Monika Błaszczak and Rotem Sherman

Collaboration Diary

 

 

Y O U R     J O U R N E Y

 

Describe your journey of working on the piece. What kind of issues came up in your life?

 

M: The journey was long. It was for sure the longest time I’ve spent on making a piece (even though the way it started was not so much about making a piece but rather exploring an idea, as well as there were a couple of try-out pieces, which were very useful for understanding what we’re looking for). I guess this work was somehow accompanying me in my general journey here and now, during my BA at Laban and during my London experience. So this piece was a bit like a strong support, like something I can rest on and reassure myself, and a space for reflection: on what is happening at the moment, how do I feel about it, where am I. This piece was a place to meet myself, and definitely, to meet the others in whom I could also kind of recognize myself – by seeing that we all struggle with the same stuff, that we all miss similar things, etc. This piece gave me a sense of stability and groundness, but also because it was constantly changing and evolving, it continued to surprise me and nourish me, challenge me, pushes me to discover more and more in what we chose to explore and to not give up. As I was battling with myself and with my past and with my expectations, this work enabled me to look beyond it and become less concerned with this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

R: It’s a bit like we went on this roller-coaster when we first started working together, and it’s been going ever since - we’re still on it, riding day and night. This work has become a huge part of my life. I live with it and think about it a lot, and even if I think of something else, it’s always somewhere in the back of my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a strong creative experience in the past. Everything else seems to link to it somehow, and I’m constantly looking for links to it in stuff I read, hear, listen to or watch. Perhaps it’s because the work is about us, our identities and our personal perception of reality- these are all themes that are present within us anyway. So naturally, I’ve had ups and downs mainly with myself along this journey. I guess the main circle I found myself struggling with was that circle of doubting myself and feeling lost. Once that circle takes over, I start feeling clumsy, unable to express my thoughts clearly, worrying that my English isn’t good enough, and that I’m not good enough. That circle often draws me into another circle: the circle of being overwhelmed, in which I can’t seem to decide about anything. But this is a baggage of fears I carry with me into almost every room I walk in. These are all inner loops of voices and discussions that aren’t related to our work necessarily. It was always there in me, ever since I can remember myself growing up. But once I manage to let these go, when I choose to open my eyes and step out of my body, I suddenly start noticing things and feeling inspired, which then makes me feel special and worthy. In this sense, this journey was constantly reminding me who I am, what is important to me and what I’m interested in. 

I feel fortunate that we had the privilege to spend a long time just in searching, without feeling we must rush into decisions. That felt like a very healthy process, and thanks to that, at some point it felt like we went on a very clear path which led us almost naturally to where we are now. I now realize more and more how important it is to keep visiting that searching mode, even though we are now in the last cosmetic stages of refining the piece - when you think you already have answers, that’s when you should think of a new question to ask yourself. It’s a big challenge, to keep finding a reason, staying playful, digging deeper, looking from a different perspective. But if you forget doing that, it’s starting to get mechanical and boring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you changed during the process? Describe your ‘circles’ before and after: do you remember how you were before start working on the piece? What kind of circles (of thoughts, concerns, stories) were you walking in? Describe yourself today. Which circles are you walking in now? 

 

R: I feel like I’ve grown a lot. Working with Monika and the dancers made me meet myself in new surprising places I didn’t know exist. The dialogue with Monika changed the way I think of dance, and extended the possibilities I see in it. It helped me understand better where the movement comes from. It sharpened my ideas of the kind of things I’m interested in and the kind of processes I’m looking to be part of. 

I think I’ve started feeling more present since we started working on this piece. I have a better sense of what helps me to be present. I still have a long way to go, but that’s what I’m aiming for in everything I do. Understanding that is also part of my growing process. 

 

M: I think I’ve changed hugely. It’s hard to even connect to the way of thinking I had in the beginning of this process. I guess I was much more interested in feelings and emotions which today appear to me as something I don’t necessarily want to focus my attention on – either in my personal life or in the artistic work. This is not to say that I don’t want to care about mine or somebody else’s emotions or that I want to make purely formal/conceptual work and nothing else. From the choreographic point of view, I don’t think it is possible to work with emotions as such in the creative process – I mean, they are always there, but you can never programme to feel this or that way, or to not feel at all, or to feel something at least. Yes, emotions are always there, but they are just states, which we don’t have to be slaves of. You cannot decide upon your emotions but you can decide upon what your body is doing – and this is something I am more interested in at the moment. 

