The mythical festival of reading week occurs during this span of days. Perturbingly, I have many tasks to fill my week, other than reading:
- Prepare my group project pitch and presentation for week seven
- Blog, blog, blog and essay planning for Exhibition 2
- Re-visit my tutorial recordings for this semester
- Learn to draw as good as what that guy who drew the Vitruvian Man was by Tuesday next week
- Begin work on my TAKEOVER project proposal form
- Work on further developments of my “Address Melody” piece
- Assemble and explore my installation again
- Avoid using a numbered list when there are a large number of tasks to address
- Free up storage space on my phone (1.4 GB available)
- Work, sleep, repeat
My group project idea involved me in another Research Tree which took me to places familiar and unknown. Having chosen my subject – musical chairs, I was focused on ideas of displacement with that game and ways to offer “the players” experiences of displacement, involvement in ritualistic action/choreography and meditative undoing of habitual self.
I remember taking part in a workshop that taught me some simple movements based on the work of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer. The Gurdjieff movements have a basis in Sufi mysticism and became part of Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” system of spiritual development.
Enneagram – this is a special symbol relating to the number nine.
I found out that there is much confusion as to the origins of the diagram on the right, above, but it is generally accepted that Gurdjieff created it around 1915. Subsequently it has been used to plot different personality types as an aid to self understanding and development. The work of psychologists around the world has continued the ideas based around this diagram.
I have two identical Enneagram tattoos. The number nine is important in my own paradigm and often reveals itself in strange ways, like the amount of money I got from Student Finance, my interest in electronics and Tesla’s fixation on the numbers 3, 6 & 9, my date of birth, etc. Nine is the only number that will reduce down to itself from any number of multiples… 3×9=27 = 2+7=9, 6×9=54 = 5+4=9, etc. Fascinating!
The work of Pina Bausch was the next branch of this research tree. Her ritualistic and repetitive choreography is intriguing and I made a connection with her work and the Gurdjieff movements.
My project is a movement workshop, using the Musical Chairs game combined with repetitive movements as a starting point. The workshop will develop with a look into choreography and culminate in short performances using the participant’s own choreographed movements.
I enjoyed the experience of planning something outside of my comfort zone… I certainly have little interest in contemporary dance, but the connections I made were stimulating and exciting. I think it would be an unforgettable and beneficial experience for some.