Lockdown Ornithology

Emerging from the first lockdown in the UK in 2020, ‘Lockdown Ornithology’ was a part of my work with what I call DIY Digi-corporeality.
It was an evolving research project that built on my praxis as a ‘choreodramaturg’, DIY Digi-corporeality uses and develops the ‘unsteady state condition’ along with ubiquitous technology as a creative and productive means of working remotely in ‘lockdown environments’. The collaborations were filmed on Zoom, Mac and iPhone and edited using InShot and Unfold.

The above film is composed of all of the ‘Caged Birds’ that were filmed.
The films below are the individual studies set out in the order that they were filmed.
finally, there is a short outline of the approach and concepts that informed ‘Lockdown Ornithology’

Caged Bird #1

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Kat Collings (10/01/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: ‘Nightingale, Pt.1’ by Cosmo Sheldrake (with kind permission of Cosmo Sheldrake)

Caged Bird #2

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Nathan Lafayette (12/01/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: ‘Dunnock’ by Cosmo Sheldrake (with kind permission of Cosmo Sheldrake)

Caged Bird #3

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Shelley Eva Haden (14/01/21)
Editor Paul Sadot
Music: ‘Marsh Warbler’ by Cosmo Sheldrake (with kind permission of Cosmo Sheldrake)

Caged Bird #4

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Tania Dimbelolo (16/01/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: ‘Nightjar’ by Cosmo Sheldrake (with kind permission of Cosmo Sheldrake)

Lockdown Ornithology (remix #1)

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancers: Kat Collings; Nathan Lafayette; Shelley Eva Haden; Tania Dimbelolo
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: ‘Greenfinch’ by ICY audiovisual

19 January 2021

Caged Bird #5

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Mathilde Lin (20/01/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: ‘Skylark’ by Cosmo Sheldrake (with kind permission of Cosmo Sheldrake)

Caged Bird #6

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Joshua Nash (23/01/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: 'Robin Wren Pigeon’ by ICY Audio Visual

Lockdown Ornithology (remix #2)

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Joshua Nash and Nathan Lafayette
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: 'Blackbird' by ICY Audio Visual

27 January 2021

Caged Bird #7 (revisiting #1)

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Kat Collings (31/01/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: 'Siskin, Mistle Thrush, Dunnock, Coal Tit’ by ICY Audio Visual

Caged Bird #8

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Jordan Douglas (12/03/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: Nightingale by Jed Holland

Lockdown Ornithology (remix #3)

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancers: Tania Dimbelolo, Jordan Douglas, Kat Collings
Editor: Paul Sadot

15 March 2021

Caged Bird #9

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Maria Nikolou (29/03/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: Blue Tit Robin by ICY AudioVisual

Caged Bird #10

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Lucas Gill (10/04/21)
Editor: Paul Sadot
Music: Swallow Mistle Thrush by ICY AudioVisual

Lockdown Ornithology (remix #4)

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancer: Kat Collings
Editor: Paul Sadot

26 May 2021

Lockdown Ornithology (remix #5)

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
Dancers: Nathan Lafayette; Shelley Eva Haden; Joshua Nash; Jordan Douglas; Mathilde Lin; Tania Dimbelolo; Kat Collings; Lucas Gill; Maria Nikolou
Editor: Paul Sadot

April 30 2021

Process
I meet each dancer on a one hour Zoom call. We discuss almost nothing beforehand. Sometimes I may send them the track we will be using and other times I change tracks as we work. It is an improvised process that is sustained through a reflexive way of working. It happens very quickly. It is immediate. I use what I have termed in my earlier practice research as ‘choreodramaturgy’ (see below). ‘This’ process has evolved during, and ‘because of’, lockdown. It is a political act because it evades supervision, and funding, and institutional gatekeepers who often control access to the ‘sanctioned’ space(s) of dance and theatre. ‘This’ process gives us agency and access. It changes our proximities and perspectives. It is a process that is very much in flux and one that thrives on precariousness as a creative environment. Within the simple Zoom set up, myself and the dancer become scenographers, film makers, dramaturgs and lighting technicians and, for one hour, close collaborators in the creation of something we have not yet imagined. It is an intimate process and very much a kinesthetic one and I am still trying to fully articulate what I mean by this. It is a felt experience, empathetic and connected (not just digitally), an embodied ritual that is most definitely ‘live’.
I edit the footage immediately and very quickly, trying not to think, but to feel and to challenge my own practitioner habits. Sometimes I edit on a basic phone App and others on iMovie, ubiquitous technologies that allow me to work rapidly and to chop and slash the footage, move it around and displace its original intention: to displace my immediate intention, though I don’t yet know what that may be. I try to invoke turbulence in the editing process and music plays a major part in this, by shifting soundscapes I can derail my patterns of doing. I deliberately seek this out, to derail my steadiness. When the process becomes steadied it submits to being named and, in doing so, is punctuated, becomes recognisable, consumed and dull. To avoid achieving such balance, my process seeks to to invoke what I term the ‘unsteady state condition’.