In general, I feel like I want to go into this direction of cutting of my past, my sentiment, my regrets, my romanticism, and to get rid of the box with special souvenirs and treasures of memories. I don’t want to carry history with me everywhere. The narrative is always a circle. Just because I don’t want to keep walking in certain circles: the circle of trying to escape my fears for example, or the circle of trying to get closer to what my ambition is presenting to me as the perfect desired place to be. Even though I think we are walking in circles, I think that repetition is not about producing sameness, but rather difference (sure, this is Deleuze). So every circle is actually different from the other one and they are not exchangeable. And also, I believe there is a way of transforming oneself, perhaps into something one desires to become. So I do believe that it’s not as tragic as it may look like, this walking in circles. It’s transformational. Especially when you start walking the other direction. When you start unlearning, unmaking, pursuing the politics of forgetting, throwing away the treasures you kept as the most precious ones. I want to be less, reduce, shrink, dissolve, and become limitless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What have you learned from this process? What insights do you take with you? 

 

M: Quite a lot of things but for sure, the nice creative process requires reasonable amounts of planning and letting things happen. It’s good to challenge people you are working with, then they can challenge you. When you think you’re doing bullshit, you don’t know what you’re doing, you hate this work, stay there. To be lost is to find yourself in the place which is real: the place of artistic freedom and its despair, and the place of unknowing (we should all be in this place as often as possible). You can always take things to the extreme even more, when you think you’re radical, you probably haven’t even started. It’s good to give things time to grow. Be honest with your collaborator. Perhaps don’t interpret your own work, especially not before you have actually made it. Working with your friends is very beautiful, but very challenging at the same time. 

 

R: At some point, I started noticing that whenever I get ‘down’, I become very frustrated and exhausted, usually as an automatic reaction to the external pressure of producing something coherent. But then, what almost always comes next is a moment of realization, a moment of discovering something new, and that moment is a sheer joy. I want to be able to learn how to enjoy this stage of not-knowing in the same way, without feeling there’s something wrong in me. I would like to be able to learn to except this place and devote to it. To be in search and see what happens. To be playful and able to get excited by it and not to be scared or stressed by it. In other words, instead of trying to arrive somewhere, try enjoying the journey. Make an effort to find my interest along the way. Put time to see what I haven’t noticed yet, use it to learn. In retrospect, I think that in this process we let ourselves spend a long time there, which at times felt very intense and difficult, but it was valuable for the work and we learned a lot from it. 

It also accrued to me that when working in the studio, we’re dealing with the art of reduction, similarly to poetry or sculpturing, from a lump of matter we reduce, and subtract, and remove more and more until we touch something very bare and real.

 

T H E    C O L L A B O R A T I V E   P R O C E S S 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What was your first impression of each other? Describe the first steps of the collaboration. Do you remember what you felt in the beginning? What were your expectations and how were they met with reality?

 

M: I do remember meeting Rotem very very well, it was in this lovely Trinity Laban welcoming event for the beginning of the academic year. She appeared to me as a very beautiful person, very grounded but also curious about the world, full of ideas and life juices, very intelligent and smart. Also for me she was always this girl who is actually older than me a good couple of years and actually know more about life and stuff. So I always had a bit of this thing of listening to her as to an older sister (which I don’t have) but not in a patronizing way. It’s also because she actually really cared for me and that was a lot. What she was doing with us in the very beginning was like a revelation for me. I completely didn’t expect that I will meet somebody like her who would like to come to the studio and watch us doing our strange things and then share her talent with us. I would never expect that suddenly there will be another person who brings such great ideas into the room and makes a lot of effort to enrich the space with another level – the sound. And I cannot even say if my expectations were met because it became much more than what I expected. Not only in terms of how much the piece has grown but also how connected I began to feel to Rotem, how important she became for me.

