back from your heel bone, anchoring you in space.
• Partner B, take a walk, feeling your heel bone as you walk.
• Trade roles; do both feet.
Foot x-ray showing calcaneus
Image by Alena Giesche
TO DANCE
Opposite-Voice Dancing
15 minutes
Exploring attitudes, you both value your personal voice and seek range—new horizons. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding to get out of deeply set habits. As you explore your opposite-voice dance, familiar movements don’t go away; you just find more choices.
• Improvise an opposite-voice dance. Start with the qualities you didn’t include in your familiar-voice dance (Day 1). Allow awkward feelings as you explore; push into unfamiliar use of time, space, and pacing. If your other dance was lyrical, make this angular. If you like to go fast, now go slowly. If you are always edgy, try the opposite.
• Borrow; imitate vocabulary that’s “not like you.”
• Dance long enough to fully inhabit this physical embodiment/exploration; push your limits of concentration and endurance.
• If working in a group, dance your opposite-voice dance, witnessed by others.
• Explore improvising this voice in different places—for example, the studio, outdoors, and in your kitchen. Does place change how you move, how you perceive yourself?
TO WRITE
Why Dance?
20 minutes
Why do you dance? Begin articulating your views; make a list without hesitating.
David Dorfman Dance
Disavowal
Photograph © Vincent Scarano
STUDIO NOTES
DAVID DORFMAN teaches a technique class at the American Dance Festival at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2005). Consider David’s words as an abstract sound score with some literal handles; there’s not necessarily a linear logic:
Think of this as a dancing class rather than a “dance class.” A dancing class is not limited to style.
Walking: Let the torso initiate weight change; let it curve to the side.
• Think of the comingling of circles and lines in your body and in space—let your movement be inspired by circles in the ribs, circles in the pelvis.
• Think of movement as more air conscious, feeling constructive resistance in the air, texture in the air, and then go to the fullest extent before you go on to the ground—soft, into the ground.
• Then imagine where that leads you.
• Be pleasantly demanding of yourself.
• Start a phrase low to the ground, with momentum—deep hip flexions, with turns, with head throws perhaps, with a head dive and then the leg up and around in a giant circle.
• Breathe through your limbs.
• Nothing is flat; everything has contour.
• Accentuate your breath.
• Feel weight in the two halves of the pelvis; let them be independent.
• Reach energy out through the toes and fingertips. Think of reaching both sides of the room at once.
• Go against your preferences, your predilections: absorb new kinesthetic patterns. Do it like an adagio (while you are learning), and it will sink in.
• Roll on your back, feel your legs dropping into the pelvis, recycling up through the head.
• Take a deep breath in and exhale audibly.
• Let the legs release. Maintain that looseness as you’re dancing.
• Try to do something new. Feed in something new.
• See the big picture—the room, the other dancers, and the light.
• Remember initiation and articulation—details.
• Explore different movement qualities, so you’ll be ready to use them.
• Be sure to keep the reputation of modern dance as a serious art form! (I’m joking!)
• Greet your colleagues, talk, and laugh. Keep moving as you chat and check in. Include this energy (human interaction) in your movement.
• Circular movement, linear movement, smart feet, big picture.
• Add weight bearing on different parts of the body.
• From your newly discovered place on the ground, as you continue to move toward standing, test out an aversion toward vertical; explore off-balance, curvilinear space.
• Go with, in, and around the music/the silence.
• Look at each other; have fun now; relax.
• Pause. Close your eyes and relive the last minutes in your mind’s eye. “Yes, that was you.”
• See yourself doing three moves you’ve never, never, never ever done before.
• Open your eyes. Take a walk around the room. Let the pelvis use all its curvaceousness.
• Knees are easy. Top of the head floating up toward the ceiling.
• Feel the diagonals in the space.
• You are supported by the architecture, by the air, by your pals.
DAY 3
Bebe Miller Company
Dancers: Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones
Photograph © Robert Flynt (2004)
Flow
What We Can Count On
We are basically fluid beings that have arrived on land.
—Emilie Conrad, Continuum founder
Flow is our oceanic heritage. As we focus on the sensations of flow throughout the body, we recognize that it exists in varying degrees and can be diminished or enhanced through attention. Understanding the feeling of flow and maintaining connection with this internal sense of fluidity in our busy days takes practice.
Our inner body and the Earth’s surface are both largely water, most of which is salty. Life-supporting oxygen enters the body as breath, and is pumped by the heart to every cell in the body through blood. The flow of breath as blood is an expression of the life force that begins, sustains, and ends life. Words in many languages attempt to describe this animating presence, including prana, chi, life force—and dance.
How do we limit flow in dancing? Sometimes when we feel anxiety about beginning a project or making decisions, we contract or become fixated on preset, preformed views. But dancing and art making require fresh forms of being. When fixation limits expression, it can be useful to let go of form altogether and reconnect to flow. Attention to the fluid system of the body connects all the parts. Gently shaking the “blood side of the skin,” the insides, helps us feel the ripples and responsiveness of fluid, rather