Choreodramaturg
The search for my identity within my creative process working with dance theatre artists led me to explore a hybrid role that I posit is best captured by the term ‘choreodramaturg’, an original term I have developed to delineate this composite role. Notably, I do not choreograph in the traditional sense, where routines and steps are passed on by the choreographer to be drilled and synchronised by dancers. I do not function as a dramaturg in the traditional sense of forming a dialogical relationship with a choreographer or director to comment on the evolving work and the dance(ers) or act(ors). Rather, I draw on an embodied understanding of movement that aligns itself most closely with dramaturgical thinking when creating movement/choreography. This role manifests itself in a processual approach to creating work, where task-based methods are introduced to test, disrupt and develop new ways of moving with the performers. This involves a process of layering that calls on an interaction and disruption between various elements such as text, movement, subject material and scenography. This interaction and disruption questions the choreographic and visual identity of form and per(form)ance.

The Unsteady State Condition
Through the working processes of multiple entry point layering and processual accretion the choreodramaturg is positioned as a creator–facilitator, an agent of turbulence who instigates the ‘unsteady state condition’ out of which the work emerges. The term ‘unsteady state condition’ is commonly used in the field of thermodynamics to describe the scientific principle of thermodynamic heat transfer in areas such as chemical and thermal engineering, where it is posited that the desirable ‘steady state condition’ cannot exist without the initial unsteady state condition when elements are in flux (White, Gilet and Alexander, 2002). Used as a metaphor, we might then view the steady state condition to signify a choreopoliced product. My research explores the possibility of a choreodramaturg constructing an unsteady state condition, and positioning dance artists as the creators of the movement vocabulary that emerges from such conditions. This processual approach is unsteady in that it is largely improvised and not concerned with choreographic output in the traditional (commercially focussed) sense.

Choreopolicing
In order to develop choreographic strategies that resist dominant processual structures in dance and theatre, I have found it necessary first to understand the full complexity of the constraints within which performance moves. I believe that the production of dance and theatre in the UK is linked to current governmental and Arts Council England prerogatives aimed at strategies of cultural consumerism and that the apparatus maintaining this supervisory structure is built on a network of complex negotiations. Foucault’s dispositif is useful in suggesting that these dialogic criteria operate implicitly as well as explicitly in these arenas and in doing so they exert a type of choreopolicing on the artists and the form.
In the wider spatial context of UK arts, the supervision of dance and theatre artists constitutes a type of ‘choreopolicing’ (Lepecki, 2013). Here, an analogy can be made with the surveillance mechanisms that dominate 21st century life. This analogy is informed by considering the wider context of societal policing, where surveillance cameras, cell phones, loyalty cards, credit cards, computer-linked location tracking systems and other devices track our movements: ‘this condition, where no one is left alone for long, reveals how an apparent “freedom of movement” is under strict control thanks to constant surveillance’ (2013: 15). By following this line of thought I am proposing that a similar form of choreopolicing exists in dance and theatre practice and production, whereby surveillance, represented by the watchful eye of funders, mentors, press reviewers and artistic curators, defines ‘pathways for circulation that are introjected as the only ones imaginable, the only ones deemed appropriate’ (2013: 15).

References
Lepecki, A. (2013) ‘Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the Task of the Dancer’, The Drama Review, 57(4), pp. 13–27.
Sadot, P. (2019) Unsteady State: hip hop dance artists in the space(s) of UK dance theatre. University of Chichester.
White, R., Gilet, S. and Alexander, A. (2002) What Is Unsteady State Heat Transfer?, Unsteady State Heat Transfer. Available at: http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~schreiber/uol/exp240/whatisuss.html (Accessed: 1 November 2015).