Moving through planes

I've been talking about the shifting directions of movement through the three planes—sagittal/wheel, vertical/door (also called coronal), horizontal/table (also called transverse).

Rather than slicing the body into sections I like to think of the body as moving within circles of motion, with the movement between all these planes making up a sphere, our kinesphere, which is why I have been using words that imply movement in those directions, the tyre wheel, the helicopter, the knife-throwing or german wheel.

                               

This idea reinforces the knowledge that our bodies are curved rather than straight, and helps us to stay pliant in our approach to our alignment and our dancing. We live in a built environment of boxes and lines...houses, cars, devices...fixed, straight lines and surfaces which do not match the reality of bodies and environment. So, I like to keep connecting to the idea of the flow and circulation of continual motion, like the flow of oxygen through the bloodstream moving throughout the body, like the tides rolling in and out, like the air currents that circumnavigate the globe.

Then, when I am dancing I feel supported by this idea of circulating and shifting between planes like rolling around within a sphere...sometimes close in to the body, sometimes larger than the room.

There is a functional aspect here physically as well. By feeling the connections between these planes I can achieve balance and control. 

In a balance, like tree pose, I am able to sustain and control my balance with ease by applying the three directions of movement simultaneously—the vertical down through the supporting foot and up through the top of the head, the horizontal with the pressure of the foot into the thigh and the palms into each other, and the sagittal by drawing the navel to the spine or activating the front abdominal muscles.

The same principles apply in the turns we have been doing on one leg in turn-out (the low turn in the "Worlds keep spinning" phrase and the turn on rise at the start of the Baby Animals phrase) but the arms are extended to the sides to trace the helicopter plane.

Physical Architecture & Imagery

I find the use of a combination of particular imagery (imaginative visualisation) and tactile information (directed touch with a partner) can assist structural alignment, balance and movement range. Here are a number of images and partner exercises I will at some time use in class.

The flow of energy down the back of the body and up the front of the body.

I often imagine that I am standing half under a waterfall so that the water is flowing down over the back of my body and legs, 

and drawing a zipper up the front of my body

This corresponds with the real physical forces acting on the body, namely the pull of gravity (compression) and the tensile upward thrust of the arches of the body (foot, pelvis, rib-cage/shoulder girdle) through the long bones to spine to head.

(Todd, 191)

With a partner we could trace the pathways of the fascia that interconnects to encase and support all the bones, muscles and organs in the body. We can follow down the "superficial back line" and up the "superficial front line"

and we can follow the spiral line and feel how the sides and front and back of the body intersect

(Clark, 74)

Arches and bridges in the body

I let my imagination move into the interior of my body, to visualise my structure in comparison to architectures I see in the world around me.

I visualise the body as the Eiffel Tower, 

the arches in both planes 
(fwd/back and side/side) 
creating the thrust upward 
to support the narrowing spire of the spine

Multi-directional support

I also imagine myself inside larger structures or forces as a way to achieve balance, support and/or release...to be part of the bigger picture and feel the integration of the whole body at once.

 ...supported by the multi-planes interacting...feeling the longitudes and latitudes...the rooting down under the earth and up into the stratosphere, the support of the air around me...

inside a three-dimensional sphere (kinesphere) 
as in Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man"

imagining myself connected into the longitudes and latitudes of the globe of the earth 
—the longitudes running down past ears, through shoulders, hips, knees, ankles; 
the latitudes running through the skull (ear to ear), the rib cage, the pelvis

I also refer to the planes in relation to the movement sequences: forward/back as the sagittal or 'wheel' plane; the vertical side/side as the 'door' plane (frontal/coronal); and the horizontal as the 'table' plane (transverse).

To visualise opening in the joints in the body, my favourite image is to imagine my laying torso (in constructive rest with knees up) as an airport main runway, the edges of which run through shoulder to hip, knee, ankle middle toe...and my arms (at diagonals to my laying body) as two taxi-ing runways leading to the main runway...

I imagine each joint lit up as night markers for the runways

Recommended Reading

Todd, Mabel. (1968) The Thinking Body: a study of the balancing forces of dynamic man. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons.

Clark, Bernie. (2016) Your Body, Your Yoga. BC, Canada: Wild Strawberry.

"Established" level technique—areas of focus & the notion of "style"

In this "established" or intermediate level of dance technique my focus for teaching is to offer other perspectives on dancing—specifically how to consider the interaction of the senses in our ways of moving, learning, and living.

—how a visual image might offer new insights on anatomical function and structural alignment;

—how tactile information (touch/sensation) can deepen or augment a visual image;

—how sound and rhythm/pulse connect to breathing, and to our underlying instincts and emotions...

