Category Archives: the dance

Feb5

pina

Posted on by

Dancing is not getting up painlessly like a speck of

dust blown around in the wind.

Dancing is when you rise above both words, tearing

your heart to pieces, and giving up your soul.

                                                  Rumi

I saw the film Pina yesterday.  If you have not seen it you must. What came shining through for me is connected to what I am writing about for my class, Breaking into Blossom.  In the words of Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play:  Improvisation in Life and Art:  “The noun of self becomes a verb.”

I do not see a lot of that in dance performance.  I often feel too much self in the performance, as if a mirror is always there, reflecting the performer back at himself.  Something a little too ironic or clever.   Movement that is too opaque, too filled up with the performer.

What Wim Wenders’s film captures and what I saw time and time again in the theater with Bausch’s work, is the complete, exquisite surrender of the dancer to the dance.  Movement and mover inseparable, incandescent.

 

 

 

 

SHARE & EMAIL
Jan30

running with the horse

Posted on by

Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling is the most beautiful man on or off a horse that I have ever seen. I do not mean “sexiest man alive” beautiful, but lovely in his ability to be with a horse – beautiful in the connection. His work with a horse on the ground is an extraordinary dance improvisation.  His movement is neither predator nor prey, but has a deep, grounded athleticism like a kind of running tai chi.

When I first saw this video (below), I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to run with Nelson, the formerly wild Mustang. So yesterday we went out into the big field and did our walking dance:  me asking him to move around me in a circle and then come back to me.  This is all at liberty, no halter or lead rope and in a six acre field.  Just small hand signals.  So far so good.

Then I  started running.  I wanted him to see me running, but not be afraid.  So I ran away from him.  He looked mystified, but not particularly alarmed.  I walked back to him and petted him, then I ran away again.  This went on for a bit.

Then I said, “OK, you run.”  I have been hesitant to ask him to run because in the past he would run AWAY and then our time together is finished for that day.  But this time he ran, head up, tail flagging, but with one eye on me.  And when I did that little signal with my hand by my side, he circled and came back.  We hung out together and then I asked him to run again.  And again he came back.

I am no Klaus, but I was pretty happy with that dance.  And Nelson seemed pretty happy too.  Two animals working  out together how to go and come back, how to run and be connected.  And all of that makes me a very happy horse dancer.

Here is the master:

Jan28

soft animal

Posted on by

I love this photograph of my daughter.  She was modelling an exercise for a chapter in my book.  It feels this from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

I wrote about the attic, the basement the other day as a metaphor for the body, and the way we experience those unconscious spaces in our bodies.  My friend, the poet Nicole Rushin shared it on Google+ and there was a pretty rich discussion thread.

She said, “There are days when I feel like I deny my physical self, my body. I wonder what I am doing here? I am spirit – why do I have these bones and this flesh? My body is like a carrier for me some days, unfamiliar and strange. And having said all that I suppose I am most at ease in the attic discovering new things and un-burying old treasure.”

We don’t live in the attic, though.  So I wondered about the body’s living spaces – where we are spending most of our time.  For me, I think it is in my hips, my spine.  That is where I feel the dancing and the riding the most.

Where are you living?

Jan26

pentimento

Posted on by

Ryder Cooley and Lady Moon (Ngonda Badilia) in Xmalia

Pam White and our friend Suzanne were talking about pentimento, the practice of over-painting – basically the artist changing his/her mind.  Pam had some examples of her own pentimento on her Google+ page.

That got me to reflecting on the past two days, when i have been directing and making new movement for Xmalia. The process of choreographing, standing back, and then going in and layering in different or denser or richer movement is painterly in a similar way.  Sometimes the hint of a first rendering is there, other times I obliterate it completely, but even so, some trace remains.

Maybe I just like the feeling of the word.  It reminds me of another favorite word, palimpsest, the difference being that in that case the layers of a manuscript or scroll or painting were scraped or washed away, say with milk and oat bran.

I think what I really like is the idea of underlayers – of something earlier either concealed or revealed by what has been put down later.

When I went from being an actor to being a dancer, the actor was still there, shining through in the dances.  Now that I am writing, the dancer is still there, because the words are gestural – like movement to me – they have a physical resonance that I can feel.

And sometimes I have scraped things away – old text, old selves.  More about that in The Journal this week.

I am interested in how you are feeling your layers.  Over-painting or scraping away with milk and oat bran?