 

R: We were both performing in this beginning of the year performance at Laban. Just before I went on stage to

perform my piano piece, I saw the end of Monika’s performance (a duet with another dancer) and immediately

felt a connection to the way she moved. She appeared to me as an amazing, beautiful, intelligent dancer.

I can’t remember who initiated the conversation afterward but I do remember I was charmed by this young woman.

We had a short chat about working with text. I was impressed when she later contacted me and invited me to join

her session. Then when I got to that first session I fell in love a little bit: I was highly impressed by the process

of Monika’s work, the way she led that session, her maturity, her sensitivity. Also the dancers and the level

of intimacy that was in that studio left a very strong impression on me. 

I was thrilled it all happened and even awed from the way such a big thing can happen only thanks to a small talk.

I knew already from the beginning it was going to be big for me…. and I wasn’t wrong. Once Monika started sending

me the poems she edited out of the dancers’ texts, it completely blew my mind and I realized she’s actually a real poet.

I thought there was something extraordinary in these poems, it was exactly the kind of texts I was looking for.

So it felt quite cosmic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What does this collaboration mean to you?

 

R: It means the world to me. This is the most intense experience I’ve had in London. The processes it triggered within myself, the music it made me write, the lessons I’ve learned from Monika and the dancers. Monika is a great gift in my life. We had a lot of sisterhood moments, a lot of discovery moments together. I feel like she’s confronting me with the person I am – making me feel one, helping me focus. She is a huge inspiration who makes me want to be alive.

M: It’s a lot of things, but it’s definitely a sisterhood I would say. A found sister. I just so much appreciate everything Rotem shared with me, everything I learned from her, all her beautiful work. My life here would be very different without meeting her at this event in September!

 

What is the difference between your experience of working on your own and working in collaboration? did you have similar collaborations in the past?

 

M: No, I didn’t have such collaborations in the past – because here I feel we managed to respect each other’s opinion and make it matter equally, so that it really felt like we are making decisions together, even though looking at the work from different points of view. What is so beautiful about working in collaboration is this never-ending attempt to reach out of yourself, further towards what the other is bringing, being curious and flexible and ready to drive towards new directions. And you can also be very strong together deciding on one direction to drive towards. It’s great that in a moment of doubt you can turn to the other and share your concerns, ask for some support. And with Rotem I was always sure she will be there, in any situation. 

 

R: I find it so much nicer to work with someone who cares about the project the same way as you. If it’s more than one person as it was in our case - that’s even better. When I work alone I easily fall into my old loops and circles of doubting myself (described above), and it is a challenging struggle to get past that circle and release from it. I also never felt fully comfortable with that experience of writing a piece and then give it to a performer/s. There’s something very isolated, lonely and artificial in this experience. It’s interesting that dancers don’t really know this kind of experience (unless they create a solo piece for themselves), because they usually work together in the studio and creating in real time. They’re used to this type of searching mode, and I feel as musicians we have a lot to learn from them in that sense. I learned that I’m much more drawn to that type of work, in long collaborations, in intimate groups, having enough time to experiment and play. 

In the collaboration with Monika, her reflections and perspective saved me from myself. 

In these moments of feeling like I have no idea what I was doing, working with Monika was such a relief. To find out she felt the same as me sometimes, and to be balanced by her was a big advantage. There’s something liberating in having someone to share all your feelings, concerns, thoughts and ideas and not having to live with them alone. 

 

Did it influence other aspects of your life/other works you have been working on at the same time? 

 

M: Definitely. To be honest, while working on this piece, I started to really consider all what I’m doing as one big work. So there was no separation between the pieces, or not even a separation between life and work. I think what I’m trying to achieve is a sense of flow with all of this. All the discoveries we made have had an impact on everything I was doing throughout the year. 

 

R: Absolutely. It made me feel good about myself and my life. I had a very positive year and most of it was thanks to this process. Working on this project not only gave me energies for other projects I was working on but it also helped me focusing more and being precise with the choices and decisions I have made. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T H E    P I E C E

 

What do you think of the result? How do you feel about it? 

