Creating Our Myth

Emma
Just this weekend I was talking to someone about the kind of urban superstitions that we follow. Such as, when you walk under a roadsign you must shut your eyes or else you will get bad luck. Also, you cant walk on three drains or covers on the ground only two as three is considered bad luck. I know they are crazy but I know loads of people that follow them, even people who haven't met before so it cant be a Liverpool thing. Then I got thinking about this and there are loads of superstitions to do with mirrors and things like if you look in a mirror on a certain day of the year you will see your true love and all other silly things like that. Don't know if it's useful but I will try and find out some mirror superstitions and let you know.  Also that entire male gaze/female gaze thing that directly relates to urban society and how we perceive ourselves and all that

Steven
This intrigues me right now---what about when you avoid looking the mirror, sometimes for days, not because you have an (unmentionable) or something, but because you feel something....what is that when we feel differently about ourselves even though we know the image in the mirror is the same?  Do we choose to transform?

The story is this...
It began like any other day...
Then strange things began to happen when we passed the mirror in the hall
We saw people...some we knew...some we didn't..
We approached...curious...wanting to make contact.
We did...some of it was more than we anticipated...
Where were they trying to take us?...What were they trying to show us?..
When we finally broke away...we were different...
We knew it without looking in the mirror...We went outside...we met our friends....We smiled with our new secret...the light that bounced between all those mirrors, all those images, was now coming out of our eyes...

(P.S.---this doesn't solve duet v. group...but I think "we" is a collective "we" that can be solo, duet or group...amd when "others" are implied then there can be a dividing up of roles)...

Colleen
perhaps even a magic mirror which reverses aging .. that fits with the dorian grey theme as well... 
the mirror group beautiful- it reminded me of teh phenomonon that occurs when two mirrors are placed face to face and infinitely reflect back the image creating the illusion of a long tunnel.... WORK with that... 
one more random thing- this weekend i caught a glimpse of a tv programme in which the characters used a mirror as a portal for travel..... 

Sita
The infinitely reflecting images is also echoed in Kareen's image at the bottom of the inspirations page - we will play with picking that up more too...in fact that gives me an idea right now for putting the dancers in the places of the repeated reflections, going back into the mirror...perhaps the end of the piece... 

Steven
Well, now I seem to be veering from what I myself suggested...I have something for "emergence" that is more a strategy than a story....

When the dancers come out...singlely or in pairs or what seems natural, they should already have an image they are moving to, a secret,...not necesssarily what we usually call "image"...picture, metaphor...but something deeper...a secret feeling of their whole being such as one might experience if they did indeed see their true love in the mirror on a particular day.... But it doesn't have to be that "image/feeling"---it can be anything...they can be an animal---that's a real transformation! ...and requires subtlety but from the last project I remember how one of the dancers interpreted the eagle image I sent---it was evocative... Or here is just another possibility---to bring things around to where they began---what would you get up in the middle of the night for?

Anyway...a deep image...a secret...that they are moving with/to/about/for... And then they try to share it with another of the dancers through their dance...to see if they can communicate it...And there can be a dialogue here--or in other words, one dancer can try to understand by imitating the moves of the one sharing and back and forth...And it can turn into more than two sharing at once...

But in the end I see somehow all the dancers moving together...first each doing their secret or some modification through the exchanges that have occurred...Then at the very end it settles into some kind of simple unison....whatever has evolved up to right near the end, you, the third eye, can spot it and say let's all go with this...and then maybe another...until it settles in...
We still all have our secrets within us, but we are dancing together...

hmmm...
 

Click here to see the dance outcome from the project.