First session with Kuldip Singh Barmi

Physical session in studio, alone and then with Kuldip. So good to be working with others. I am working on a piece where cultural languages are multiple, and also felt so happy to be working with movement languages again, which feel like a familiar, enjoyable place to be.  Joyful. I love words and I get bored with words. Sometimes your body says it more directly. 

 I returned to the picture of Klara my grandmother and Mima her daughter, my mother. What emerged again from the physical work, was a zoom in on their holding hands. An action both loving and restraining. This develops on the previous work, with speaking, writing and moving done with Chris. It is reassuring that working on something over time releases these kinds of tiny knowns, recognitions – something you were looking for and did not know what it was, especially at the start of a process when you so often feel like you are doodling in the unknown. Sometimes it feels like devising is listening to the work you have just made, closely, to see what it is trying to communicate – not the other way round.

And I have music to work with…!

Andy Moor is working on this project with me. He is a guitarist, earlier on with the avant garde punk band The Dog Faced Hermans and now The Ex, and also works both solo and with collaborators like DJ Rupture, Yannis Kyriakides and many others. I asked him to take The Dog Faced Hermans (Scottish punk band circa late 1980’s) version of Bella Ciao apart and he has sent me rough tracks, with enhanced bass, repeated riffs, background trumpet and backward trumpet. And jerky loops. 

Kuldip watched me dance to one of these tracks of Bella Ciao and gave me some words – ‘off balance’ which is spot on. And punk. Which is also spot on. And we also worked with the Klara/Mima photo and Auntie Jo Jo’s duck face – a solo duet and some fast stepping. And more…..

I am happy to have homework, set by both of us, for our next meet up.  Which is to create a score, meaning the outlines of an improvised dance, for the full Bella Ciao dance.