Our last project together finishing early this year, Anakatira:Sugbo, was a 5 week dance and art workshop that accumulated in Cebu’s first site-specific performance at the historical site, Fort San Pedro. This project was an intense cultural exchange on many levels where we began to discover enlightening cross over’s between our respective trainings, for example between Laban Movement Analysis and Tai Chi philosophy, or establishing that we are both natural improvisers yet this form has been developed in different disciplines. The 15 young people that we were lucky to get to know brought us much new inspiration (this is an understatement) and their lives created a tapestry so rich and full of textures and feelings about god and life and water pumps and Korean pop videos, Rasta hair-do’s… Ubec is a city that still (maybe not for long), has wonderful hand painted advertisements, highly individually decorated jeepneys, it’s a third world that’s in transition in the name of progress and all that it comes with. Walking to visit squatter houses on stilts becomes an adventure course, if you fall into the rubbish bellow you will be made a mockery so better be cautious, mind your step. As the team progressed and opened up they began to perform and bubble with ideas that were intuitive and sophisticated, and at the same time a great passing to us of their Filipino culture and individual life stories. We both left Cebu with the confirmation that improvisation as a tool and the development of creativity is so powerfully positive and vice versa, positively powerful.
Now both based in Hong Kong, I (Jensen) relocated from the mess I had become in London. John (coming to the end of a long line of free-lance projects) and I have decided to continue developing our joint work in education but taking a more specific focus: videodance! (or ‘dance for screen’ as some term it). Our personal practices naturally meets in this genre, and as a way for us to do further research and develop ideas/concepts/techniques, we will start a course for 6 Form level students at West Island School, as well as run a free (!) summer workshop for HK Youth Arts Festival (August 1st 2010). The interaction we will have with these young students is not only a way to spread this genre on a grass roots level but we hope they will become collaborators and team players in our experiments and will help feed this new direction. As we go we will upload and share some sketches and thoughts here.
