Dance Lineage — the passing of movement memory from body to body

With Trisha Brown leaving this mortal coil last week, my thoughts turned again to my/our family tree of dancers.

Russell Dumas, who you worked with last week, worked with Trisha Brown. He also co-founded Sydney company Dance Exchange with one of my teachers, Nanette Hassall, who had danced in the Merce Cunningham Company. Nanette founded the Melbourne company Danceworks, which I was a dancer in under the Artistic Directorship of Beth Shelton and Helen Herbertson. Helen spent some time studying with Trisha Brown and brought something of that aesthetic into her work with Danceworks. She also brought Lloyd Newson, Artistic Director of London company DV8 to work with us which also influenced the aerial/climbing works (Physical Business and Vagabonds and High Flyers) that Helen and the Danceworks dancers collaborated on in the mid-nineties.

While I undertook my Dance Degree in the 80's (SACAE/Adelaide University) my teachers included: David Roche, who danced with Pearl Lang, who had danced with Martha Graham; Simi Roche who was accepted into the Martha Graham Company; Steve Paxton (founder of Contact Improvisation) with Lisa Nelson (Editor of Contact Quarterly); Elizabeth Cameron Dalman who was the founding Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre; Deborah Hay with whom my dance colleague in Danceworks, Ros Warby, works with regularly.

So when you are dancing my material you are also dancing the traces of all of the above...
There are physical imprints that stay with us and which intertwine with our personal experiences/aesthetics to create our own particular ways of dancing. So you have a great legacy supporting you...have a look at some of their bodies of work to see the connections (see the links I have inserted in this blog).

You could also say that the studios we work in hold those traces.
In 2005, while I was Artistic Director at Dancehouse, I made a film/community project called
Dance Path. It was a video collage of the living history of Dancehouse with twenty-two independent dance artists dancing their recollections of practicing and/or performing in the studios there. It includes the above mentioned Helen Herbertson and Ros Warby, as well another Deakin face, Shaun McLeod.

"Dance Interrogations" at "Ten Days on the Island"

This week I am presenting my dance and screen work "Dance Interrogations" in Hobart as part of the Ten Days on the Island Festival. The work began as my solo in an underground tunnel at the 2012 Adelaide Fringe, then a blacked out hotel room at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe, relocated into a train carriage at the 2013 Melbourne Fringe, and built into a two-part site specific work adding a duet with Melinda Smith in a hallway in the Abbotsford Convent in 2015.

Between 2013–15 the work formed the performance research of my PhD at Deakin University—”Dance Interrogations—the body as creative interface in Live Screen/Dance.”

The title has stayed as my duet practice with Melinda Smith continues to develop and in 2016 we secured Australia Council and Creative Victoria funding, and Footscray Community Arts Centre in-kind support, to develop the work, specifically building in harness/aerial work to build Melinda’s role and vocabulary. We were then invited to be “movers in residence” for the inaugural Salamanca Moves festival in Hobart, where we won the A.W.A.R.D. show. The award included a grant to return and be a part of the Ten Days on the Island program in March 2017.

http://tendays.org.au/event/dance-interrogations/

It has been an interesting collaboration with Melinda, who has cerebral palsy, over the past several years. It brings up lots of thoughts and strategies in relation to how we can work with/in our bodies.  In relation to dance technique I have found that working in duet with a dancer with a disability has opened up new artistic terrain for me as a dancer—inclusive strategies are not about working in a limited range or "dumbing down" physical virtuosity...they offer expanded views and new possibilities.

Melinda reflects on the process

The dance class as a whole event

I approach each dance class as a performance, a narrative, a complete story.

As I move through the material I look for connections, physically and intellectually—considering its unfolding like scenes in a novel or film.

I see the introductory warming up as a laying of the land—the introduction of characters, the mapping out of the location, getting a sense of the style (the period, the culture, the temperature)

As my body warms up and as I gather information (learn sequences) I begin to come into contact with other people and locations.

The action develops and the possibilities complicate to move me through different planes and at faster speeds or using more intricate language. I come across obstacles, need to find strategies for negotiating the new as my body moves in and out of the floor, skims through space or pushes up into the air.

And as I slow into the final stretching and cooling down of the class I get a sense of return, feeling the passage of that journey through my body, considering the shifts that have occurred as I resolve into rest.


There are a number of ideas or metaphors you could apply to your "dance class as a whole event"

—the passage of a lifetime

—the passing of seasons over a year

—a film narrative

I once used "the 12 stages of adventure" as a model for the structure of a dance piece and then my Masters exegesis (see link below). It is a pattern/progression I heard a film director referring to once as the pattern you can see replicated in many adventure film narratives.

