a conversation between choreograph.net and fitzgerald & stapleton, on the occasion of the publication of their final commissioned score, MINE

from their website: “Language plays an integral role in the values and practices of Fitzgerald & Stapleton. The company’s choreographic process is rooted in the use of language to animate and direct the performer’s experience on stage and to celebrate the virtuosity of the body’s ability to perceive itself in relation to the unique and immediate physical and choreographic environments of each performance.

A central aim of Fitzgerald & Stapleton is the expansion of the language within which choreography and dance performance represent themselves. This commission from Daghdha Dance Company and choreograph.net enables the company to expand the stage of their writing into a third space where reader, choreographer, audience and performer can propose, exchange and debate current concerns in relation to the company’s work.”

…beautiful, honest, graceful, funny and delicate: during the performance of Dog of All Creation i felt myself growing extra-spectral antenna, sensing a kind of natural presence, a hidden dimension bleeding in… mystery… could you tell me a little of the body that you write your scores for, does it inhabit or emerge from or yearn toward those extra dimensions i felt?

I aim to inhabit a place of peace and fulfillment, experiencing the sensation of complete trust in my whole body’s ability, and noticing the infinite possibilities available to me each and every moment. I want to train myself to constantly relearn everything for the first time and be excited by life. This is not always something I experience when I am caught up in the daily drag, running for the bus or chatting with friends about people we fancy… in that place I exercise repetitive thinking, daydreaming, habit and familiarity in a lazy mission to overcome boredom. I live in my head – projecting my thoughts and energy towards past and future.

I experience my body as an energetic transformer – I am humbled by its ability to heal, to create, to dream and to sense. My body’s capacity for sensitivity fascinates me and lends itself to the feeling of fascination – it seems that the more energy I put into sensing being the more there is to sense.

If I choose to practice this ever available sense of awareness my entire life becomes a performance, and I can exist in continuous experimentation, removing any separation between my art and my life.

In 2004 I participated in the Solo Performance Commissioning Project with Deborah Hay. She coached me in developing my adaptation of a solo dance called “The Ridge” The dance involved asking the question – “What if every cell in my body has the potential to perceive the uniqueness and originality of all that there is”. Before I could publicly perform the solo I had to dance “The Ridge” every day, five days a week for three months.

During those three months I gained many insights into my relationship with dance, my body and performance and those insights have been the basis for much of the work Stapleton and I do with our company. I formed an impression of my body as being like an energetic field capable of endless transformation. I began to realise that approaching “The Ridge” with expectations about how I would deal with its challenges obstructed my ability to tap into the richness of my body’s own resourcefulness and creativity. Gradually I began to draw together threads out of my experience which I could weave into creating my own dance-language and I began to become fascinated at the way language and sense interact in my own life.

what is made possible for/in a room full of people by the naked presence of the dancer?

We are all unique. We should be encouraged to experience peace with our bodies and to embrace our individuality. The society we live in offers us a narrow definition of how we should relate to our bodies. It takes adoration away from ourselves and instead projects it towards manufactured images of fleeting idols, be they religious figures or pop singers. The naked form, and speaking from a woman’s perspective the female naked form, is continuously labeled as a passive and pornographically sexualized object for men. We perform our work naked in opposition to this epidemic. The presentation of nudity in a non erotic way can be shocking. It is the not the norm. Two naked women together adds another level of expectation, and again three naked women and one man and so on.. We have received criticism online by a man who was highly offended by our lack of technical prowess and ‘beauty’ so much so that he accused us of having “no shame”. We also receive ongoing emails from a man offering us money to “dance naked to hip hop in high heels” after he watched our you-tube video of the Judson Church performance. I feel that offering the naked presence of the dancer in the way we perform challenges the audience to experience the body in a non erotic way. It allows them to notice the infinitesimally small details of the body as it interacts with its environment. It raises awareness about the social and political restrictions placed on the body. The performance – and by performance this includes daily life – is a place to challenge these restrictions.

