Movement Idea .3

Movement Idea .3, for your consumption...
I say that this is for your consumption because I would like the participant to take a new position or perspective of movement (dance) as a language of expression. My purpose is not aesthetics or style, but instead a communication.
To participate, you are invited to read the movement. Reading the movement means that you will watch, listen, and reflect. Second is the translation of the movement idea. As you reflect, watch and listen again and again and again, you will then take the idea and speak it yourself using your own body and movement 'technique' (I use the word technique here in the sense that all bodies have an acquired and learned way of moving). Thirdly, and this is the most exciting and rewarding part, you will then video yourself translating the movement and then share with all of us **.

**I realize that readers can not embed video to this blog as comments but you can post a link to your video in the comments section. If you do take the 3rd, exciting step, please leave some words along with it in the comments section, so that we can know your perspective or state of being :)

Final Summer Video

This is my final video post for this summer trial.  I will be sure to post the video of the formal showing of this accumulation.  

To recap, I am using these videos and this online presence to expose or find human subjectivity.  By subjectivity I mean the uniqueness or individual qualities that make a person identifiably singular among all other humans.  This summer I have acquired new language to describe what I have already known but not fully understood.  I had the privilege of listening to Michael Kliën speak and share his philosophy of dance as well as participate in what he calls Excavations, which are safe spaces where a person can dig out their thought-body and release it into an honest and true dancing state. 
Kliën believes that dance forms and bodies are institutionalized, shaped by their societies, and are owned and regulated by the politics and philosophies of these societies; hence most people have never had the experience of an intense and true dancing state.  This of course involves the politics of bodies and bodies in motion; what is proper, what are acceptable ways the body can or should move?  

So an aspect of this research is to instigate a method whereby a person, a moving body, can have a safe place to excavate into their own body's way of speaking a common language without judgement.

This is Not Your Regular Rehearsal

In the common dance world there is a usual set up of events that lead to a performance:  

1.  A choreographer premeditates movement or an idea for a rehearsal with dancers
2. Dancers and choreographer show up to regularly scheduled rehearsals where the choreographer shows or facilitates movement to be learned by the dancers
3. The dancers take on the role of emulators of movement and feeling, basically they do what the choreography tells them to do
4. The choreographed dance is performed by the dancers in a performance space where the outcome is clearly defined and foreknown

 As a choreographer and performer I have always valued the ability to make choices in performance, and as I have matured in age as well as in my art form, I increasingly am investigating choice making, sensing, being, and active sharing of responsibility in performance.  
Here is the third installment of the movement accumulation for this summer project.  Two dancers are watching and embodying the movement contained in the videos over a set period of time.  The two dancers are tasked with using their own bodily knowledge (they must stay truthful to their own thought-body) to translate the movement.
P.S. Anyone is welcome to try this at home.  Can you take this simple, pedestrian movement and allow your body to speak it? 

 

Here I Go

This is not easy for me, putting myself into the open space, a space larger than what I am accustomed.
I am a choreographer and I am in my final year of graduate school (MFA Choreography).  This blog is to serve the function of keeping me on task and in truth.  Truth, honesty; finding voice from a new impetus and following intentions. 
I just spent a three day intensive workshop with Ana Sanchez-Colberg and she was a validation for me and oh my, what knowledge and desire to share!  Before that it was three days with the wise-man choreographer, Alonzo King and he was a life changer for me.  Both of these experiences I will hold on to as I go forward in life because what they taught me had more to do with life and living than art and dancing.
So here I go, into the vast internet, grasping at the ephemeral-web place in an effort to find new space for inspiration or poietic instance.