Week four

With the summer break around the corner I have managed to get three more dates lined up this month and next to further the Hawk R&D, which will no doubt form part of the research I would undertake if the grant were successful.

I am compiling a list of former students who were good a the work. Some of them are already involved in the Hawk work with me and some I will contact once the ducks are lined up and I can begin organising the series of workshops necessary for the research next year.

In the meantime Fay Simpson http://lucidbody.com/about/bios/fay-simpson-2/ is back in town and it will be great to see her and discuss our current projects. Last year we did some exploratory work together. I have been watching the footage of our "Bear Girls" piece and remembering the themes I was focusing on this time last year. They have most definitely developed.

In practical terms I am sending my application off to be looked at by the CDD mentor, Prof. Paul Allain. He has been encouraging in terms of my desire to do this practical research as he has known about my work for some years.

Back to the process of Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation and a quote from Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk

"To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods......You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear, and then in the birds she watched, took flight. It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away."    

(Macdonald:2014)