Notice outside the body, notice inside: the air, the room, your breath, and where your body is touching the floor.
• Have a real inquiry into movement, not a fixed agenda. Be curious.
• Notice how you’re supporting yourself along the floor.
• Focus attention inside, attention outside.
• Keep the folds of the body malleable.
• Soften elbows: push against the floor with your hands, to initiate sliding across the surface.
• Soften knees: push against the floor with your feet to initiate sliding.
• As you continue pushing and sliding, focus on the folds of the body, folding toward center and extending through space.
• These two things, folding and extending parts of the body, are happening all the time; let’s bring awareness to it. Fold and extend the arms and legs, but also the spine, skeleton, fingers, and toes.
• Your body is constantly sliding as you shift your weight through space—focus on everything coming into the center, and moving away from the center.
• Remember the eyes. Remember to see.
• Shifting, folding, and extending: keep a malleable skeleton, with lots of space in the joints.
• Imagine swimming through water.
• Consciously engage your arms. Shift between hands and feet, supporting yourself on your feet, on your hands.
• If you space out, click your fingers.
Multiplicity: With Partners
• Working in trios: Person A, with eyes closed, lies in an X on the floor. Partners B and C move person A’s body, folding and extending. Be curious about how body A can move while noticing how your body also moves to move that body. Explore; then change roles so each person gets a turn being moved.
• When all three have finished, continue the same exploration, but with eyes open and attention toward space, direction, and will. Notice where you have leverage from the floor and from contact with others.
• Activate a little more through relationship to the floor and points of contact, sending the body into space.
Consider:
• How do you remember the specificity, detail, and “it-ness” of movement generated by improvisation for your own choreographic work?
• Technique is being able to adapt to any unknown situation in real time in relation to the parameters or conditions you are pre-given.
DAY 7
Choreographer and performer: Ann Carlson
Grass
Photograph © Mary Ellen Strom (2000)
Embracing Mystery
Earth and sky as one in the space of the unknown.
—Suprapto Suryodarmo
Dancing involves surrendering to something larger than the self. Moving and making give access to the mysterious pulse of life, willing us to be participants. If we deny energy and ecstasy—the place of mystery—in our lives, we are cut off from this deep, ancient resource. When we dance beyond muscle power, sense of control, endocrine high, buff physique, and societal praise; when we source more deeply, we open to the mystery within each moment.
Dancing is art making, a process of articulation. Art making requires that we value and prioritize a creative life. If we view dance as a life’s work, not a hobby, it offers a fruitful, intelligent, generous way to live to the fullest. The process of art making is very specific and in no way romantic. It builds one’s capacity to feel emotions when facing the immensity of life’s events. Courage, wisdom, justice, and reverence are required. Creating through dancing can keep you alive, focus your attention, and wake you up in the middle of the night. It can help you to love the world.
Ask yourself this question: do you see yourself as an artist or a student of art? And to answer, take a leap of faith. Open to your true nature. Consider yourself an artist, and everything you do will be filtered through this lens. Unfolding the creative self, with honesty and integrity, builds your house on solid ground. Not the ego self, the “I-am-ing” self, but the individual in pursuit of wholeness, all that is whole, holy. Daily you face the blank page, emptying to open.
There’s simultaneously the invitation to maintain a “beginner’s mind.” Approaching art making with this curiosity and freshness allows the “empty vessel” perspective of a lifelong student. Art making is an investigation and discovery, a pathway for research into knowing oneself and the world more fully. In this way you are both artist and student.
You can have collaborations, assistance, and conviviality: the friend who calls at just the right moment and asks a potent question; the colleague who adds new dimensions; a community of other artists, audience members, and critics who view your work and stay the course. These essential collaborators may remain with you throughout your life, pushing and supporting the edges of your work. But ultimately, the journey is yours.
STORIES
Moving Rock
Along the rock faces of Marloes Sands beach in southern Wales, Gill Clarke and I move together as part of a weeklong intensive. We are drawn to tumbled, horizontal boulders juxtaposed with vertical uplifts that form a kind of stage. Climbing, then closing our eyes, the impulse is to invert, ooze, and slide down the coarse surface like the molten lava it once was. Experiencing the abrasive granite bedrock as fluid counters logic. Who knew? Time shifts to timelessness. Moving at that speed, every cell finds its way. Arriving at Avebury Stone Circle in England, we walk on the 30-foot-high outer bank. How did these hundred standing stones get here? Who shaped the 1,400-foot-wide perimeter, and why? Groups are picnicking, dancing, strolling with children and dogs. We have come to mark World Environment Day with movement. After hours of viewing, we slip into dancing, like others have done for centuries. It’s a ritual site inviting participation, not functional but purposeful—like our dances.
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On the Gaspé Peninsula of Canada, I meander down to an isolated stretch of the Grand Cascapédia River. Picking up two stones, I close my eyes and begin moving, clicking the stones together. Another stone catches my attention, another dance. Sometimes, themes for a dance just need an invitation to call them forth. Over the next hour there are seven stones, seven dances, forming a whole—beginning to end—accompanied by water.
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Songwriter Paul Simon has described this receptive process: sometimes the song comes so fast, all he can do is catch it and write it down. If he hesitates, it’s gone.
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Colleague Caryn McHose is drawn to stones: she can sit for hours at the water’s edge, looking, feeling, and collecting. I watch, now, as she chooses tiny pebbles from a beach in Giovinazzo, near Bari