This level of technique differs from the advanced level in that I may not cover as much material, i.e. spend more classes working with the same sequences or teaching shorter, less complex sequences. I may introduce material that is more moderate in its shifts between planes/levels and in its demands for flexibility, control and nuance (stylistic detail). However, all my material to varying extents concentrates on musicality and rhythmic variation, drawing on visual imagery and imaginative ideas,  and bringing attention to how we use our vision and our three-dimensionality in our dance performance.

Dancing is a personal statement and a cultural act—who we are and where we have been (or long to go) resides in our bodies and contributes to our individual "style."

My dance "style" is a hybrid fusing contemporary dance, physical theatre and post-modern aesthetics. There is a deep underpinning in my movement vocabulary of my own musicality and love of rhythm/syncopation (extensive background in tap-dance and music practice and theory) and my pioneer modern styles dance training (Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey via my University teachers) mixed with my interest in the everyday in movement (have had direct experience working with Judson/Post-modern greats Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson, Eva Karczag).

In a teaching context I try to engage and inform students on a range of levels, re-articulating ideas from different perspectives (visual/imagery, kinaesthetic/tactile, aural/rhythmic, anatomical) to broaden their access to or ‘ways in’ to my dance material. In a choreographic context I am interested in extending this approach to facilitate a creative exchange with my dancers, one which enriches my choreographic process and which can support each dancer’s performance narrative.

I have felt a significant pull toward Indian culture, specifically to yoga practice. I was introduced to it at University (my dance teachers) along with jikyu jitsu and qui gong and have been practicing more intensively (i.e. 4-6 times per week) over the past 10–12 years. As my physical practice deepened so has the mental rigor and breathing. I have also spent a considerable amount of time in India over the past ten years and other traces of that culture have seeped in. I studied some Bharatanatyam (Indian classical dance) and Kalari Payattu (a South Indian martial art form) and have found the detail and specificity of gesture and the directness and strength both a challenge and a place that I could enter into fairly easily. The uprightness of Indian classical dance is almost diametrically opposed to my style of rolling, release and floor work but there is also a theatricality and virtuosity that appeals and which sits well with me. I have always been strongly influenced by an eclectic range of musical styles (Celtic also features in my repertoire/heritage) and my trips to India have built my collection of Indian music (Sufi, classical and Hindi/Bollywood). When in India I taught contemporary technique and choreographed a contemporary work on Indian dancers and I think it is the combination of ‘living’ in a culture and having to work out how to collaborate artistically across cultural landscapes that pushes your expressive capacities—you have to analyse and communicate (and often question) where you’re coming from with your western aesthetic, and you have to find ways to meet their physicalities and rituals (of which there are many!) creatively and sensitively.

Whereas your "introductory" level classes may have been about finding basic commonalities with your fellow dancers—of alignment, strength and stretch, use of space and time—now I encourage you to consider your individual aesthetic and potential, your particular inflection in how you interpret and perform the material—to investigate your uniqueness.


Images: Dianne as a tertiary dance student, Adelaide, 1986; dancing with Mallika Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, India, 2006.

Connections

In these last few weeks of trimester I am making connections

connections across the body

—between the shoulders and hips as the larger joints framing the torso, working in opposition or counterpoint to balance the body, or as gateways out to the limbs which, when released, amplify the range of movement out through the limbs and through space

—or the idea of working with all 5 limbs as a collaboration...arms, legs and vision...all emanating from the pelvis/saccrum

—or recognising the continuum of movement through and across the different spatial planes (wheel/sagittal, door/vertical, table/horizontal)...the sense of being contained and fluidly shifting between these circles of action, like the electrons around the nucleus of an atom


connections in the choreographic material

—recognising the evolution of material... sliding out onto the side of the body from a low kneel becomes a sliding out from a spiral/squat, then a body slide from a fouette in the air landing in a deep lunge

—finding the connections in rhythm, accent, impulse, angle, shape

—building the longer "Sweet Design" phrase by looking at the potential entry and exit points for editing phrases from class together...opportunities issuing from landings/placement, spatial position, momentum...

connections in space and with your fellow dancers

—an attention to the shifting fronts, being able to transfer material to the other side (from R to L, first to second side) through strategies of mapping relationships between body and direction/room

—dancing with other bodies safely and dynamically by both understanding the trajectory of the material and staying tuned into your peripheral vision, sensing your position in time and space in relation to and supported by the others dancing with you (including those who are watching/witnessing you)

Focus

I  mentioned "focus" as one of the areas I would give attention to in my classes:

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 "Before Your Eyes"). 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). 

