Linzy Na Nakorn in response to Akeim Toussaint Buck’s workshop at Arnolfini - March 2022
Akeim’s workshop that explored so many elements left me feeling inspired to explore a number of provocations from the day. Some directly given to us by Akeim, and others that sparked off further thought within my own practice.
Questions arose for me around the themes of art and activism, decolonising movement, heritage, the joy of sound and the use of sound making in choreographic approaches. So very full and rich. It felt good to sweat, to flex some technical muscles and to discover that my beatboxing skills aren’t actually, it turns out, totally non-existent.
Since the workshop I have made a collection of writings, of movements and of experimentations exploring the themes above as well as revisiting past work and experiments and asking new things of them.
Below I skim the surface of some thought activated within me from the workshop and as direct responses to the day.
Thankyou to Gather Up for inviting me to respond to the workshop in this way, sometimes an external invitation is the best way to begin x
SOUND
I felt swept up by Akeim’s explorations of ‘Counter Motor Signalling’, inspired vocal explorations and the use of voice to conduct your own movement, and the use of movement to conduct the voice. What is it to collectively sound together, to move to a shared score or someone else’s score?
Making the direct link between musical improv techniques and shared movement improvisations feels so intuitive. To be offering up, filling gaps with voice, setting tempo’s finding collective polyrhythms and the joy that collective sound making and moving together brings, feels as an experience akin to something spiritual.
For the same reasons that mass collective movement in activism to me feels hopeful, jubilant and uniting, dancing together and making sounds with your face calls in a collective experience in what it is to fill and share space in a way that feels like a collective act of defiance and declaration, we are here, and we make an imprint on the space and those around us. It’s an experience that I also recognise to that of gigs, protest marches, hushed spaces such as libraries (where there is in fact a collective absence of sound) and religious spaces.
Keen to explore how this relationship between sound, movement, gig, theatre and collective improvisation can be expanded, Simon Panrucker, Nirvana Warner-Hughes and I got in a room together, asked loose questions and made sounds and moved. It felt unstructured, sometimes really rich, sometimes sort of nothing but by the end of the day we had come up with four different structures for four very different shows that we may or probably may not make.
I have been left with a wealth of questions, no answers but lots of creatively feeding provocations that I find echoing in many of the studios, dances and provocations, all overlapping with that of my own known practices and the new threads that are appearing and weaving themselves in all the time.
(Images from clockwise from topleft: Lanna earth, northern Thailand 2018 / Image of Linzy from r’n’d of ‘Of a body’ UK 2021, Family Portrait, Thailand 2001)
HERITAGE
Akeim shared some movement language with us drawing in Caribbean dance styles as an offering of vocabulary to weave in and amongst the western contemporary techniques, that many of us attending the workshop were bringing within our own improvisations and movement. Offering up the notion to shift perspective on what is considered codified or ‘technique’ and by whom.
The sharing of Akeim’s dance heritage and early motivations, has contributed to my own current journey in exploring my own heritage in relation to my physical dance practice.
As a mixed heritage south east asian human, my training has only ever sat firmly in the western canon of codified techniques, I realise I have no physical language related to my own heritage within my body, yet I do have the memory and embodied sensation of what it is to be in, on and off the land in Thailand. The days work generated several questions for me, of which the answers I am endeavouring to explore; How do I integrate my ‘otheredness’ intuitively within my own conditioned language and practice? What stories can be expelled, shared and explored? What is the line between appropriation and repatriation to movement when as mixed race person, it is possibly not a returning to, but a first meeting?
Akeim’s workshop felt like a celebration of all that sits within the broad range of contemporary vocabulary of movement from both northern and southern hemispheres, a place of sharing via way of exploring what it means to surprise the body in shape, in texture and in movement; To find what is not expected within your own movement, to recognise what is borrowed from others that move around you, what is shared and what is of the self.
SOLO
It brought me back to an exploration, a self imposed R&D within the autumn of 2020 where I was keen to explore what it means to be a body, my body, in heritage, health, race, form and self image. What came from that was a venture into visual projection (totally new realm for me) but also further observations around the intimacy of making solo work versus collective work. New ground!
More questions arose, who is the solo work for? For me? For others like me? Not like me? What is it in relation to?
The joy of creating and dancing for me firmly sits in the collective and shared activity of exchange, celebration and trying to figure something out, dance as a tool for space taking, action making and community making. What does a solo do, what does my solo do and does it need to be seen in the sea of solo dancers, all of us floating around our living rooms for the best part of 2020?
Skip forward to the workshop, and what felt like came home for me so strongly within Akeim’s work, through sound conducting, movement making and set material was the joy in the many solos that make up a collective movement or action; Each one contributing to the tapestry of movement and the chorus of sound, of bodies lending their movements, showing off in brilliant ways and finding the sticky and unsure bits that make it live.
for more info about Akeim Toussaint Buck: https://www.toussainttomove.com/
for more info about Linzy Na Nakorn: https://www.linzynanakorn.com/