The naked body is also reflective of the society we live in the sense that it is a costume in itself. When the figure is stripped back other aesthetic choices can be made more explicit for example if the body has been altered in any way in response to societal ideals and trends – is the body hair shaved? Is the hair dyed? Is there make up or fake tan? My art form is a means to challenge these social and political issues.

I aim to experience full confidence in and respect for my body, noticing it as being enough, and a place of wonder. I do not want to seek validation or adoration from those outside of myself, so that if I do choose to be in relationship to something or someone else, my practice of relationship begins with me being fully present. In this way emotional or sexual connotations do not take precedence and dull sensation.

exaltation, adoration, and mystery all play a part in your works; traces of religion litter the dancefloor and the texts; there is a classical biblical dimension to nude bodies. i don’t want to talk about religion, though, so much as the sacred. is there an opening deliberately made for the sacred to enter the space of your performances? can you describe the aperture by which it enters?

The body is the matrix in which language comes alive – I’m fascinated with language and experience – how language can frame an experience in time and how we sensually experience time. The body we write our scores for is one which is constantly channeling information about the experience of being matter in a shifting matrix – a body which knows itself to be impermanent.

To be like water
as light quietly breaks
on the sea’s shifting skin
Emma Fitzgerald – Poems 2009

The work that we do is a worship of the self and of life. It provides the performer with the sensation of another dimension that is beyond or different to the mundane. It feels almost divine in a sense that it allows me to experience connectedness with everything, and provides me with confidence that everything is happening as it should. You can feel the buzz of the environment around you, appreciate the simple feeling of the body as it feels each and every moment anew. It is an honouring of the full potential of the body. This state continuously sustains my interest in pure existence. I feel like my energy is in perfect harmony with all that is.

It is diminishing the role of religion and the new religion –consumerism– in my life.

The challenge of simply feeding adoration into yourself, holding your body sacred and relishing in the possibility of your own existence, is the means by which the sacred enters the work.

I had a dream once where I was a section of black guttering – just a section – about a foot long and a thick stream of gurgling, sparkling rainwater flowed through me. When I awoke I felt really peaceful.

watching your dance works i experience a clear tension between the impenetrability of the world created onstage – strange communications, relations and relationships unfold that we the audience are not given reason or means to understand – and the vulnerability and directness of your own presence – the sense that there is something you honestly wish to disclose to us. are you actually hiding inside the work, and if not you, what is?

For many years running parallel with my work as a dancer was my work on the tills of various supermarkets. I spent hours day after day negotiating the same routine – standing or sitting in a small enclosed space turning and moving barcodes over lasers and responding to that efficient electronic beep – occasional diversion was provided by weighing loose fruit and vegetables. I struggled often with a dragging sense of being edited out of people’s vision while handling their food and money. People were choosing what to put into their bodies and I was passing those choices through my hands. I looked at what people were buying and I looked at the people themselves. It felt intimate. I was reminded again and again of the vulnerability of the corporeal.

Leisure centres and hospitals give me the same feeling. We are vulnerable creatures living in soft tissue. At this point in my life working as a choreographer and dancer I have the joy and privilege of being able to actively enjoy great respect for my body but it hasn’t always been like that for me – and even nowadays in order to survive the world I live in – to pay rent, buy food, buy clothes, get from home to work, take care of my pets and negotiate sharing the world with other people I don’t always find time to tune into my body on a level which acknowledges the immense activity which is going on to keep me alive. Choreography and performance are a space where I can actively acknowledge the mystery of being and sometimes I feel like the prodigal son because whenever I re-engage in that level of respectful attention and dialogue with my body my body welcomes me back without question.

We are trying to offer the audience an honest account of various scenarios that are relevant to us as artists and people. Because this is not always disclosed to an audience in narrative form or understandable language it may come across as confusing or non-sensical, but rather we are aiming to offer the audience an opportunity to get more creative with their seeing and understanding of dance, theatre and the body. We want to offer them a space full of questions rather than answers, asking them to self reflect on the issues raised on a personal level, and holding individual interpretation as all important.

The vulnerability and directness of our own presence is a practice of being fully present and confident with the material we have written. We aim to fully embody the language score in order to give full opportunity to the audience to experience it.