Tag Archives: improvisation

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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Feb15

the wait

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Guinevere and Jules are waiting for us to finish tea and make their breakfast.  They are moderately patient.  They are confident that breakfast will arrive.

I am waiting for inspiration.  I am impatient.  I am not confident that inspiration will come. For the past couple days I have been feeling a lull, like a surfer out on a flat sea, no wave in sight.

But I am keeping in mind something that Stephen Nachmanovitch said:  Attempts to conquer inertia are by definition, futile.  Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness.  Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.

I know that in dance, stillness is the canvas on which the movement appears.  With my writing have lost some sense of stillness being the place to begin.  I am filling the moment with too much effort, too many gestures, too little breath.  There is also this:

To the mind that is still
the whole universe surrenders.
                                       Buddha

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!

 

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.