Impossible to work

A few weeks back, I took Sara Wookey’s workshop at Links Hall. By day three, my ass had been kicked. Why is that? Because I’m ridiculously out of shape and Sara Wookey is agile and athletic. Was this a bad thing? No. It was good to just move. There was a lot of moving, lots of freewriting, and a bit of reading.

And moving is good. There were lots of movements that I did a hillariously poor job of replicating, but that’s all part of the fun.

One day in particular (and once again on the day I missed), we spent about half an hour repeating a movement and letting it change as a group. I thought it was a great exercise. Two rows facing one another, not interacting with each other (for the most part). The goal was to stay in synch with your row, repeating and changing the movement slowly. It was very meditative. I felt great afterwards. Everyone made the decisions to change together. We didn’t very too much from where we started (though the other group certainly did) so in that respect it was somewhat boring. But boredom is a good thing too, sometimes. It’s nice to let your mind wander.

We worked a lot with walking. Walking around the space. Group improvisations. Great stuff. I enjoyed watching so much, I didn’t want to go back in to the performance space. Walking was the most important movement we did, and this links up to Wookey’s current work “Walking LA,” which I will get around to talking about.

If I have something critical to say about the workshop it’s that I would have enjoyed more structure to improvisation overall, but the freeness of the improvisations did result in good things on various occasions throughout the workshop. I’m just the sort of person who would rather improvise based around a laundry list of constraints than just do whatever”^a1a”. When you’re forced to think laterally, you frequently end up doing really interesting things. However, when you can do almost anything, the intersections between the improvisation and that zone called interesting or even good, are often few and far between.

1. I do not mean by this that our improvisations were wholly free. I just mean that there were times when we would be told to break the few base rules laid out at the start. I, personally, didn’t have enough rules in front of me to break them in a very interesting way. aaa