Tag Archives: dance

Feb17

cookbook for the bonehouse: upcoming workshop

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I don’t usually do an out-and-out pitch, but for those of you who have been wanting a non-digital, deeply physical experience, this is it.

MOVEMENT FOUNDRY presents

COOKBOOK FOR THE BONEHOUSE

an improvisation workshop for dancers and performing artists

 

with PAULA JOSA-JONES, MA, CMA, RSME/T

 

SUNDAYS, March 25th & April 1st,  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm

 A two-day workshop that takes a playful and strategic approach to movement, voice and performance. For the past twenty-five years, Paula Josa-Jones has developed a “cookbook” of wild play “recipes” that she uses to challenge and focus dancers. Techniques include: development of personal, kinetic imagery; the power of stillness; the palette of dynamic space; internal phrasing; initiation and beyond; a thousand voices (a “chunking down” practice that brings greater clarity and differentiation to the body); shape shifting; listening and responding.

CLASSES TAKE PLACE AT

The Dance Complex, 536 Mass Ave. Cambridge 02139

COST
$30 for both classes / $18 a la carte

HOW TO REGISTER
Please email movementfoundry@gmail.com to reserve your spot.

You will be asked to pre-pay for your classes by check. Mailing address will be provided.

PLEASE NOTE
Participants interested in taking both classes will be given registration preference.
Maximum capacity: 22 students per class

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT
WWW.MOVEMENTFOUNDRY.YOLASITE.COM

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Feb12

bodyscape

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(I apologize to the photographer, Marconi.  I cannot find a really good link to his work.  If any of you have one, please pass it along.)

I don’t usually include the work of other photographers in my blog.  It feels dishonest, a little like cheating.  But that is just an old tune in my head. When I find something this beautiful, it has to be shared.

Here is what I love about this photograph.  It is completely kinetic – when I look at it, I can feel the contours of the landscape in my body, can feel the breath and music of it so clearly through my terrain of skin, muscle and bone.

When I was just out of college, I took a dance improvisation workshop with the great choreographer Trisha Brown.  One of the things she asked us to do to create movement was to “read” the a wall in the studio with our movement, to translate what we saw into dance.  We all got busy dancing the basketball hoop, the windows, the bleachers, the sky beyond.  That experience kicked open a door to something that has always stayed with me – connecting what is outside with what is inside – finding that creative, generative impulse from everything around me.

I teach a workshop called Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  Here is a recipe for you:  Sometime today, maybe right now, stand up and face a direction you usually don’t.  Let your shoulders or your hips or your nose “read” (translate) whatever you are looking at into movement.  Do it again, but this time slow it way down.  Do it again fast.  What are you feeling?

Tell me about it!

 

Feb7

the mirror

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Photo:  Jeffrey Anderson

I will say right from the start that it feels strange to post this picture.  Even though I am a performer.  Even though I was for a number of years, a model.

About ten years ago I stopped wanting my picture taken.  Age?  Probably.  Something else in the mix as well, I am sure. Something to do with hiding.  However, I am redoing my website, and it was suggested that new headshots were a good idea.  So I trekked to Glen’s Falls and Jeffrey  (with wife Laura and new baby Jeffrey in attendance) took some pictures.  I am not shy with Jeffrey.  So it felt ok to let myself be seen.

The reason that I bring this up is that I wrote yesterday about seeing the Wim Wenders film, Pina.  What I was aware of as I watched the astonishing dancers of her company was the absence of mirror in their dancing.  Their pure, wild absorption in the movement and the moment.  From their words, I understood that Pina was their mirror and their witness.  The big, allowing container for their movement that let them push themselves off precipice after precipice of their dancing and their fear.

As Shunryu Suzuki says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:  “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”

Today when I was in my studio, I turned my big mirror around, so that it was only the space and the music holding me.  At first, this was disconcerting – we dancers are mirrored creatures, seeking reflection, affirmation, information.  But then the movement began to tumble and spill.  Almost as if Pina herself were in the room, urging me to dance my longing, my love.

 

Feb5

pina

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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.