In conversation with Simon this morning, he asked how dancers might respond to Antarctic texts differently from other texts.
He suggested this question could be the ‘meat’ of my research.
Tomorrow is the last Drawing through Moving workshop for the year – a chance to start exploring that question.
Last week we moved and drew to words from Jack Ward’s 1955 Mawson diary.
Estranged was the animated outcome.
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Tomorrow we will continue with:
The earliest new light comes at two a.m.
making long shallow pools of shadow
and immense streaked slopes of yellow light –
a farmyard pattern on this ever-fallow ice.
Jack Ward, Mawson diary
17 November, 1955
…and then this:
All day long we have been gliding through the Gulf of Suez between two fantastically picturesque and desolate lands: Sinai, a great massif of granite and slashed red sandstone, and the Egyptian coast, at first regular and tabular and then bristling with all sorts of extraordinary peaks, all equally sharp and bare.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s, Letters from a traveler
15 April, 1913
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The two texts describe landscapes changing in different ways.
The first is a landscape emerging with increasing light, with the sun appearing after a long period of darkness.
The second is a panorama – a changing view observed from a moving ship.
Both writers describe the unfamiliar by drawing on what they know about, or have experienced.
The Antarctic text has a more elemental quality achieved through the paradox of ‘ever fallow ice’.
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I recognize ‘tabular’ as a word used to describe Antarctic ice bergs, just calved from the ice shelves.
Jack may have read such works as De Chardin, which may have influenced him.
‘Picturesque’ sounds strange applied to Egypt.
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Can elemental gestures evoke Antarctica?
What is an elemental gesture?
How do we respond to the paradoxical ‘ever fallow farmyard’?
What do people bring to their responses, from their own knowledge and experience?
What can my animation bring to their drawn and moved responses?