(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
To Dianne and everyone -
ReplyDeleteI just wrote this as my thoughts came to me, it does run on a little...
A few years ago I struggled with the idea of a degree in dance because there is so much enjoyment in dancing for me that I saw myself as selfish to undertake training that was so focused on the self with no outcome that was particularly useful. Now I see many more ways that dancing is part of the world and is an important part of human culture. Dancing is a tool. Through dance I can contribute to and reflect on my world, my community, my relationships with others and myself.
I love to find flow in my dance, and move across the room
feeling the air and space around my body
I used to train in a basketball stadium and we would open the big roller door and dance through the afternoon sunlight on the floor.
somehow all the space that was outside in the tall gum trees, the open grass footy field and on beyond to the trees along the river and the hills, all that light and air would lift me up in my dancing
I still have a snap shot image from maybe 7 years ago, of watching four or five dancers practice a phrase we called the swallow dance I think, they were in the late afternoon sunlight and I was on the other side of this huge basketball stadium, looking back at them. The sun cut a low angle across some of them, and they moved between the shadow and the streams of light where dust motes spiraled. I think that is an example of what inspires me to dance.
I think dance is coming out in strange ways in our modern hyper tech age compared with the dancing that has been going on in human societies for many many many life times and deaths and on and on... and on, for longer than I can really gather into my head at one time. I think I aspire to dance with the awareness that dance is a part of the ancient ages, while also seeing what is here now, the contemporary.
Tully
Thanks for your lovely response Tully
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