Hi folks,

Christian here:

is it worth trying to upload an mp3 of our 20 min. "gap" discussion from last monday?

If so, any tech suggestions as to how?

That said the question Mike left us with was:

"Is the gap a lack of orientation or a lack of purpose?

wake up the blog

Good day,
Let's crank up this rusty blog...
Nadia sent this link out a while ago.
http://sandgrainsintopearls.wordpress.com/

- Christian

Watch how all four of these guys have perfect, perfect command of their CENTERs, such a key component of CI technique too.  Always perfectly above whatever support (elbow, shoulder, knee, head) they have on the floor, you can practically see the vertical line.  They've also got the important connection of using spiral to control fall: in a couple of the spins their center is NOT on the vertical above the support, but because they are spinning/spiraling they are able to neatly replace their supports constantly so that the fall can just continue and continue and continue, never hitting the ground.

Love you all,

~Roel

The Divided Brain, courtesy of Louis

Weeks 1 and 2 of Ensemble Exploration, part 2. PS - this session needs a sexier name

Not a linear thinker/writer, but I will make an attempt. 

On November 12, we began a new 6 week session continuing focus on ensemble and ensemble awareness, building on inquiries and curiosities that emerged in the previous ensemble-based session. 

As facilitator for the first two meetings of this session, I decided to focus on the challenge of doing less as an individual... doing less, allowing for easier to find and maintain group cohesion. 
 
To begin:
small dance, standing, sitting or lying down. patience and breath. let one "truth" emerge in movement form. it is small. stick to it. repeat. repeat. intense repetition. movement size and locomotion increase, contact happens, but stick to intense repetition of your own movement. I called this "unambitious grazing". 
In hindsight, this warm-up probably happened much too quickly and the straight-jacket repetition did not seem to feel that great to anyone. oops. However, the idea behind it was to quiet our reactive tendencies. For example: I feel a touch from another dancer and very quickly abandon my own dance for a new dance. Being eager to say yes to my partner(s) has caused me to, in a way, compromise my individual intention. Can we find a stronger partner connection through NOT letting go of our one idea? Through the tiresome repetition, we find ways to live in our movement/be busy with our movement and somehow still be part of a partnership or larger group. 

Transition to:
Numbers score - 2:3
5 folks danced at a time. We worked and muddled our way through the 2:3 score using

• facing - front vs. back
• stillness vs. movement
• level  - high vs. low
• contact vs. non-contact

The idea behind this score is that there are no mistakes! Simply know that by making a choice/change, you are forcing/trusting someone else in the ensemble to re-establish the 2:3 balance. 

Struggles

• Facings led to quick changes, lack of continuity and overall frustration. I wondered if the movement vocabulary had been limited in the beginning to simply standing, facing front or back, if people would have been able to see/feel the group facings better as movement became more complex. We jumped right into tricky turning, flipping and ambiguous side-ways facings that made it hard to read, as a do-er and observer
• I think it was Michal who mentioned feelings of working to fulfill the rules and trying to "survive" the score. 
• Seeing far too many ideas and clutter, making it hard to join

Solutions?

• Shelia said she tried to broaden her vision as a way to stay in the score. To me it sounds like she was reminding herself to take in the space of the dance, the architecture of the room, the sensation of touch.... telelscoping out to make a dance rather than zooming in and feeling trapped by the score
• Louis came at the exercise with a "perspective of generosity"... I loved hearing him say "generous with stillness", "generosity of showing choices" i.e. being clear and obvious. I also remember something about a feeling of being generous to himself to be able to say, fuck this score, I don't know what the group is doing. Made me think of the gap in the underscore, a good reminder that it's ok to not always know what is happening or to be in synch
• Kaitlin found a feeling of liberation at the "task oriented" feeling of the score. Without having to feel creative, she was able to live in the group movement, making choices based on the number rules.

Challenges as facilitator

• the dances felt shallow and sporadic and probably needed much more time
• how to give the dances more time but still give everyone a chance to move/prevent getting cold from sitting too long
• how language affects the room: problems with the interpretation of the word unambitious

On November 19, I was allowed to try again, to find answers to the questions we were left with after the 2:3 score. 

To begin:
Invite being seen - simple standing and facing the group witha generosity of presence
Walking around the room, stopping to invite being seen - I found that a big part of "inviting being seen" for me was in the eye contact, so when we transitioned to walking all around, stopping and going as we pleased, I had a harder time finding that connection. I had to simply trust that someONE in the room would and was seeing me if I was making myself available to it. 
The goal for this warm-up was to prepare ourselves to be aware and inviting of others in the group while also being aware and giving of oneself. I hope everyone felt much more connected and ready to dance together with this warm up.

Transition to:
Group 1 idea

• line
• circle
• stillness
• asterisk
• square 

Without much guidance as to whether these words meant formation, body shape or movement, we came to an agreement as a group when we felt like the "1 idea" had been achieved, allowing anyone to call when it had happened. 

Return to 2:3 score:
This time around we focused our groups on movement vs. stillness or contact vs. no contact. The dances were also a bit longer, at somewhere between 6-8 minutes apiece. 

