• Extend the heel out into space, and lower your leg slowly to the ground.
• In contrast: lift your leg consciously. Notice if your thigh muscles bunch around the joint (and the knee goes slightly to the side). This reflects moving your leg from your quadriceps muscles, a less efficient action.
Even beginners can do deep reflexes, allowing release of the hamstring muscles through reciprocal innervation—as one muscle shortens, the opposite lengthens. The hip joint is a common place of tension. For efficiency at the hip, look for the reflexive pattern, the fastest, most efficient pathway in the body.
TO DANCE
Light-Touch Duets (Felice Wolfzahn)
20 minutes
Training includes comfort with skin-level contact.
Working in pairs, standing: Dancer A has eyes open, Dancer B has eyes closed.
• Dancer A strokes down the skin or cloth somewhere on Dancer B’s body. Use a light touch, so you aren’t pushing or moving your partner’s body. The touch creates a tingling sensation—stimulating light touch receptors in the skin (not muscle or bone).
• Dancer B receives the sensation (impression), and allows the body to respond (expression). Notice what instinctual action occurs. You don’t have to preplan or be interesting. Let this response settle.
• Dancer A strokes another place, using another body part (foot, shoulder, head). Make the stroke long and specific (not a poke or push), using light touch.
• Dancer B responds.
• Continue (5 minutes). Pause.
• Change roles: Dancer B touches; Dancer A closes eyes and receives.
• Continue (5 minutes). This will travel you through space. Keep noticing what you’re actually sensing, rather than anticipating your response.
• Pause. Take a few minutes to discuss your experience.
• Now, both have eyes open: alternate touching and being touched, with no words. Don’t worry if the sequence gets confused; just keep working (5 minutes).
• Now, dance your light-touch duet as solos. Each dancer works separately. Be clear about the imaginary stroke of stimulation, and then respond.
• Visually, this allows highly specific places of initiation for movement, unpredictable yet clear.
• Watch each other’s light-touch solos.
• Try this moving across the floor, first with one partner touching, and then again, soloing on your own.
• Reverse roles.
• Enjoy light-touch duets as part of your creative tool kit.
TO WRITE
Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses
20 minutes
Discuss your areas of strength and weakness as a dancer, along with training techniques that support your growth—some make you feel great, some push your edge. What might be useful to move your dancing forward? Consider your personal response to these questions: What is technique? What are you training for?
Photograph © Paul H. Taylor
STUDIO NOTES
JEANINE DURNING teaches and investigates technique in a movement workshop at Middlebury College (2011):
What creates a generative state and what limits one? What serves your inquiry?
Seated on the floor, begin moving:
• 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