Category Archives: the dance

Oct5

get out on the floor!

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Photo: Jeffrey Anderson; Ingrid Schatz & DeAnna Pellecchia in “Stallion Tango”

I am looking for more ways to get out on the floor.  Getting out on the floor means dancing (writing, riding, loving) full out, no stops, all in.  I came across this delicious video when I was doing some research for one of the performers I coach.  Check out Ruel and Mike. They are ALL in.  How often do you get out on the floor?

Oct4

contact

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I have been thinking about the emphasis on connection through social media.  And about the disembodied nature of those connections.  As a dancer, I can feel the remove, the disconnect of all of this faux intimacy.

It is why I think it is so essential to get out of the chair and into the studio:  back in the saddle, into messy, sensuous, fleshly meetings. Body to body.

I found this sweet old clip of Steve Paxton introducing contact improvisation at Jacob’s Pillow, and loved the juiciness, the workmanlike, diligent quality of the two bodies moving together. He talks about CI as a way of staying in touch, about the skin as an organ of transformation and transmission.

That is why between noon and 1pm every day, I pack it in and drive to the barn.  That is one of my “studios,” a place of practice and observation.  It is where I get in touch.  Skin to skin, hips to spine.  It is why I swim every morning.  Rediscover the long body, feel the body’s surfaces and deeps meeting in the soft water.

Where do you connect?  What is your studio?

 

 

 

 

Sep28

the spaces between

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photos:  Jeffrey Anderson

dancers:  Ingrid Schatz & DeAnna Pelecchia

 

 

 

I love this sequence of photographs because of what it reveals about the spaces between.  The spaces between the bodies, and more important, the spaces of transition from one movement to another.

Recently I noticed in myself a tendency to not straighten my body, not lengthen into the vertical as I moved from one task to another.  Bending forward to pick up one thing then curving into another movement were blending.  I think it is the remnants of when my girls were small.  My whole body became a forward bending arc of love, protection, readiness to hold, to embrace, to dress, to bring my body around them. I can feel it in the barn too – bending forward to wrap the horses’s legs, to pick up a brush, and somehow the spaces between becomes part of that, rather than having a fullness of their own.

So now I am paying attention to the spaces between – consciously lengthening upward and reaching my legs downward between.  It brings breath in, broadens my perspective outward for a moment before I lean into the next thing.

The word for the space between the cells is interstitial. I love that word because it captures something of the secret hiddeness of those spaces, their subtlety.

How do you feel your transitions?  How do you pay attention to the spaces between?