Musings from Munich
Mid-February, Lynn chanced upon another stepping stone in her latest choreographic exploration with collaborators Kalle and August Laar. During a week-long trip to Munich, Lynn introduced her international audience to her improvisatory discoveries from last September’s Mixed Movement as well as her working duet featuring pop and locker Mike Fields and ballet dancer Kerry Shea.
Joining Kalle and Augusta in their regular electronic poetry lounge performance at Schwere Reiter, Kunst Oder Unfall Salon, Lynn found new layers and myriad possibilities for her recent movement investigations. Lynn participated in a 50 minute improvisational performance, gathering ideas from Kalle and Augusta’s sound experiments and the group’s use of visual accompaniment.
Imagine this:
Performers grab what they want from a storage room full of lights and sound equipment. Kalle, Augusta and Lynn set up in a small room with wallpaper purposely peeling from the walls in an aesthetically pleasing grunge-like fashion. The floor is a white Marley. Lynn marks it with black gaffer’s tape, creating dashed Baroque patterns – curves intersecting straight lines and forming pathways on the ground. Two spot lights flood the space with light. A drummer accompanies Kalle and Augusta as they playfully and skillfully tinker with various sound devices. Lynn adds to the improvisational template she created at the Mixed Movement event in Brooklyn – a long flowing skirt sways with undulating hips and her hands frantically mimic intricate sports signals. A video of a softly bobbing buoy plays on the wall then a loop of Mike popping alongside Kerry’s bourrées.
The environment is cluttered and uncoordinated yet Lynn and her partners in the creative process continue to locate ideas that, though they would presumably clash, mesh together in unexpected ways. The football signals and a drum solo look cohesive and crisp. The sound clutter created by Kalle and Augusta suit the visual clutter of the space. Lynn’s movement alongside Augusta’s solo reading of original poetry could become an intimate duet.
It’s still early in the process. There’s no reason to rush this project to completion. The sense of the whole won’t come until the group has worked together more extensively, and there’s not a set schedule of rehearsals or performances. The plan for now is to try something new each time while developing the ideas that have emerged so far.
And it seems that things are developing most readily when all the creators are present.
“You just have to do it,” Lynn says. “You just have to keep going. The connections that are perhaps intrinsically there are starting to become uncovered. They only happen when we put ourselves in that situation – of being under the gun, under the lights.”
