The First Day at 'l'estruch'

Started skipping yesterday as part of a mini-residency run by a group called Accio Cultural Metropolitana (you can find them here: accioculturalmetropolitana.wordpress.com) in 'l'estruch', Sabadell, Catalonia.

I have titled this specific project: Internal Transmogrification – Defeat (Me) They Must

(Performance Art Piece)

This is the working statement I provided Anna:

This Mini-residential week I will be tapping into moments of endurance, exploring mental stability as it runs into instability and the transmogrification within the process; as it responds to physical exhaustion.  I will be doing this with a skipping rope and will be doing the action for continuous moments, at times for as long as the body will allow.

The rope is an important part of my personal critical and creative studies, its history of punishment, servitude, enslavement, order, tension, security, connection, dependency, imprisonment and more, make it a strong utensil to explore many facets of history and our links to such histories.  Though my concerns with history can often be particular, this piece is personal in some ways but completely open for viewer interpretation.

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And there you are a academic view of the work, stripped of feeling and poetics.  In this blog I intend to add a bit of the poetics, the feelings and some documentation of the everyday (it will last a week).  Besides this there will be a 'performance' day this coming Saturday in 'L'estruch' of which its activities I am still not sure of.

I have noticed that when I speak of skipping a pleasurable moment comes to people, possibly a connection to their childhood, the games which included the rope and the memories fill their minds; they smile at me for simply having said the word 'skipping'.  The connotations are endless, at times, boundless, yet there it is, it is binding - as most of its use suggests.  When people speak of happiness they want to connect, share and re-record, and I acquiesce them in with my imagination of their youth.

Yesterday there was a dancer here, who too is doing a residency (though a longer one) and she was asked what came to her mind when she heard 'rope' and she immediately thought of hanging..  The rope then can jump from moment to moment from different spaces to even more different spaces and many such spaces are somewhere in the memory fields of most of us.

The rope has many links and jumping it is something we do more often than we think!