was highly effective in bringing attention to how different perceptions of space can be conditioned by particular ways of moving within and inhabiting space. This certainly made a significant difference to the kinds of drawing that occurred. To take just the first two frames as an example, the act of walking forwards and backwards along the length of a long rectangular space to a wall, and then stopping to spontaneously draw what we perceived of the horizon on strips of paper that were placed across the width of the space at different intervals from the wall, was significantly different from the act of allowing our bodies to sink into the ground and then drawing from that lived experience of the weight of our own bodies. The difference could be noticed not just in my own drawings but in those of other workshop participants that I later observed.



Thirdly, the relationship between moving and drawing was not reciprocal, but only flowed from the former to the latter. It struck me that the five frames also sum up different dispositions that the dancer has towards space whilst dancing, and so I would very much have liked to have had time to improvise movement in response to, or as a continuation of, the act of drawing, or even to have used my drawing and/or the drawings of others as a score for physical action. To be fair, the fact that this time was lost was due more to the garrulous nature of the workshop participants as it was to Ed and Caroline s time management!

Finally, during the discussion some mentioned that far more time was needed for each frame. Certainly, an indication of the efficacy of the score is that it is clearly possible to spend several hours if not days on each frame, but I do not think it fair to say that we needed more time for each frame in this workshop in particular since it was clearly designed as a taster session, a salutary introduction to this fascinating practice of drawing and dancing. I would be keen to find out more, and to continue the conversation with Ed and Caroline. Thanks to them and to Parasol for the workshop.

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