(Blog entry Three main areas of focus)

This week (week 8) I am introducing a "focus phrase" (to Nick Cave's Spell track). In it I am bringing attention to your vision as a kinetic phrase, to consider not just what you are seeing but the line, timing and quality of your vision as the choreography—the pathways through space, at different distances from you, and the shift of your focus from sharp to blurred. 

Because I am a screendance artist, I think about the dance material cinematically—

• imagining seeing landscapes or other locations rather than the studio walls (I pan from the ocean/horizon to the cliff I am standing on as I look from forward-mid to right side mid)

• playing with timing as I would in the edit suite (a jump cut from the distance to the right, in to my R shoulder)

• activating the musculature around my eyes and considering the mechanics of my retina, lens, optic nerve like a camera as I play with softening or sharpening my focus (zooming in slowly on my fingers as I draw them from outstretched arm in to my eye)

Faldinghurst

My 2015 screendance Faldinghurst is a re-visioning of vision. I wanted to remind the viewer of the screendance how “seeing” feels. Through a cinematic play with focus, depth of field, I believed it possible to affect the viewer’s physicality—encouraging adjustments in your optic mechanism and the muscles around the eyes through visual shifts across space and plane, from foreground to background, left to right, down to up, pulling the viewer in and out of the frame. I was looking to upset the viewer’s balance, to shift their relationship to gravity and expand possibilities for “seeing”—to consider ‘the physicality of perception—the way we feel ourselves in the present’ (Dove 2006: 64).

The Faldinghurst experiment proceeded in this way. Firstly, I asked dancer Gülsen Özer if I could make a film with her at her farm residence in the hills on the outskirts of Melbourne. I asked her partly because I wanted to continue the connection that I had set up in the 2014 practice sessions at St Johns hall,155 and partly because I wanted to have a new screendance to submit to the Light Moves Festival156 by the end of May. But mostly I asked her because (besides needing a body other than mine) she has a capacity to fill a stillness, to inhabit her body attentively before the moment of impulse. She also has access to this geographic location—a landscape promising spatial depth, texture, autumnal colours, rural artifacts, and the traces of a culture lost or remote. She and I both understand that dancing the location is a way to understand it, decode it, inscribe it, and that ‘movement is a translation of space’ (Deleuze 1986: 8).I also wanted to see how my research, this improvisational practice, might be effecting my screendance practice—a development I was also tracing, sharing during my 2014 field trip.157 The score I gave Gülsen was about occupying the frame, attending to the relation between us, as dancer and camera, a shared passing of time and noticing of sensations...temperature, moisture, terrain, frames, textures, traces. The score I worked with was to find frames that satisfy my aesthetic158 and then play with the edges of these points of view—geometrically (composition within frame, negative/positive space, planes/lines of movement) and viscerally (moving in and out of focus within shot to expand and contract the focal length in the viewer’s eye and to physically effect the musculature around the eyes).

 (extract from my PhD thesis)

Sweet Design phrase

Today I will start teaching the Sia "Sweet Design" phrase which we will add to over the next three weeks. I plan to film these in Week 11 as solos (or duets) for your final assessment.

You can find the phrase at this link

Sia

The first 10 x 8 counts is the original phrase, then it will vary to the video adding some of the other material we have worked on this trimester. The first side (L) runs from 00—40 seconds, and the second side (R) runs from 1:27—1:55

and PS...Here is a link to the phrase with our 2017 additions

2017 extras 

So crack out the unitards!

Strategies and styles

We learn using three main sensory receivers—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK).
We mostly use all three modalities but one or two may be dominant so I try to find ways to present class material using a mix.

For the visual (my dominant preference) I describe movement with other visual imagery, demonstrate with my own body, video demonstration and feedback, get you to draw pictures.
For the auditory, I use music and my voice to cue timing, information, qualities, I describe what I'm doing, I ask for questions, I encourage you to feedback with each other.
For the kinaesthetic, it is about getting into the movement material and learning it by doing. This is why I sometimes give a scan of the material by demonstrating a complete phrase before breaking it down. I also incorporate various tactile exercises, often in partners, so that physical information is transferred by touch and sensation.

Last week I asked you to draw one of the sequences, to graphically notate it. You were creating a visual map to help you learn the spatial pattern, while also attending to listening and following the timing/accents with the music in real time, and physically drawing the tactile qualities on the piece of paper.

Here's some examples placed next to each other.

It was a strategy for learning a phrase from a range of angles.
I would encourage you look at different strategies for your own learning...try drawing or notating a phrase, video it in class for playback and rehearsal outside of class time, work with a partner on a phrase and use touch to indicate an impulse for or direction of the movement...