write for 10 more minutes.
Photograph © Julieta Cervantes
STUDIO NOTES
KATHLEEN HERMESDORF teaches a technique class at the Bates Dance Festival with musician Albert Mathias (2010):
Flow in dancing can be inspired through touch.
Keeping the energy moving:
• Move across the floor, engaging space from one side of the room to the other.
• Next pass, as you travel, partner yourself on the journey. Use light, receptive, responsive touch to add momentum, flow, and specificity. Feel yourself touching and being touched. Try this several times as you cross the room.
• For example, touch your head and give it a light push to direct your movement through space. Feel yourself being touched and touching. Take time.
• Try your hip: touch one hip and give it a spin through and into space.
• Move through various body parts, nonhierarchically and spontaneously—including and encompassing the whole body, without aversions or preferences.
• Then dance again as soloist, feeling as though you are still being partnered. Enjoy the specificity of initiation, the impulse to follow momentum and flow through space.
Working with a partner:
• Continue this process, but move across the floor with someone else doing the touching. It’s a duet; both partners keep moving through space, one person initiating the touching, the partner feeling and responding to the touching.
• Keep your own center while you are in dialogue; no shoving, forcing, or manipulating. It’s a touch conversation, with one person leading. Moderate the amount of pressure in the touch to indicate direction without forcing.
• Change roles.
• Thank your partner; check in if it feels useful.
DAY 4
Bandaloop
Artistic Director: Amelia Rudolph Dolomite Mountains of Italy
Photograph © Atossa Soltani (2006)
Fire
What We Might Need
Looking for that place of magical intensity …
—Barry Lopez, lecture
Sometimes we need fire: heat, will, the drive that gets us up in the morning and out to the studio, classroom, or world. Fire is passion, essential in the process of overcoming inertia, motivating curiosity, and committing to action. Fire excites us to begin a project—striking the match. But fire also sustains—the slow burn. How do we find our passionate nature and feed expression without exhausting ourselves, hurting others, or damaging the Earth?
Fire is energy. Ninety-nine percent of all energy on Earth comes from the sun. Heat from this radiant source is stored in plants and integrated into our bodies through the food we eat. Absorbed in the digestive tract, nutrients fire the mitochondria of our cells, and fuel our lives. Sustainable energy of body, like sustainable energy of Earth, involves choice making. Energy is energy; we do with it what we will. The same energy we use to rage at a friend or disparage an enemy could build a school or make a dance—it’s all fire. We have choice about how we channel the energy that moves through us.
Many dance-training techniques are focused around fire; aspects of each dance form evoke it. Inner fire needs healthy pathways for expression. While dancing, we can notice when we build energy and when we let it dissipate. Some physical practices and rehearsals feel good at the moment, but over time they burn us out. Others aren’t energetic enough, leaving us in a vulnerable state of sensing without directed action. Getting to know qualitative range in movement—from tiny flame to full burn, cool-down, coals, and afterglow—is essential.
Investigating the substance of personal fire—its history and range—brings perspective. Unresolved anger or addiction to an endorphin high is not enough to sustain a dancing life. Valuing dimensionality lets us play. Every body system has aspects of the fire element. Discerning the alchemy that’s right for the day, we know when an energetic practice serves and when it’s counterproductive. Some days, less can be more. And fire is contagious. As we access healthy drive in our dancing, we can encourage others to meet their potential.
The fire body has many dimensions, including the volume body and the agency body.1 The volume body is our visceral self. This core is the living, breathing organs that animate emotions and expression. The volume body orients us to others and to place. This is our warmth: our breath, heart, guts, and sexuality. What does the volume or visceral body need to be supported in expression and regulated in appropriate action? Sometimes we meet resistance at the level of the organs. If there’s a protest going on, there’s an intelligence getting expressed. Don’t be limited by self-judgment. Acknowledge resistance; when that gets met and re-sourced, energy courses forth naturally—because it’s inherent.
The agency body is our skeletal, muscular self, directing the volume body through space with an axis. Bones propel the body in contact with an outer surface—in most cases, the ground. Where we initiate movement at the bone level clarifies action and reveals intention. For example, moving from the hip joint rather than the knee creates a distinct look, trajectory in space, and whole-body coordination. As we differentiate the skeletal parts, we find a new level of integration. There are 206 bones in our highly mobile human skeleton; each has weight and takes up space. Skeletal directionality supports agency, our capacity for action in the world.
Muscles move the bones, building heat. If we need more fire through the agency body in our dancing, we can increase muscularity. Muscles, however, require responsive tone so they can move quickly and efficiently as well as powerfully. Sometimes willfulness creates rigidity in the body: we become irritable or entrenched in patterns. Ideally, we have toned, responsive muscles throughout, without hierarchies or favorites. Heat creates sweat, released through the living, breathing membrane of skin. The measurable electromagnetic field around the body is also heat; we feel it when we move with partners. Muscles play a role in invigorating our lives, moving beyond inertia into action and interaction.
Air modulates fire. With each breath, the outer environment becomes inner, and what’s inner becomes outer in cyclic exchange. Breath is an effective partner both in activating heat in the body and relaxing our drive. Breath rate and volume affect responses throughout the body. Short, quick breath arouses alertness in the nervous system; slow, continuous breathing calms the body-mind. Oxygen levels in the blood cue ease or stress. We have choice how we breathe, impacting movement expressivity.
Fire has a role in protecting what we love, standing up for values. We need to know that we can speak, act, and respond effectively in challenging encounters. Then silence and focused stillness are sourced in knowledge of the fire body—in fullness—not in repression. As we practice accessing our passion and channeling it in life-enhancing ways, we activate heat without unnecessary burn.
STORIES