 

M: I think it’s a result of a long walk, a long search and it feels like there is a kind of a drawing, or a map of what has happened. There is a special connection between the girls, there are the texts which remember us from few months before, there is Rotem’s voice and my eye. It’s all what we’ve got. I feel like the work is simple but at the same time very complex, or rather: there is a lot of content. 

In a way, I feel like this work is about putting a dot after a long, long sentence. It’s been a walk, and now we only need a dot (that’s why all these circles). I really think that the real value is in what we’ve done in (and outside of) the studio. The performance is for me just about sharing with people the fact that something like this has happened, that this crazy group was meeting regularly for a year and established something special between them. And maybe this is what’s the most important about the work?

 

R: I love the result. I feel very proud and excited about it. I’m Curious to see how people will respond to it.

 

What do you reckon this work is trying to do? 

 

R: Above all it’s about circles. The circles of life and the private circles each of us deal with. This issue came up again and again in my conversations with Monika, in the texts written by the dancers and in our work in the studio. We talked about how in life we’re moving in circles all the time. As Monika mentioned, It’s actually spiral circles, because it’s never the same, each time is different.

I think for me, this work is also about the attempts, the desire and the journey towards presence (which is another type of circle). It’s also a feminine work in its essence, in the sense that it's celebrating the feminine journey; the secret, mysterious, hidden, repressed journey; the baggage of childhood, identity and lack of confidence, the complex relationships we have with ourselves and with our bodies; but it also celebrates the beauty, the honesty, the courage, the love, the friendship and the amazing women power. It’s interesting that Monika and I have 11 years between us, and yet so many points within our own circles intersect. Working together allowed us to look at our personal journeys from different points of view, side by side, comparing them and discovering how similar they are. 

 

M: I think it’s just trying to invite people on a journey, to something they may recognize or not, something they may learn from or not, have a good time with or not. I think it’s about sharing space and time with people who for some reason want to come and have a look at us doing something. And we will share our piece with them.

 

What do you hope it will do?

 

M: To be most honest, I hope the girls will feel good performing it. I hope they will get a chance to perform it in a way that satisfies them, and that they will be able to open themselves for the gaze and curiosity of the looking eyes. If this will happen, I think the audience will be able to see these beautiful creatures in their glory, and that’s all what I think is needed.

 

R: I feel like we ended up with a simplified version, a thin layer which makes a lot of sense to us. Underneath this layer lies all the process we’ve had, which contains many different versions of similar ideas. I hope some of it will come through and project to the outside, but I don’t expect the audience to get all those things we were thinking about. I hope it will provoke a feeling of participation, of sharing something very delicate and personal.

 

What is your favorite moment in the work?

 

M: I think it’s the moment of being completely close to each other in a clump. Somehow it really moves me every time. And it’s the combination of sound, stillness, their skin and hands, their backs and knees – it all just makes this moment like something infinite, something which I don’t really know how to explain.

 

R: I love the moment where the dancers come out of the clump in the middle of the space. They always appear to me in that moment as if they just woke up from a dream, in which they went through some sort of transformation. I find this moment very tender and moving. 

 

What are your influences? Which artists’ work do you think this work corresponds to?

Which references did you find during the process?

 

M: Because of our Colab and because of what I’ve been writing about, I have to first mention Yvonne Rainer,

I think she was actually interested in similar things as we are. Generally, I started looking deeper into feminist

discourses and I found a lot of relevance to what we were doing. 

 

In terms of the context that I think our piece could be placed from a choreographic point of view,

I’d like to mention following authors:

• Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti for their feminist choreographic acts of resistance, explorations of otherness (Forti also for her interest in animals)

• Dimitris Papaioannou – for the simplicity of the images created on stage, the elegance of the body (wearing black), the idea of a body becoming a sculpture/a piece of art, the idea of becoming an image, strong interest in sexuality

• Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion – for how they collaborate together, challenging each other, working very closely, inviting each other to challenge their habits and the setting they are used to 7because of their art discipline etc.

