geTting on my nerVEs

Last night, in my new home of NYC, I returned to CI after a 6 month hiatus! I attended the Tuesday night lab at Bill Young Studio, and entered orienting within physical--inner ear--disorientation. I realized that for me, the most delicious dancing is the triggering, responding, new triggering, new responding neurophysical chain of action within a framework that forces disorientation and new orientation.

What we did:
Head study
1. Solo warm-up in which the one rule was that we had to maintain contact between head surface and the floor at all times- 15 minutes

2. Repeat with the potential for partnering adding that the partners body and the dancer's own body parts could also serve as interchangeable floor replacements with which to maintain head contact.

3. Exploring the free weight of the head and it's relationship with eye gaze and spinal/whole body follow through. We started standing together as a group holding hands in a circle. Taking care not to crash heads, to greater and lesser degrees, sometimes initiated by the trajectory of eye gaze, sometimes not, we tossed our heads. Each toss followed through to body of the tosser and caused a weight shift in the entire circle, a series of simultaneous ripples affecting one another. Eventually the circle broke apart into an open dance.

Observations and sensations:
3. It is challenging to use the gaze of the eyes as an initiating limb and maintain a visual awareness of what is happening in the space around you. Finding the orientation within this disorientation, the heightening of wind and temperature senses, allowing softening and sharpening the gaze to happen as a response to the needs of the moment. This adaptation response allows for a degree of scintillating risk to exist within and drive the dancing without the danger to could result from insensitivity.

2. Folks tended not to take full advantage of the sudden huge openness that the new possible surfaces for head contact provided--particularly maintaining contact between the head and various interchangeable surfaces of the dancer's own body. This blows the realm of possibility wide open. I'd like to explore further.

1. Warming up with the head in perpetual contact with the floor was an incredible warmup for the spine and the perceiving organism coming up with various ways to move and locamote within this unusual confine.

mina

matthew

Melissa

what next?

i am enjoying coming into the place of soloing and dueting-soloing into dueting-continuing a thread. It was really helpful to have the wonderful witnesses and support of Matthew and Asimina. I think this is a great place to work for the performance coming up-i think it might lead to other questions. And, it is agreat place to also integrate the developmental score we have been working on. I am going to bring my camera tomorrow-which I am excited to find out that it has 30 minutes of video time-YES!
i think it will help us look at and reflect on what is happening within these processes-how are we using the developmental score? what is happening in the dance? how are we supporting and listening to each to other? how does the dance 'develop"?

so-i look forward to more-and
yes, margaret is missed :(
;)

Post Workshop De-Brief

Feedback we heard from students:

Pushing, as CI vocabulary, makes sense in the context of the Developmental Score.
Pushing is awkward.

Questions I have:
Where do we go from here?

General sentiments:
I'm going to miss Margaret.

Developing Developments

hmmm. I had a lot of fun at the lab today. But, I sometimes have the desire to spend some time exploring other things....i think pushing in particular. I was thinking yesterday about the act of pushing and how much it is part of the contact improv vocabulary. You have to push to find a point of contact with a partner and to remain upright-and find that meeting of energy. I remember doing some exercises for finding pushing and resisting pushing (pushing back) with Andrew Harwood and Nita Little-well they came to mind last nite. And I thought, how "juicy" this would be if we combined even more of this vacuuming with more pushing. I know vacuuming is kinda like this push-pull dynamic-but what about push-push- and then finding the vaccum to lead you somewhere new.

I think of the developmental score as "developments". There was one week that we has talked about which elements we as dancers found as habits and which elements (of the developmental score) we found we were doing with certain partners. I thought this was really helpful information.

So, in retrospect, I think my desires for breaking down the developmental score stems from finding methods to explore these actions-some of them being more helpful, more difficult or left out more depending on comfort, habits, and the duet with your partner.

I have also become interested in finding new ways to sense and feel these actions-soft and hard-light, and energetic-so there is more of a range of dynamics within these developments.

anyhoo-just wanted to write alittle- I had to process some of the things I was feeling last nite.

Thanks allllll!!!!!

Recruiting for Open Training

Great work last night. Thanks Mina for encouraging us to think about recruitment for the Open Training. I reached out the Jake Wise from the Archer Ballroom.

Preparation for Open Training

Hi all,

I used the Sunday Jam to try out teaching the breathing+little captain work that I am bringing to the Open Training on Saturday, March 27.

Here is my pathway:

1) Beginning with the hands- open one palm to the ceiling, cradle that arm's elbow in your free palm; meditate on the weight of the elbow in your supporting palm, feel energy up from your elbow outward through the open palm. Meditate on your breath. Beginning with your pinky, inhale and fold in your fingers to envelope your palm. Exhale and again beginning with your pinky, send your fingers away from your palm. Let the inhale/fold and exhale/unfold initiate an spiral in/out of your wrist and forearm. Repeat. Other side.

2) Finding a through line between scapula, elbow, and palm- remove your supporting palm from its elbow; continue to fold your pinky into your palm and unfold away from your palm; let your the spaces between your ribs compress when you fold, let those spaces expand when you extend. Repeat. Other side. Both sides together.

3) Finding a pull and push throughout the whole body- standing, continue to spiral in and out, always beginning with your little captain. Abandon the instructions.

After this warm-up, I offered the jam a "fussy baby score." The fussy baby score is simply a "pause button" in a dance in which the dancer interrupts his pathway and then begins again after having held the pause at least a second. Its called fussy baby because the image is that the baby will fuss (interrupt itself) until it is satisfied that it has found a pathway of ease. I'd like to do this as a warm up at the next lab.

Workshop #1 Description

Scheduled for Outer Space 3/27/2010 7-10pm Sliding Scale Suggested donation $5-$500

CI Juice Lab #1

CI Juice Lab invites you to sweat out some serious juice. Liquify your spine. Yield. Push. Reach out and bring your flava. Hook, envelope, and pull your parters using fundamental and evolving elements of the developmental score, noticing habits and choices in between--where that sticky residue is. So Bring your juicylicious booty and we'll work some skills, mix it up, and dance our big hearts out.

CI = Contact Improvisation

Contact Improvisation = A dynamic movement form in which two or more bodies interact spontaneously with each other by maintaining contact and simultaneously interpreting the common parameters of gravity, weight, momentum, friction and inertia to achieve continuous flow. Contact Improv is dance-sport-martial art-meditationrolled into one. As the term contact improv implies, this movement form encourages the drawing together of bodies in a creative and collaborative context. Contact improvisation provides opportunities for personal, social and cultural differences to be expressed on common ground, through physical parameters that are common to all human beings.


This workshop is for folks experienced with the fundamentals of Contact Improvisation.

melissa

margaret

chen je

matthew