MEANING

(Elisabetta)

It all started with a name drawn out of a hat and Hallvord and I were assigned to work together, for the first time. Nine weeks later we were sharing something far bigger than what we had in front of that hat on the first day. Through a long process, involving a good amount of laughter, of days in which everything seemed too difficult to deal with, but also of days in which a warm up would turn out as a "perfect" sequence of movement to be fitted 'just there' between the two we had already, we had a piece to show. Unbelievable.

Everything that happened in the space and time of those nine weeks has been, I think, quite significant. There has been, first of all, the increasing feeling that I was working with somebody that I had to trust, and to whom I had to give the time and the conditions to trust me just as much. The process was harder to start with, as he was speaking a body language very different from mine, both for reasons of difference in backgrounds and for dissimilarities in body weight, height and dynamics. My smaller structure forced me to oppose my whole weight to his, and to find effective ways to carry his without hurting myself. Solutions to this last problem were, for example:

• Giving in to him instead of resisting allowing the weight to flow into and out of my body, rather than trying to guide it consciously
• Localising and sharing our centers, especially in the lifts, so that, for either of us, it was possible to use the momentum, rather than muscular force to hold the partner in a specific position in space
• Concentrating on the stronger parts of my body that would work effectively as supports. I experienced that positions like on all fours or in a wide second plié could easily be used as ledges and allowed a comfortable distribution of weight and a fair amount of ways of getting in / out of them
• Work on the fluidity of the executions so that our give / take should never get to a halt.

Having to present a finished product put it all in perspective: improvisation was no more an end in itself, but it was useful to capture images, sensations, and variations in moods and in movement qualities. The emphasis of the work was not placed only in the improv task 'per se'', each time, but acquired a meaning that was getting richer and richer the more I knew who I was having a conversation with, the more I felt like he knew me. We soon established a code language that allowed us to understand exactly what the topic of the discussion was each time, to find a way out of it, often a compromise, until we reached the "finished" product: a speech that every single time allowed a few unpredictable variables.