THE PATH ON THE FLOOR AND OTHER USES OF HAND-DRAWING

Karen Christopher

the goal: inspiration during the making of So Below with Gerard Bell is a section describing how ideas were developed for performance through a series of drawings which facilitated the movement of thought from the head to the page and, eventually, to the stage.

The accompanying photograph from So Below links to a webpage from the author’s website including more information about, and photos from, this duet project.

This duet explores a moment of pause, the space between two stutters and as time stops and the world grows small around them they find a multitude encased in this interval. With a combination of gravity and lightness two people inhabit a carefully constructed twilight of mounding earth and falling water intermingled with the comic grace of a time between world wars.

So Below is a Haranczak/Navarre performance duet by Gerard Bell & Karen Christopher; lighting design by Martin Langthorne. So Below forms part of The Difference Between Home and Poem: a duet series. Each project in the series is jointly made, directed and performed by Karen Christopher and another artist.

Let’s look at the drawing

video credit: Andrea Milde

the arc or totality: a programme note to coax the unfamiliar viewer is a section describing the use of a diagrammatic tool for displaying associations between discrete elements in the body of a performance work. When showing non-narrative or collage-like narrative material to audiences unfamiliar with such performance one is often faced with a problem of how to facilitate understanding among possibly resistant audience members. Long paragraphs of description can be further distancing for those people and may also undermine the point of keeping narratives loose, which is to say, open to individual interpretation.

The video by Tara Morris embedded here is a 5-minute video interview with the author at the time of making (with students at the Claremont Colleges in California) the performance work Free as Air in 2013 for which a drawing was made to include as a programme note. This is the drawing used as an example in the text.

Adam Levy Photography 2012.

the path on the floor: an aide-mémoire in service of composing Control Signal with Sophie Grodin is a section describing the way a drawing serves as an aid to bringing material back to life after a pause in a making process.

As Sophie Grodin and I were making the performance duet Control Signal there were often gaps of more than a month between working sessions. Notes on material that rely solely on words can be cumbersome when it comes to describing specifics of movement. Drawings of various kinds describe the different parameters of our movements through space and facilitate our recollection of previously composed work.

This video clip is taken from video documentation of a day in the studio during the making of Control Signal was captured and selected by linguist Andrea Milde, who studies spoken communication between theatre makers, actors and directors, in order to analyse types of spoken artistic discourse. It captures the moment on a first day back at work following time off from the piece when we had to consult our notes in order to settle confusion over a walking pattern we were to trying to remember.