Observations:

• invite being seen created an appreciation for stillness
• there was a clear sense of commitment to composition within the groupings
• the commitment to composition took away from the commitment to partnering, which put people in situations where they did not feel safe
• while last Monday felt frantic, this time around seemed busy and engaged
• being ok with the inability to keep track of a grouping larger than duet or trio

hmmm... how much of the more "successful" feeling from this evening do we attribute to the fact that we had the experience of soupy confusion the week before? 
did we get better at the score? 
did the score feel less restrictive when we were throwing less ideas into the pot?
is it possible to compose space and compose duet and compose group all at the same time, spontaneously and successfully?

A few last words to hopefully move forward with:
One idea is the one that is already there, you don't have to find it or create it. 

Be always commited and always letting go!

Broaden the senses when you feel bogged down by a task


Also, both sessions I lead were sourced from experiences I have had with Lower Left artists. They are amazing. http://www.lowerleft.org/index.html
 

Alex's thoughts and debrief from 10/29 lab

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

 

 

An Overview of Monday

This is Kaitlin...I led lab last week, and I just want to publicly record some notes since this was a goal we laid out at the potluck in an attempt to keep tabs on the question "what did we learn?" Also, Alex is leading this coming monday, and maybe these will be of some use to her as she continues our trajectory.

To review, we started of with a basic leading/following exercise with a twist. Blind partners led by their seeing partners around the room progressed to leaders only touching their blind partners in order to prevent collision. This then progressed to non-verbal agreements between leaders to switch partners, and then the pace was accelerated. With this exercise I hoped to find group mind out of necessity. The seer must be constantly aware of everything happening around you in order to protect your partner. The blind partner must be totally trusting of the group. It is also just fun.

Then for the rest of the lab we split into groups of four and five, and while one group watched the other performed a ~5min ensamble dance, working towards finding an ending as a group. How to make decision as a group (especially how to finalize that something is an ending without saying so) brought a few challenges. Here are a few observations from people that a jotted down during the harvest, I hope I can sum up what people were saying accurately enough:

-Louis brought up the word "satisfaction" and that these dances had a certain kind of satisfaction when the same thing happened at the same time, synchronicity happened, etc. That these short dances were like swimming on the surface, which has a different sort of satisfaction than one might find in a duet or more extended, developed dance, which is more like "diving deep."

-The concept of a "cleansing dance" came up. Which I believe is a short dance followed by another dance to sort of get the initial unfocused energy out of the way.

-Scott (I think) mentioned that when trying to perform as a group, the individual is looking around at a sea of ideas, trying to pick up on the strongest one and joining in that idea to try to find some cohesiveness. Different people end up choosing different anchors to join, and then there is pressure to abandon your idea in favor of the group dynamic. So the whole thing can be a shallow negotiation of these elements. Scott suggests that sometimes the best choice to make in a "soup" is a strong new choice instead of affirming someone else's not as strong choice. But then we have to balance this with the question of "how do we do less?" How do we as a group find cohesion through ways other than just testing out ideas in a soup?

-How do we avoid the contrasty/slapstick rutt which seem to be the two most prominent choices in group improv?

Some ways to improve the format of these exercises were suggested:

-Begin with 20 seconds of breathing and stillness
-Have a "seed" to build the improv around
-Connected to the "seed" idea, have a solo, then a octet (assuming there are 9 people total) in response, followed by a duet in response, followed by a septet in response, followed by a trio in response, and so on and so on.
-Having someone call start once the group was onto something, and composing from there, or having multiple "ends" so that things could continue to develop longer/see what happens.
-Someone dancing calls end.

Sheila also asked if there were some tips/tricks of the trade for group improvisation for those who had not done it in a while. I will just list some off the top of my head that I use, anyone please add to it!

-Staging--where is everyone in the space? How does where I put myself contextually change other people/our relationship?

-Contrast/imitation--I think this is an obvious one, but it can go in non-obvious directions. Contrast can be a contrast of energy of course, but it can also be a shift of idea. Becoming verbal, changing my role, or focus shifts can all be contrasts. Imitation doesn't necessarily just mean doing what someone else is doing. Can I do what they are doing but much bigger or much smaller? In another part of the room? Develop it into something new?

-Developing thematic relationships/identities-- maybe I have a goal that you are trying to accomplish, such as "I'm trying to get away" or "I'm trying to rearrange people" or "I want to touch everyone's forehead"or "I am going to walk in circles" etc. Also I often find a physicality/mood that I like within a dance, and then I let that define how I interpret new information/decisions.

-Repetition--if a theme/movement returns from earlier it helps with cohesion, if that is what I want. Sometimes it helps me to store things that I like, and then when I get stuck I can come back to them.

-Rhythm--sometimes if I am stuck I think about the rhythm of what is going on or how to add rhythm. Or as the arc of the piece as a whole as rhythm. Maybe this is sort of like contrast.

-I follow my desires! I think mostly for me it's just about being aware of what's around me and then my gut will tell me what it needs.

Ok, hope this is helpful. Will see you all at the potluck!



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