Open Field Study (all together now)

The night which is white and blue, an ocean.
The company works in shifts like sailors, submitting happily to the rhythm of the ship which, because it must sail day and night, is always half awake and half dreaming.

Open Field Study (all together now) was a durational, site-specific choreographic project featuring 50 performers linked sonically using low-watt radio transmission. A distributed choreography, the work was developed in collaboration with five movement artists who in turn gave the collaboratively conceived score to a group of 5-10 performers. Each group then rehearsed separately, starting with the ideas of pedestrian movement and serial repetition as the base vocabulary. Over a few weeks, each developed responses to the initial proposal. The full ensemble then met and danced together in a public space for 12 hours, synching up where groups of dancers arrived and departed from pre-determined meeting points, at moments moving together in a kind of precarious unison.

The 30-minute score repeated over and over again, with components missing or added, as groups came and went from the performance space, completing a series of shifts over the course of the night. Constantly the same and constantly changing, the attempt at unison in the dark and with fifty people, the imprecision and the clarity of the act, the ridiculousness and the honesty of the task, and, as the instigator, the responsibility of having asked them to do it.