• Pina Bausch (always) – for her interest in people, looking at those who are very close to her and trying to understand what is happening in that person (and her interest in using words on stage)

• Marina Abramovic and Ulay – for their walk on the Great Wall in China

• Jerome Bel – for his investigation in language, movement, body, significance

• Anne Teresa De Keersmeaker – for her pieces for only women, very feminine kind of movement, her way of closely working with the music

• Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar – their collaboration is built upon a huge admiration to the work of one another, and the desire to give the other what is the most beautiful; interest in love and sexuality, partying, overcoming one’s own boundaries, femininity

 

From a philosophical perspective I would like to point out these writers as ones who strongly influenced me:

• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – especially “A Thousand Plateaus”, and concepts such as becoming-animal, becoming-intense, becoming-woman, line of flight, singularity, wolves being pack, rhizome, etc.

• Nietzsche, especially “Zarathustra” and “The Birth of Tragedy”: especially the will to power, going beyond oneself, Ubermensch, the kind of dark, mad side of dancing and singing (and drinking)

• Michel Foucault, especially “History of Sexuality” and “History of Madness” (mass hysteria’s name came from this inspiration) and “The Lost Interview”

• Jacques Derrida and everything he talks about writing. The method of writing the dance that we established in our sessions came very much from an inspiration from this (+ the improvised film “Ghost Dance”)

• “Metaphors We Live By” Georg Lakoff and Mark Johnson who speak about how what we say we embody, how words play a huge part of who we are and what is the physical experience of our existence, and how the power of metaphors is impossible to be escaped from

• Feminist writing, writings on the feminine experience of the body – writings on the pressure from the society on the feminine bodies: Iris Marion Young, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, Virginia Woolf

• Andre Lepecki and his emphasis put on choreography being “writing of dance”: especially “Exhausting Dance”

From the visual perspective, work of the following artists inspired me while creating this work (I’ve been interested how it would be possible to create a portrait in dance or create a sculpture out of a body): Alberto Giacometti, Modigliani, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo

 

R: As I mentioned earlier, since every artwork I was engaged with along the process somehow linked to our work, I’m going to put here a mixture of stuff. Despite the wide diversity of styles and genres of these works, it seems to me all the following references have something in common: they all bridge between different worlds of sound/language, between inner and external experiences, they all give special attention for time, and they all speak in a very personal, poetic tone.

 

It’s worth mentioning here first the poet Wislawa Szymborska, who both me and Monika love and cherish. Her poem ‘Nothing twice’ express beautifully this idea of ever-changing landscapes, even when we think something repeats, it’s really an illusion, since it’s impossible to actually witness any identical repetition in life. When we observe nature as well as when we interact, move our bodies or generate sounds in space. In her Nobel lecture, Szymborska talks about the importance of asking questions and admitting to yourself and to others that you don’t know. To acknowledge one’s ignorance and disability to know everything. To be humble.

I would also like to point out Emily Dickinson and her delicate, unique gaze on humanity.

Then as Monika mentioned there are feminist heroes such as Virginia Woolf, who talks about the importance of a room of one's own - the physical and spiritual space to be able to contemplate and think in order to be creative. I feel we’ve implemented that idea mostly in our Colab. That’s what it was for me- this week of going into the studio every morning and leaving in the evening. Just that simple practice and existence of a fixed space automatically stimulates the creative process.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's book "We Should All Be Feminist" refreshed my reflection of my identity as a woman, acknowledging my privileges as well as my weaknesses. It encouraged me to keep exploring these (what our society call) 'feminine' domains of delicate, intricate worlds of feelings.

Laurie Anderson is a big influence, in particular her multidisciplinary scope, her creative approaches to working with text, and her as a thinker in general. 

In an interview for The Creative Independent, she talks about virtual reality and our perception of reality, about making art in the Trump era, the stories we tell ourselves and the creative choices we make on what we should create and what should it be about. She also talks about creative blocks and creative process, as well as (like Woolf and Szymborska) the importance of making the time and space to work on your art regularly, excepting it will involve a lot of unknowing and uncertainty. I found the following quote especially inspiring:

 

I think that anytime you try to get a message or think, “What is that thing supposed to do?” you’re not working with the materials that are there… sometimes you force them to do things that they can’t do. They just can’t talk to you in that way. If you’re a sculptor, you’ll find that you hit stuff too hard and it’s in pieces on the floor. It doesn’t work.

