Thaw
Photograph © Tom Caravaglia
Getting Started
The Creative Process
There are two qualities necessary as an artist: fidelity and originality. Fidelity because it takes so much work and time to bring something to fruition, and there will be times when you will want to leave it behind. Originality because you are making something new, something never experienced before.
—Terry Tempest Williams, lecture
You can only dance where you are: physically, psychologically, and emotionally. To get started, take stock. Notice what is actually happening in your body right now—not what you want to have happening, but the sensations detailing inner and outer landscapes at this moment in time. Then authenticity will flow through movement. Dance, the mother of all movement forms, requires honesty, truthfulness. This includes a commitment toward not harming self or others in the process of art making. You make ethical choices when you are working with other people’s bodies. Then the body will open. Taking stock allows you to arrive, fully in the moment, ready to begin.
Where do we go within ourselves to source, or locate, our dancing? How do we let movement impulses flow into expression without too much restriction or convention? What’s the pathway to our unique creative flow? How do we get there, know when we’ve arrived, and find our way back to daily life? Can we create the conditions to return to that dancing place at a different time, from a new direction, under challenging circumstances? What do we encounter on the way: blocks, moods, and diversions? Pleasures, excitement, awe? As we become familiar with our creative process, these waypoints are signposts, not obstructions.
The creative process takes time and tenacity. It seems everything conspires to dilute our attention. We generally have to give up something to procure time and to receive the muse of our creative life: cancel a party, ignore email, or skip a trip with a friend. Then we still have to get ourselves to the studio to dance. At first, making time for creativity feels like a hard choice, but eventually the flow will refresh.
A life of dance is not for the undisciplined. Especially for those who engage in the creative dimensions of performing, improvising, and choreographing, dancing will lead to surprising aspects of self. The cortical mind, our top-down brain, likes to have something to do. To keep it from dominating the dancing scene, we can give it tasks. First, it can be helpful in setting up a schedule, getting us to the studio on time, and determining a regime. For example, a session might routinely begin with a body scan while moving, so all the body is awake. But creativity is rarely a linear process.
Whole-body thinking needs to take over. Both the agency body that moves us in space and the volume body that supports feelingful expression and gutsy connections can be called on to find pathways into movement. All the resources already explored in these chapters are available: orienting to weight and space through the bones, heat and range with the organs and muscles, and presence through the skin and senses. Sometimes music helps; at other times, the inner pulse is enough. Throughout, there is a cycling of awareness. Sensation permeates everything. That’s where dancing starts.
Once the process is familiar, any place, any time is for dancing. In an instant, we can arrive, access a creative state, and move. Completing the adventure, we return to daily life. The membranes are permeable between moving and dancing, the ordinary and extraordinary. We can notice when we are preparing to dance and when the dancing takes over and dances us. Some days, we can spend most of the time getting started, and other days, we are immediately present in a moving, dancing body. This is our place of dance—available for a lifetime, portable, practical, and free.
STORIES
Nurturing Creativity
A writer’s calendar depicts twelve female authors in their studios. One writes lying down in a cozy bed; another rents a room in a local motel for privacy; and another stands at a desk by a window. Each has a space and set of conditions that supports her process. What’s yours?
Finding Space
Some dance graduates say they don’t have time for class, can’t locate a studio or money. This too is a practice: finding time and space, and committing energy. In the first decade of our dance company, we did technique class daily—anywhere and everywhere. Pliés and tendus graced kitchens, balconies, and an empty ice cream parlor. On tour without a studio or stage, we simply found a space to move. Being resourceful is part of dancing, requiring both inner and outer endurance and creativity.
Being a Dancer
According to dancer David Dorfman, getting choreography done requires overcoming inertia: you get a core of dancers together, make a schedule, and develop material as a regular practice. He says, “A big percentage of being a choreographer is organizational—your long life of dance making is largely logistical.”
Photograph by Angela Jane Evancie
TO DO
Three Long Walks (Caryn McHose)
10 minutes
Three bony places in the body link back body with front body; when identified, they offer entranceways, landmarks linking your back body depth with forward body expression—moving you from thinking about a project to bringing it forth in the world.
Calcaneus
Standing in plumb line, bring your attention to your feet:
• Shift your weight toward your toes, your heels, and then circle the weight around the circumference of your feet. Close your eyes, circle your head, and notice the tiny adjustments of the twenty-six bones of your feet.
• Bring your attention back to your heel bone, the calcaneus. Feel or imagine the shape of this large bone directing the foot from the back.
• Refresh the long walk of the calcaneus, from back to front of the body.
Sit Bone to Pubic Bone
Seated on the floor or on a firm chair, bring your attention to your pelvis:
• Rock your weight forward and back, and feel the region between your “sit bones” and your pubic bone (the front of the pelvis). This region on each pelvic half is called the ramus—one of two feet of your pelvis.
• Notice if you can rock your weight on the “long walk” between your sit bones and pubic bones—the rami—and stay relaxed in your thigh muscles, separating leg from torso muscles.
• Continue rocking forward and backward, bringing stimulation to the full length of the rami: this long bone on each pelvic half makes a V to the front of the pelvis, like the prow of a ship. The right and left pubic bones connect at the interpubic disc, creating two joints at the front of the pelvis, one for each side.
• Option: you can also bring awareness to one ramus by lying on your side on the floor. Lift the top leg slightly so you can use your hand to trace the “long walk” from sit bone to pubic bone. Change sides. Notice how the bones meet in a V, creating an attachment site for the front triangle of the pelvic floor.
Occipital Condyles of the Skull
Seated or standing, lightly touch the outside flap of your ear that covers the hole (external auditory meatus):
• Imagine your fingertips on each side of the skull meeting in the middle of the head, creating a horizontal axis through the skull, linking ear to ear.
• Nod your head “yes,” and feel the place where the skull meets the top vertebra, the atlas. This one-to-two-inch-wide joint also connects from back to front of the plumb line in efficient alignment.
• Use your hand to feel the curve of the occipital bone,