Week 2 - A week to think about Collective Fantasies - by Anna Seymour
Anna writes about the second residency - Cardiff, January 2025
Our second residency was spent in Cardiff, Wales. I had just returned from 5 weeks in Australia and it was a hard transition from warm and sunny to cold and dark. It had been a couple of months since our first residency.
The theme ‘collective fantasises’ kickstarted a rich exchange of talking and moving with some flinch-o-meter moments.
MONDAY
What is abstraction?
How do we evaluate what we do?
True collaboration is about shared power, shared responsibility, a willingness to follow, and a willingness to initiate.
Each of us offering movement tasks in the afternoon.
TUESDAY
Morning talk, afternoon move. We talk move talk move talk move.
What gifts do we bring? Jo falls in love with everyone, Anna is open and up for anything, Gwyn is non-judgmental.
Trauma, power status in dance, and our desire to change the shape and structure of how we work/dance.
What is radical in dance right now?
A task to make a task. Starting from ‘nothing’ and letting it develop collectively via movement. A balance of agreeing, disagreeing, yielding.
Collective offering – equal input – new structures – collective fantasises.
WEDNESDAY
We co-facilitated our “collaborative class” with 4 local dance artists.
Dismantling the traditional dance class form.
Allowing people’s desires to manifest and land.
Our afternoon improvisation was a flop. It was diluted.
We finished with disco dancing to classical music to shake it off.
How can we create communal moments? And physical spaces?
THURSDAY
Self-led warm up.
A conversation about our relationship to our voice.
Drawing diagrams of our collective decision-making processes.
An egg timer/bottleneck/birth canal was our collective diagram. Writing words, images, questions that emerged this week on post it notes and placing them on the diagram.
FRIDAY
Time felt more urgent today.
We finished our diagram
And created our 2min choreography that used the objects of chairs, jugs, water, bowls, wine glasses.
A pouring of fantasises, desires, histories, archives… an ongoingness. To be continued next time.
Written by Anna Seymour
