Arachne: swinging between actions and emotions

Building up to our "Morphing in progress" showing on 28th November, I felt uncertain of my choice of episode and unsettled by the difficulties it presented. I had picked the tale of Arachne - I really like this story, it feels so simple and yet in its simplicity it manages to evoke so many issues that remain relevant today (e.g., authority, creativity, skill, recognition, and how society operates with/around/against those notions) :

Arachne, a talented weaver, finds herself refusing to pledge allegiance to Minerva, goddess  of crafts, who seems to think that as a goddess, she ought to be thanked by Arachne for having such skilled hands. A weaving competition ensues, where Minerva and Arachne each produce a tapestry. Minerva chooses to depict the gods in all their splendour, and Arachne depicts the gods in all their turpitudes evoking scenes of transformations where gods turn themselves into animals to seduce mortals. Minerva, shocked, berates Arachne, who, in despair, hangs herself. Taking "pity" on Arachne, Minerva sprinkles her with powder provided by Hecate and turns her into a spider so that Arachne can keep weaving for the rest of her life - her and her descendants after her.

I picked this story for a number of reasons amongst which are the following :

• previously I had only been characterising males (Lycaon, Daedalus, and Icarus) and I wanted to try myself out at a more familiar gender (!)
• the story involved more characters than the previous ones, and two different "levels" of storytelling: the story between Minerva and Arachne, but also the stories evoked by each of their tapestries (which I heavily edited, as Ovid evokes 24 rapes in his description of Arachne's tapestry)
• these stories were more easily defined by the actions that unfold than the previous stories I had worked on. 

This last point proved to be a sticky point. For Lycaon and Daedalus & Icarus I had first relied on their internal states and on their feelings to tell their stories, and then I devised corresponding actions (and for Icarus for instance it took some time before I was able to make him do things that felt right, that felt like him). Here, for Arachne and Minerva, the actions were so very clear that they imposed themselves to me. It seemed obvious that, for weaving, I had to use ballet for both of my main protagonists - in contrast with my Lycaon who had a butoh quality, and to my Daedalus & Icarus who had each their own physical space and texture. The pointed feet, the crisp shapes, and the stylised flowing movements of the ballet vocabulary had to be my choice for this story of weaving.
So the layering that first concerned me in rehearsals was that of adopting a specific texture or body quality for each character, and that whilst they were both undertaking the same activity, weaving, denoted by balletic vocabulary. And that somehow got me stuck in the realm of actions.
The lovely 15th century woodcut illustration below describes quite accurately the elements of action I had latched upon to spin Arachne's tale.

"Woodcut illustration of Arachne's suicide - Penn Provenance Project" by kladcat -
Woodcut illustration of Arachne's suicide.
Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

A crucial dimension that was missing was the emotional dimension (which is ironic, provided that I turned to Jung for my two previous pieces!). Why was Minerva so angry? And why was Arachne so desperate as to hang herself?

In a sense, Gustave Doré's evocation of Arachne in his illustration of Dante's Purgatorio represents what I was missing. Doré's depiction of Arachne oozes sadness and despair, without any hint as to what might have happened to her to get her there. What happened to her however is all in the woodcut illustration which in turn doesn't seem to convey much emotion.

Arachne in Dante's Purgatorio - by Gustave Doré
"Pur 12 aracne". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Luckily, thanks to various discussions with Marie-Louise, Malcolm, and Susie, I was able to identify this important lacuna before the showing. 

I had to rectify my course and strike the right balance between the descriptive of the woodcut that almost spells out the whole narrative and the emotional of the Doré illustration.

Intriguingly, that sends us back to our character-emotion-action warm-ups... It's almost as if I had concentrated so much on the characters and their actions that I had all but forgotten about the emotions. In the end, based on the reactions from the audience, it seems that I did bring an emotional dimension to my performance and that it got through. 

I did feel Minerva's anger, her authority threatened by a nobody.  I also felt Arachne's despair, her sentiment of injustice, of being denied her own voice.

And I couldn't have done it without Malcolm's fabulous sounds. As the sequence of interventions of the characters was more complex, I instinctively concentrated more on the actions in order to not loose track of who comes next and doing what - but Malcolm's music was always there to, in turns, provide hints, support, provoke all the three (character, emotion, action) dimensions that we wanted to convey.  

In any case - that was yet another fascinating discovery and I'll have to keep working at it. 

I can't wait till we get back into the studio!  

Ségolène

Working together on new tales; rehearsal at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building 13th November 2014

Thursday 13th saw the Avid for Ovid group come together again to share progress on the new stories that we are developing for showing on 28th November as part of the Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers Colloquium on Communicating Verbal Emotion; full information on this to be posted very shortly. Our afternoon session was in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building at St Hilda’s; great to have access to this space with its beautiful resonant Steinway, a big thank you to Helen Slaney for organising this.

Tackling new stories is challenging our abilities to take on different characters and more complex narratives, finding ways to explore clear and seamless shifting between characters not only through altered physicality, but through selection and refinement of movement motifs and demarcation of the geography of the story in the space. Malcolm’s recent prodigious output of musical themes for specific characters brings its own challenges for him in being able to remember and instantly access a wealth of rich material while remaining alert to the potential progression of the dance. Although very much still in exploratory and improvisatory territory both music and dance are beginning to crystallize as we make decisions as to what we can discard as inessential, and get a sense of how long is required to establish character and situation.

We begin with all four of us warming up in our own ways, morphing gradually into individual explorations and practice of movement and musical material. Then a sharing of our sketches of each piece, with mutual feedback and discussion after showing. First Marie-Louise with her moving interpretation of the story of Myrrha; fascinating to see the effects of her working this in the neutral mask. Then Ségolène’s telling of the tale of Arachne raises intriguing questions about the potential depiction of a narrator and who this might be.

Minerva and Envy.

Crispin van de Passe the Elder c.1600

Source: Royal Collection Trust

Stringing together some sections of my Aglauros begins to reveal how this complicated story might be stripped back to essentials. In all cases we are reminded of the significance of seemingly minute details in projecting the narrative and its emotional heart.

Helen contributes a discreet presence and a welcome outside eye, and over tea after clarifies the arrangements for presenting the work. At the end of the session we are all surprised at how much has been achieved today, and how much more effectively we have worked. A coherent working process seems to be emerging; together with an encouraging realisation that we have progressed over the last six months.

Susie

A tune a day

As part of the preparation for our next performance at the end of November and as a way of comprehending the scope of Metamorphoses I am attempting to write themes for characters from the work in relation to the narratives that Ovid recounts.

My approach is to write one short theme every day finishing it the same day – whether perfected or not (usually the latter). The response has to be immediate and intuitive – similar to the approach within unplanned performance such as the exercises we have undertaken where a character, an emotion, and an action are specified to elicit a response from dancer and musician. However, in this case I am trying to find something essential about the character (divine or mortal) within a given story.

I hope to build a repository of motifs that can be memorised and used in performance. I have found that some themes morph into representations of other characters or emotional states – but the process is useful as a continual clarification of what can (and can’t) be signified by a theme.

Here are some examples.

Mercury dresses up:
 

Narcissus sees himself:
 

Adonis:
 

Jupiter:
 

Arachne:
 


Malcolm Atkins