Category Archives: the body

Jan26

breath and gesture

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I spent a part of yesterday doing Authentic Movement with my friend, dancer Pamela Newell.  In Authentic Movement, the mover closes their eyes, and in the presence of a witness, “waits to be moved” by whatever impulse is arising in the body.  There is no expectation or preference for a particular kind of movement.  The witness is a container for the experience of the mover, and follows their own images and bodily experiences as they arise.

In my experience, there is nothing like this practice.   You never quite know what kind of wind is blowing, where it will come from or where it will take you.  Yesterday, at one moment, my fingers felt gossamer, transparent, light as moth’s wings, and in another moment, my arm stretched out for minutes like an iron bar seeking heat.  There are no stories that need be told or interpreted, only one moment linked to another by breath and the body.

This spring I will be offering several workshops.  If you would like to host a workshop in your community, contact me here:   Email Paula

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Jan18

raving in wind

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In the late nineties, Pam and I went to the Galapagos.  It was another one of my obsessions, like the horses, like adoption, like every dance I have ever made.  I read everything about the islands, and became obsessed with the albatross.  To me, it was – and is – a mythic bird, a creature with the largest wingspan of any bird – up to 12 feet.   Their flight is  soaring, and they are known to cover up to 1000 km per day and may stay out at sea for up to seven months before returning to their natal breeding grounds.  They breed for life and the pairs have complex, beautiful dances unique to each pair, developed over years of dancing together.  I needed to see them, feel them.

PHOEBASTRIA IRRORATA

When we arrived at Espanola Island, we saw our first albatrosses.  The first bird was so close that I could see every detail of its great soft eye.  There is something so deep, old and wise in that eye.  I stood and watched them dance, soar, nest  – tears running down my cheeks.  When we got back home, I began to make a dance inspired in part by the albatross – my bodily impressions of them, – and in part by the wild drawings of raptors and crows by Leonard Baskin.

I called the dance Raving in Wind, a line from the poem Rancor of the Empirical by Ann Lauterbach in And, for Example

Now comes the hard, hopeful part.  On Facebook, I found this link. Watch this, feel this, care about this enough to do something.  Why hopeful, you ask.  Because this is an opportunity to open, to love, to act.

http://www.midwayfilm.com/

For more information, watch Chris Jordan talk about his experience and his project.
http://youtu.be/pGl62LuQask

Jan14

get lost

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I read this story in the New Yorker about the street dancer Storyboard P with interest.  The same week, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and was drawn to this ancient dancer.  A week later, I performed my new solo – The Traveler (Moth to the flame) – at the APAP Booking Dance showcase at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

All of this has me thinking about why I/we dance, and where these dances come from. About intention, inspiration, improvisation as a political act, and improvisation as passionate gesture.  About the body and what it desires, what it demands, where it takes us and how often we do not go along for the ride.  About rhythm, stillness and listening. About finding and losing oneself in the movement and the moment.

There was one moment in my performance where I forgot where I was going.  It was an interesting, rich moment – a kind of time-space hiatus.  I wasn’t worried, more curious and astonished by both the emptiness and the possibilities.  Then the movement I had rehearsed pushed through, but it was somehow different, re-infused and invigorated by that momentary hush.  I am building work differently now – more intuitively and at the same time the process feels canny, knowing.  Throughout, I focus on getting lost to find it.

At APAP I shared a dressing room with the brilliant Claire Porter, and two beautiful French men – Manuel Vignoulle and Isaies Santamaria Perez.  At one point Isaies said, “I only want to dance.”  Me too.  Well, I also want to write and ride, but the dancing is first.  It is the hardest, wildest place.  It is where I can get lost and found, over and over again.

Here is another seeker.

Dec27

wild woman

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The Messenger, choreographed and performed by Paula Josa-Jones; Photo:  Nick Novick

“You have to make yourself some kind of an antenna for the songs to come to you.  So you have to make yourself a kind of a musical yourself.  You have to be of music and have music in you – some way for songs to continue to want to live in you or near you.  You gotta be real quiet sometimes if you want catch the big ones.”

Tom  Waits, July 1992, Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words

I made The Messenger in 1992, the same year as this quote by Tom Waits.  What he said there about music then is what I have been saying for as many years about dance.  That you have to become dance.  You can’t do dance, it has to eat you alive and spit you out speaking in tongues and breathing fire or tender and wet as a newborn lamb.

I am making a new solo called The Traveler (Moth to the flame) to music by Tom Waits.  I will perform it at the APAP Booking Dance Festival in New York on January 10.  The dance is about a traveler in an unpredictable landscape.  It is a dance that is chewing me up.  It is so hard, physically and emotionally, that I am often afraid to rehearse it.  Waits’s music is like the mule driver and the light in the dark.

A friend of mine said that she was looking for a way to dance (she is 50) that won’t destroy her.  I am older than she is but don’t seem to have that kind of restraint.  Working on this dance, I enter through a door that looks like it won’t explode and then find myself in a mine field.  Sometimes it is the music but mostly it is what comes slithering and snapping out of my body.  I don’t want to shut the door.

Building work from and for my own body only is harrowing and exhilarating.  For many years, I opened those doors for dancers in my company, and traveled with them wherever things led.  Dancing now is different than it was twenty years ago.  I have learned how to move in back and forth from what is a sheer, intuitive download to refining form without losing the heat.  I have more patience and faith.  That only took a lifetime.

Come and see!

Booking Dance Festival