Well, my connection with Zombies has not been the most exciting one, I’m more a superhero person, thinking highly of Batman(!)… Horrormovies have never been my thing and the few connections I have with these lovely creatures is that I played one once in a low-budget movie and I had a tragic death because the protagonist smashed my head with a baseball bat.
(Anyways according to Costas and the Hollywood crew they usually die when you shoot them in their head, so the brain, which controls the hunger of human flesh, will be hit)
Costa’s inspiration on Zombies was based on the ideas of Romer’s films and also the notion of a generic body (Link: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Romero_zombies). The question for our group was not always “What is a body?”, but “What can a body do?”.
Zombies were shown as beings which are not there for production as we are so used to in a capitalistic society, but they even represented “hope” for changes in the human condition. So maybe a Zombie revolution could be an answer to Capitalism.
Anyways we started with touch going into pairs. The person touching and the person being touched both stayed active in this process and exchange touch and were an inspiration for the other person. After a while they both parted and the person being touched started to reconstruct the sense of this kind of partnering by his own, being still open to the external, so not simply busy with oneself, but keeping the attention also on the surroundings. This task then expanded and we went to different objects or inspiring surfaces to take this further.
We tried not to produce something or make something out of what we were doing. This principle stayed also in the next tasks. In the next one we listened to music and explored a body part or a short movement phrase. Howeve, it was a fleeting moment again, because before something became “something”, we dropped it.
After that we started to listen to the music and tried to do bodysynch (like lipsynch, but with the whole body), where the body tried to show as many as different components of the music as possible. This was quite difficult to do, but quite nice to watch.
A video will follow soon and some comments