1    The place where you are—something is missing
2    The call
3    The response to the call
4    Meeting with the mentor
5    Crossing a threshold into a new world
6    Tests, allies, enemies
7    The approach—facing the fear
8    The supreme ordeal
9    Reward
10  The road back
11  Resurrection—another ordeal
12  Return with the elixir

http://www.academia.edu/22032987/Cutting_choreography_back_and_forth_between_12_stages_and_27_seconds

"Advanced" level technique—Three main areas of focus

Moving into an "advanced" level in contemporary dance can be about picking up more complex material more quickly, and performing material with high levels of control, flexibility & nuance (stylistic detail).

For me, the following points cover the sorts of ideas/approaches that I think "come up" in my dance material

1. Detail/Cross-patterning 
This is about instrumentation, looking at the intricacies possible in the articulation of body parts and their relationships to each other. It is a zooming in to find detail while at the same time keeping the whole body in the picture. It is a consideration of the multiplicity of the micro—the potential to articulate each joint of each finger or to activate subtle shifts of angle and impulse in the spine. I often make phrases that layer and counterpoint upper body and lower body patterns in ways that not only fine-tune the physical instrumentation but also work on neural pathways to improve coordination and memory.

e.g. the "Celestial Gestures" phrase (named for the music Celestial Blues and the incorporation of hand gestures) which will continue to build a gestural language upon the moving foot/floor patterns. It is also a cross-cultural patterning, drawing on Bharatanatyam (Indian Classical Dance) mudras on top of leg work that has more Western hip hop flavour.

2. Phrasing and Musicality 
I am strongly influenced by music and like to draw on an eclectic mix of styles, tempos and time signatures. How we use time can colour the quality, character, dynamic of our moving. Working in irregular time signatures is another cultural education  that can broaden your dancing palette. Amplifying variations in speed can build physical control, the ability to change and shift across more extreme ranges. You've probably already noticed how I will often use musical composition as a visual metaphor—your legs carry the bass line, the foundation; the torso, arms add voices, melodies and harmonies to this rhythm; where you shift your focus or your breath can be an embellishment, a cymbal or a horn blast. In Labanotation, dance notation that is also recorded on a stave, this idea of the layers of the body as parts of a musical composition is echoed.

3. Focus/Performance

This is both about seeing and being seen to, as Deborah Hay says, to "invite being seen."
I suggest that you can consider your focus, where you look and what you are seeing, as another body part that can move out to connect you to a distant part of the space and which falls back into the body as light or information through the lens of the eye (refer to Lisa Nelson article linked below). Here is where my work with video becomes the metaphor—softening or sharpening your focus affects the detail of the facial musculature, noticing how you can see from other angles and distances and considering how you are seen from all angles and in particular frames (i.e. not all the body at once). More than just relating to the face and eyes, how can you activate different parts of your body by considering how a viewer is seeing them? How can your back smile, or your stillness speak?

Lisa Nelson article

Welcome to contemporary dance technique

Welcome to contemporary dance technique with Dianne Reid.
(This blog is for my current students at Deakin University but it can also be a resource for anyone)


I may have already met some of you in my previous classes but there seems to be less and less time in a trimester to really get to know each other—for you to understand where my particular approach or style has come from (my history and my current practice), and for me to understand how best I can support your growth as dance artists and creative practitioners.

So I thought I'd create this blog for us ... as a way to share more information outside of class time and better inform our working together in the studio.

Firstly I want to pose the question: Why do you dance?

and more specifically...
1. What do you love (admire or enjoy) about your own dancing?
2. What inspires your dancing? or What do you aspire to?


Here's how I answered that question recently...

Why do I dance? Why wouldn’t I? I can’t imagine not dancing. 

It has just bubbled out of me—how I feel, images in my head, 

dreams about places and people and my relationship with them 

have always expressed themselves through my moving body. 

My hands sculpt the air; I paint with the brush of a leg;

a melody runs up my spine; and snapshots develop on my face. 

From an insistent compulsion developed a persistent decision 

to always be involved in dance, to work at play.

Dance was the vehicle for my speaking, commenting, 

imagining my life 

but also a way to come close to others. 

The relationships you develop in the dance studio are deep because they are deeply connected to breath and touch, 

to our most intimate states. 

If we could bring the whole world into the dance studio, 

into their own breathing and sensation 

we could get on with living (generously) with each other. 

I see dance as a means to fully experience the world, 

our relationships and our imaginative, creative potential. 

When I dance I shake out all the places I have been—locations, scents, sensations, rhythms, words, desires, fears, actions, thoughts—and expand the sense of myself. Dance builds community. It tells stories, forges pathways for groups to move through the world together—to explain phenomena, to find food and shelter, to mate and reproduce, to sharpen their senses and stimulate euphoria, to consider things from other angles. 

It is both pleasure-giving and problem-solving. 

This image from my recent performance with cellist Jo Quail is also an example of what inspires my dancing...her music, and the frames and light within the architecture at the Abbotsford Convent.

More about my dancing and thinking here

http://www.hipsync.com.au/diannereid/blog/