Integration and Differentiation
• Take a walk, feeling the spaciousness of these long walks, these three landmarks in your body. Notice if they increase your sensation of depth, front to back. We often think of our bodies as flat, from photographs and mirrors. But actually, depth is essential in dancing.
TO DANCE
Presentations—Building Duets (Paul Matteson)
30 minutes
Sometimes you get stuck moving in one place; presentations help you get started extending beyond your comfort zone.
Starting seated on the floor with a partner, touching back to back:
• Dancer A presents a limb in space (arm, head, shoulder, foot). Dancer B extends the presented line in space, using hands or other body part to create an energy line.
• Dancer A follows the extended line wherever it takes him or her until the energy resolves. Dancer B accompanies the journey.
• Dancer A presents another limb in a clear directional path. Dancer B extends the line or vector in space and follows through space.
• Stay alert: use strong enough touch to mobilize the presented limb without forcing, or overextending joints.
• Repeat for 5 minutes: presenting, extending, following, until it resolves.
• Change roles. Dancer B presents a limb; Dancer A extends a line (using hands or another body part) and follows it in space, using any body part to reach, any part to extend (5 minutes).
• Alternate presenting, extending the line, without talking. Stay in continuous motion (5 minutes).
• Explore dancing the duet with no one leading (5 minutes).
• Show your duets (5 minutes each).
• Construct set material from your experience, collaboratively building a short, choreographed duet. Retain the freshness of the improvised experience, while remembering landmarks.
• Show and discuss what you find.
PearsonWidrig DanceTheater
Photograph © Tom Caravaglia
TO WRITE
Creative Conditions
20 minutes
You’ve been thinking about your values and longing. Now go a step further. Describe your creative process. What works for you? Consider time, place, and useful stimuli. Identify one aspect of your process that could be more efficient or effective, and explore how that could manifest in your studio practice.
Photograph by Erik Borg, courtesy Middlebury College Archives
STUDIO NOTES
PENNY CAMPBELL leads a warm-up for a Performance Improvisation course at Middlebury College in Vermont (2007):
Dance begins in sensation. It starts with you.
Lying down, eyes closed:
• Begin each time where you actually are, how you feel in this moment, in this place. Notice sensation. Begin moving, finding impulses in your own body, however small or large.
• Don’t judge at this point. Be curious. Just follow the movement that emerges. Notice when you get those little sensations of “yes, this feels right” or “no, don’t want to go there.” Follow the “yes.”
• If you find yourself in familiar movement, look for new initiations, investigate possibilities. Change one little thing, just a little bit. Stop rather than go, go rather than stop, or change level.
• Feel your skin on the floor; gradually warm up through muscles; notice bone. Remember that movement comes from and creates sensation. Follow sensation.
• Return to your breathing; connect to your inner experience.
• Begin as a soloist. Root the whole process in you. Grow a deep root, a strong connection, so when you add vision and dance with others your choices are still sourced in you. Let things unfold moment by moment. If you lose that connection, close your eyes for a moment and reconnect; start again.
• Dancing can begin long before we are actually warmed up. It’s a state of mind, focused attention and intention. Notice when warming up becomes dancing.
• Change levels and explore new spatial orientation. Stay rooted. Don’t judge. Let the little ticker tape of self-criticism become background noise that you ignore. Return to sensation.
• Move each body part: from feet, to ankles, to lower legs, to knees, and on up through the body. Open through your shoulders. Find back-space. Continue moving. Be very specific (the left-nipple dance, the back-of-your-ear dance). Take your time.
• Try a duet with two body parts talking to each other.
• Make a different dance with each arm: find two voices. Feel your head and tail. Explore your spine. Find the articulation in each leg.
• Wake up all your senses: notice smell, sounds, and tastes as you move.
• Pick up speed. Go as fast as you can. Find unusual weight shifts. Surprise yourself. Really open your eyes now. Build your stamina. Go to your limit, and then continue three seconds longer. Develop your endurance.
• Use whatever happens (giggles, crashes). They are all material (keep your focus—don’t drop out). Don’t stereotype some movement as “dance” and exclude other movement (usually automatic movement) as “not-dance.” Everything is part of the unfolding event. All of it is compositional material. Deal with it.
• At some point, dance with each person in the room and with the room itself. Stay rooted in your own experience. Borrow movements and try them on. Catch a part of a movement, or be that person in the movement.
• Brush up against each person. Explore near and far. How close can you get? How far away can you get? What’s safe? How does it all feel?
• Use your eyes; follow your eyes in space. Let them lead you somewhere. Fix your vision in space, and move to and with it.
• Find your back-space; notice the space between body parts, between you and others.
• Expand awareness to the whole group, the whole room.
• Bring your movement to a close. Notice possible endings: how long does it take; what feels right in the moment? Find an ending that makes “sense.”
DAY 6
Dancer: Bebe Miller
Photograph © Julieta Cervantes
Training and Technique
Every lasting dance technique is based on anatomical truth.
—John M. Wilson, lecture
We train for the unknown. Dancing cultivates a personhood capable of meeting the art form. Like all awareness practices, dance requires a balance of study and practice, reflection and doing. Along with work in the studio, there’s history, anatomy, and aesthetics to engage, as well as understanding media and the collaborative art forms. Throughout, there’s the creative edge of invention. Dancing requires our largest selves. Our choices for training reflect this desire, this understanding.
Contemporary