 

In her article Tonality and atonality in the psychic space, the Israeli psychoanalytic and poet Dana Amir parallels the musical terms to areas in our emotional scope. She describes tonality as a situation of familiarity and orientation, that generates a feeling of a clear center; a home. Atonality, on the other hand, is a situation that challenges the familiar syntax principles and creates an anomaly, inherent tension and contradictions; undomestic, ambivalent environment, which distances us from a harmonic, immediate structure solution. Amir claims the relations between these two areas determines the ratio between motion and fixation: the tonal areas may draw us to fixation whereas (ideally) the a-tonal areas might help us break through and undermine old hierarchies, allowing thickening of our emotional texture. These a-tonal areas create constant tension; however, they lead to constant movement of search. This is exactly what I feel we’ve been doing in our own research, and it links well to the rest of the references mentioned about that value of spending time in that unfamiliar environment, to arrive at meaningful places... Dana Amir points on these delicate nuances and motions inside us in such lyrical language, I find her ideas and way of expression very inspiring. I think this article articulates beautifully these tensions we were interested in, and personally, it enriched my perception of the dancers in the space, and that journey they’re doing from the edges of the room to the center, and back. 

 

Another inspiring interview I found in The Creative Independent was with Richard Hell (writer and musician) about collaborations. Since I read it in an early stage of our collaboration, it helped me notice and appreciate the advantages of it. I highly identify with the parallelization he’s making here between collaboration and working with a set of rules/form. I feel our collaboration provided me with a very clear framework in which even when we didn’t know what we were doing, we had a sense of where we are. Also, my work on the portraits was very much about working with one limitation in order to find new ways of expression.

 

To be that intimately involved with how somebody else’s mind works in the same arena as you’re in, and that you’re bouncing off of each other in that way, is just freeing and inspiring.

Collaboration frees you from that because it’s more like you’re constructing something with these given stimuli. (…) It’s the work itself that matters, rather than your being. In a way, it’s like the advantages of having a constraining form, which artists have recognized forever. A sonnet’s a 14 line poem with a certain structure of statements and resolutions and a rhyme scheme—and there are much more complex and artificial forms than sonnets—and, kind of counter-intuitively, the rules can free the writer, because having those rules can get the artist out of his or her own habitual reflexive ways of thinking and writing, and while you’re focusing on the form’s criteria a fresher poem can inhabit the lines you’re crafting. Collaboration can work the same way.

 

Oliver Sacks' book Musicophiliaa, inspired me to explore my personal experience of the way music affects my brain and the way my brain affects my experience of music. This book tells phenomenal stories about the music and the brain, by sharing incredible stories of Sacks' patients over the years. One of the stories (in chapter 15) is about the musicologist and musician Clive Wearing who lost his memory completely, but still remembered how to play music (without knowing he’s able to do so). In our Colab, we dealt a lot with questions about memory and trying to imagine what would it be like to live with no memory. We were wondering if we would then be closer to animals, and how would that change our sense of presence and connection with nature. I feel that contemplation is very much present in the final work. 

 

In his book Music and the Mind, Anthony Storr points out that music functions in all societies as a social, collective activity of bringing people together. People sing and dance together in all cultures. In ancient tribes, 100,000 years ago, they used to do that around the fire, whereas today, when we have a special status of ‘musicians’- professional composers and performers, all the rest become passive listeners. We need to go to a concert, church, or a music festival in order to experience music as a collective, social activity. Usually in situations such as this, what creates the sense of participation is the element of the rhythm, which makes the listening active, and sync the brains and hearts. 

I had this idea in my mind when I was thinking of using ceremonial elements such as letting the dancers sing some bits of the songs, trying to create a sensation of participation in something that is communal, bigger than just one performer, and belongs to everyone.

