LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, how bored are you?

A work that explores the condition of a modern relationship.
 

The initial germ of inspiration for the piece came from an advertisement by match.com, it asked the question, how one might react to two people kissing in the street?  The dating agency claimed, by assessing your answer it would be able to make a judgment on your compatibility and increase your chances of a successful romantic match. This sparked our curiosity; we began to look into the research behind this claim.  The anthropologist Susan Fisher had designed a questionnaire to divide people into four distinct categories.  By doing this and linking her work to a world wide dating website her research looked to be able to increase and understand the likelihood of a secure partnership. Thinking about the solutions modern adults have found for meeting each other and the use of cyberspace, we looked at sites that provided questions to keep conversation flowing on first dates. We took 20 of the most interesting and answered them ourselves to see how we would react to each other.

Having answered the questions, we took our responses and asked two actors (Connor Short and Sophie Alderson) to try to read and record them as if speaking while answering a computer questionnaire.  Listening to this recording Gemma and I decided the tone was wrong for what we were trying to convey, so I took the text and tried to form a rough script, this was written to show two people at a speed-dating event. These two characters eventually found someone thorough the course of the evening and their answers begin to match and overlap. Our hope was to splice a recording of this text with scenes from the future of the relationship.  

The next step for us was to look at different stages of an existing relationship, how it progresses from tentative beginnings to acceptance of another and the mundane and dramatic aspects in between, all the while retaining a sense of affection. To do this Gemma suggested we use improvisation to surprise each other and uncover reactions that we could not otherwise find.  The improvisation tapes (on the video section of this website) show us refining our ideas into four distinct sections or scenes and exploring how to formulate our emotional ideas into movement.

Having narrowed our ideas to four distinct sections, first date, mundane, angry and tender, the choreography (section on the video page) show us trying to distill the ideas thrown up by improvisation into concise movement. Our aim was that each section should be read in both a narrative and abstract way. As we began to structure the piece it became clear that the use of a recorded script made the dance that followed it seem obvious and somewhat superfluous. We toyed with the idea of speaking at the same time as dancing, but felt more time would be needed to execute this properly.

In the final stages of completion we enlisted the help of Anthony Missen and Joe Walkling, as dramaturges, to put the finishing touches to nuance and detail within the dance and narrative structure.

LADIES AND GENLTEMEN, how bored are you? premiered in Valencia, Spain on the 30th December 2009