Week 5 at Wooda

During week 5 I was joined by dancer Riccardo Meneghini. Not having worked with Riccardo before, I was curious to see not only how he moved but also how he engaged with my creative ideas, so I asked him to generate movement material in response to maps, diagrams of the night sky, a compass and words I had compiled in the previous weeks. Riccardo came up with material that I instantly felt I could work with and which we then developed together. We went on to investigate the idea of resistance within the body and how energy can be built, contained and then released. During the first couple of weeks at Wooda I had spent time filming myself inside an old metal seed feeder that I had found in one of the fields on the farm, experimenting with movement ideas. I now suggested that Riccardo improvise inside the feeder as we explored the potential of containing the entire body. We also created movement to be performed in the leaf shaped recess in the barn studio floor. These physically restricting places made Riccardo appear almost foetus-like and for me expressed what I sensed when I first arrived at Wooda, both at a creative level in myself and in the countryside as it waited for the onset of spring. By the end of week 5 Riccardo and I had compiled a vocabulary of movement that we used as a resource when we worked with dancer Debbi Purtill in the final week.