 

In terms of music, there are a few artists whom I listened to a lot this year, as I found a lot of inspiration in their work: 

For the first time, I’ve listened to the album 'Anthology 3' by The Beatles, which captures the unique levels of intimacy, freedom and fun they used to have in the studio while working on new songs. Listening to this album, particularly to tracks such as ‘Happiness is a warm gun’, where John repeats two lines over and over, as if searching for a way out; or ‘She came in through the bathroom window’, wherein the end of this track Paul picks one of the spontaneous ideas from the take they just did and continues it by singing - for me was an important reminder that making music must come from playfulness, and how special it is to be able to be playful and inventive together with your collaborators. 

Meredith Monk, her approach to the voice as ‘dancing voice’ and her work with movement, her use of repetition and the ceremonial elements in her composition, particularly the opera epic 'Vessel Suite' (1971), 'Turtle Dreams' (1983) and her album ‘Songs of Ascension’ (2011).

Lhasa de Sela, particularly the song ‘I’m going in’ live performance in 2006. There's something about her presence in that performance that really captured me, very bare and moving. Especially when she makes these small mistakes yet doesn't let it take her out of the zone.

Nicolas Jaar (particularly the albums ‘Space is only noise’ (2011) and ‘Sirens’ (2016)) I find the way he structures his albums as one long piece deeply inspiring, as he actually takes the listener on a progressive journey. His sound worlds and samples are also very rich and inspiring.  

 

Some examples of interesting pieces I found while looking for special use of text in contemporary pieces of music:

Herbert Brun- Futility (1964), Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano (2009), Frank Zappa - The Dangerous Kitchen (1983), Gozo Yoshimasu & Kukangenadi- live performance at Café Oto.

 

T H E   F U T U R E 

 

How do you imagine the future of the piece? What do you want to do with it, how do you want to develop it?

 

R: I really hope we’ll manage to find more opportunities to showcase this work in the near and far future. I think this work is quite inventive in the way we build the relations between the music and the dance. Rather than having two separate art forms that one serves the other, we created one creature with different appearances, that contains the same DNA: the text. Even though most of it is hidden by different manipulations, the memory of the words and the feeling of it, it’s all there. I was thinking it could be nice to develop this work by creating a series of versions of it, each with different texts. It could then become a regular event of some kind of ceremonial gathering, that happens maybe every few months.

 

M: Perhaps we should try and apply to places and festivals, who knows. It might be a good starting point for something else as well. I would like to also keep working on the piece, perhaps there are things that could work differently we could reconsider. It might be also great to present the piece in different spaces and see how it works in them, how it changes according to its surroundings (and perhaps its audiences).

 

How do you imagine the future of the collaboration? What are your thoughts about the future that’s coming up in the next months but also the furthest future?

 

M: Depending on what Rotem decides to do, I would love to find a way of keeping working together. Maybe we could even find a way to work when Rotem is in Israel, keeping the conversation going. As it comes to the further future, I am real saying that I can imagine it being even a life-long collaboration. There is so much we can do together. Build, dream, imagine, try, search, challenge, ask, sing and dance. It’s never-ending. And we can grow together with it and from it. The idea of a place in the desert – I do remember about it!

 

R: I believe our collaboration will continue naturally as part of our growing friendship. We should definitely make room for this to happen in our lives after I go back to Israel. I hope we’ll manage to find a way to keep in touch, maybe by writing letters to each other! That could be quite nice actually

 

What are you dreaming about that might not be connected to the work that we were doing but what we could realize in the future?

 

M: I am dreaming of theatres that haven’t happened yet. Of art that is as much art as it is nature and technology and religion. I would like to work very hard to go further beyond what we know today and I want to learn learn learn to understand what is there now in order to be able to break it. We met some beautiful people here, we can push the boundaries to any direction with a team like this. And most of all, I think I just want to keep making an effort to make work with the purpose of understanding the world that I’m living in a little bit better. 

Or maybe, a little bit less?

 

R: My dream is to establish an art center in Israel (maybe in the desert, or somewhere in the north) with a group of my friends. I would like us to have the space to work on our own stuff and also to create beautiful things together.

In general, I’m interested to initiate events and facilitate spaces that will bring people together and allow them to meet- talk- think- dance- create- and get inspired. 

I also dream to be a DJ and organize parties one day.

Hopefully, Monika will be part of all that, or at least some of it.