Mea Tau was created using Trisha Brown's 'Locus Score' technique. We asked Elijah to share more about Locus Score, and how it helped him to create the work.
What is Locus Score and how did it inform your process?
We use the room or a space and visualise it as a three-dimensional cube. The high, medium, and low points within the cube are labelled with letters - each point represents a letter. When we generate material, our cast use the 3D map we’ve visualised to spell words or phrases through dance using the letters at each point. It provides a guide for a movement path. It’s not a commonly used technique, but it is well-known in contemporary dance history. This process was the most used task throughout our creation of the piece. So we started with using the Locus Score to spell the Isaiah bible verse. We’d start with individual work. So each performer, or a single performer would create the movement themselves. We’d then merge into exploring what would happen if two dancers performed their different movement paths at the same time, in the same space, in close proximity. If they do collide, what do we do with those happy accidents? How can they relate to each other? We spelled ‘Mea Tau’ using Locus Score. A lot of the process was spelling and coding. In one section we spell ‘weapon’ with just arm movement. Basically using the locus score to encode messages was our language. That is how we communicate the messages in the work. |
Trisha Brown, Untitled (Locus), 1975, ink and graphite on paper, 8 pages, 5 pages 12 x 9 in. (30.6 x 22.9 cm), 3 pages 17 x 14⅛ in. (43.2 x 35.9 cm) (artwork © Trisha Brown; photographs provided by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)
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For more detailed information about Locus Score, check out: