This post is from Alex:
10/29/12
I
led the last lab in our session exploring ensemble work. There was low
attendance this evening, but the smaller group potentially allowed us to
deepen further into our dancing.
We
began with a warm up dance to music. We warmed into our bodies, the
space, and did some light grazing while moving to the first few songs
on Andrew Bird's album Useless Creatures.
The album is his
only purely instrumental album I know of and it seemed to be well
received by the group and provided us with a luscious container for our
collective warm up.
After
our warm up dance, we split up into two groups and spent the next 20
minutes in our first long engagement dance with others. Cyrus, Louie and
I danced in a trio and Mike and Michal danced a duet. I wanted to use
these dances as a way to warm into listening, giving and receiving
weight and deepening our connections with others while dancing before
jumping right into ensemble work with more people and information. These
dances were a good investment for the work we did later.
We all seemed more prepared to share weight and find the juicy places
of interdependence in the dance rather than just adding information on
top of information without the genuine connection and listening that can
happen when there is lots going on.
After
these first two dances, we paused to harvest before moving on to
ensemble work. I brought paper and pastels and we spent a few minutes
working on our own images before sharing with the group. I noticed that
everyone seemed to share an equal amount and everyone spoke about their
image during harvest. The time to reflect before speaking and the use of
a different form of communication to
share our experiences, seems to be helpful in terms of balancing out
who shares and how much each person shares. When we go right into
speaking during our harvest, it can sometimes feel a bit unbalanced. I
am interested in exploring a variety of ways to harvest.
Louise's
image described our warm up dance speaking to the perfect amounts of
space in between all of us during the dance and the group momentum. His
image had lots curved lines with arrows, crescent shapes, stars, suns and flowers on the ends of each line. His image was rhythmic
and
well balanced with a mostly even amount of negative space surrounding
each line/pathway. The lines were all orange and some of the shapes on
the end were surrounded by black dots.
Cyrus drew a long, curly, line that seemed to map the path we traveled
in our dance. The line traveled around the page and paused in these
little enclosed "eddy's" that were filled with more specific, detailed
activity which looked geometric. The image also had these light, wispy
knotted lines that surrounded the thicker path.
I unintentionally chose the same colors as appeared in our trio's clothing (red and blue). I focused on a series of diagonal,
linear marks and also these hook-like marks that all curled and folded
into each other which represented movements that stood out to me in my
dance with Louise and Cyrus.
Michal
indulged in a lovely drawing that she said had nothing to do with her
dance. It was colorful with lots of circular shapes that she said were
influenced by Denis' painting in the room.
Mike
used his image to express his frustration with not feeling totally
grounded in his body. Feeling tired and run down and not well connected,
his images spelled out FUCK OKIE. He said he was playing around with expressing his feelings of frustration making the picture caotic, buzzy,
with odd faces and scratchy lines. He also was practicing accepting
where he was at even though it may not have been his desired state which
I believe influenced him to write OKIE.
My
initial idea was to have everyone find one small moment, word or idea
from their images to use as a "seed" for our ensemble dances. I remember
Scott mentioning the idea of one person "seeding" the dance with their
movement, exiting, then
everyone entering the dance together with that particular seed in
mind.
But
then after sharing our images, Louie suggested instead of using our
bodies to "seed" our dances, we could use one person's image as the
"seed" or source material for the ensemble. We all agreed to go with that and danced everyone's
image. It produced incredibly interesting, connected dances that all
had very unique specific flavors that were clearly connected to the
images. There was always at least one person witnessing and everyone
agreed
each dance was superb. They all just felt "on" somehow.
Cyrus mentioned the dances having really specific subtleties.
Someone said the dances seemed to unfold and didn't appear forced.
Mike was interested in this idea of
translation. A dance into and image back into a dance.
Michal said it felt like people were dancing inside the image.
We
were also interested in engaging with different form of communication
than verbal and how that may have opened us up to more creativity?
I
wondered how important it was that those images came from our
collective experiences rather than using just any images? I think there
is something to the
re-using of material we created together. Building upon a language
that's being established.
This
work with source material or "seed" seems juicy to me I would be
interested in exploring all sorts of different sources. It could be fun
to use objects, a piece of music we all listen to in stillness, or a
smell.
Lots to explore here!
-Alex
