Archive for improvisation
August 18, 2008 at 3:22 pm · Filed under dance, dancers, KATE, choreographer, dance theater workshop, contemporary dance, dance culture, dance companies, improvisation, dance spirit, KATE-M, SYREN, kate mehan, SYREN modern dance, dtw, dancenow NYC
Lynn and I have been back in the studio… Just “jamming” right now. Doing a bit of barre together, then she teaches me some new class excercises and combinations she has been creating…which feels great to be told what to do a bit! This week we did a pretty long imrov together to some Brahams mostly (Sonatos for Cello and piano Opp. 38, 99 and 108… and some work by James Newton Howard). Felt AWESOME to just move that BIG and free! Can’t believe we will be in studio with new company members in a few weeks re-staging “Pelleas” and getting “Abravanel” back up and running (we just booked a gig at Ethel Walker School in CT for November) and “Dig” excerpts ready for DanceNow Festival at DTW. Oh and somewhere in that I am starting a new piece for the company that we are trying to have the Artemis Chamber Ensemble play live for!!! So so excited.
And, I have yet to see a copy, but I hear there is a little mention of us in Dance Spirit Magazine for September. Page 150 to be exact!
Lots of really great stuff… But for the 3 hours in the studio, it sure did feel good to forget about running a company and remember where this whole thing started… Just dancing in a studio with Lynn…
Just doesn’t get much better than that.
www.syrendance.org
Recent Posts by kate mehan
May 6, 2008 at 1:09 am · Filed under dance, space, MEGAN, san francisco, improvisation
Hello!
This past weekend I jumped into rehearsal for a dance theater piece by Jacques Poulin-Denis. But wait, you say. Aren’t you still gimpy? Why yes I am, thank you very much. I don’t have to do anything too strenuous though, just a bit of improvisation on the themes of sleep, dreams, and discomfort. It’s fun and something different.
We worked at CELLspace, which is this really interesting performance/work space in the Mission. It’s a big warehouse-type building with little self-contained rooms that serve as artists’ studios, and a large, open area for performing artists. It was founded as an artists’ collective, so there are all these quirky touches.
I like the lobby. It has white walls and stuck to all of them are these small, white squares of paper with line drawings on them. The squares are neatly lined up, edge to edge, so that when you look at them all together, they look like one big map.
CELLspace is very close to Theater Artaud where we performed for WestWave, but I never knew it existed. I love discovering new places like this in the city. It’s such a treat to meet a different group of artists and to see how they work.
In other news, I can jump now! Tiny, tiny jumps, but still… Jumps in first position were never so exciting!
Recent Posts by megan kurashige
April 4, 2008 at 12:04 pm · Filed under dance, training, Repertory, research, improvisation, DEBORAH, Yasmeen Godder
Yasmeen Godder’s studio
It’s been more than seven months since I have learned new repertory, and while I’m loving my dance classes and improvisational projects, I do miss the process of absorbing and living in a piece of choreography. So even though my body feels a bit tired now, my spirit is extremely happy after tasting a bit of Yasmeen Godder’s work! I just finished a five-day workshop at her studio in Jaffa (at the south of Tel Aviv - technically, the city is Tel Aviv-Yafo). Yasmeen is currently on tour in Europe with her production Sudden Birds, so two of her dancers led the intensive. Each day began with Eran Shanny’s technique class, which was very similar to Yasmeen’s with its influences of release technique, yoga, Feldenkrais, and more. After he helped us absorb the principles of Yasmeen’s movement style, Iris Erez took over for the repertory segment of the workshop. We did improvisational exercises like those Yasmeen uses in her creative process, and we learned solo and duet material from Two Playful Pink. Yasmeen’s choreography is meaty, both in its movement vocabulary and its emotional content, and Two Playful Pink – a piece originally performed in 2003 by Yasmeen and Iris – is no exception. The dance concerns attitudes towards femininity and the body, and the movement often shifts a conventional expression of sexuality into more unfamiliar (or unaccepted?) territory: a hand seductively placed on the upper thigh soon insistently clutches the crotch; the slow fixing of messy hair is paired with a sudden spank-like slap to the hip; a smile is distorted by tucking in the upper lip or tugging the cheek into a sneer.
There’s so much I could say about what I gained through this experience – in fact, my stream of consciousness free-write in my notes file was enough to make Word send me a few error messages last night – but I’ll try to keep my post here manageable . . . If you haven’t noticed yet, I tend to be a bit wordy!
I’ve found myself explaining recently that yes, I am both a dancer and a researcher, so I’ll write a bit about how these two activities are complementary. Quite wonderfully, this workshop reinforced my belief in the value of physical research. My experience in technique classes this year has provided me with important information about the physicality used in Israeli contemporary dance. Yet with repertory, there’s another level of experience and analysis to be found; instead of simply dealing with the raw material of technique – some of the building blocks of a finished dance – learning choreography allows me to explore issues of composition and content along with the movement itself. This week I got a physical sense of Yasmeen’s partnering work, which epitomizes an intricate, aggressive style employed by many young Israeli choreographers. Actually attempting to dance excerpts of this duet gave me a deeper appreciation of what I had admired from afar because I myself got to experience (or, well, try to experience) the speed, precision, and trust involved in this kind of partnering. I was also reminded that in the hands of the right choreographer (and ultimately in the bodies of the right dancers), movement can be wonderfully loaded with meaning. In the duet excerpts from Two Playful Pink, each tug, shove, jerk, drop, fall, and look is a challenge from one woman to the other, a chance to manipulate, dominate, taunt, display . . .
Learning repertory also provides an extraordinary opportunity for me to recognize and question the assumptions I make as a spectator of choreography. As I realized this week, what you perceive when you are an audience member does not always get at the truth of the matter from the performer’s perspective. What I often see in Israeli contemporary dance is power – but it’s not always a controlled power or a power composed of force. In my experience with Yasmeen’s choreography (and specifically thanks to the feedback Iris gave me), I understood that this power is at times a matter of energy unleashed by giving into momentum and gravity. Having trained primarily in ballet and older modern dance forms such as Cunningham technique and Graham, Taylor, and Limón-influenced styles, I find working in this released-influenced mode quite challenging – but also quite necessary for my growth as a dancer. You can bet I’ll be back in Yasmeen’s classes after she returns from her tour!
Here’s a link to information about Two Playful Pink on Yasmeen Godder’s website.
Recent Posts by deborah friedes
January 23, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under dance, guest, TONY, dance technology, interactive, research, sarah lawrence college, students, education, dance teacher, performance, project, choreography, discipline, pedagogy, process, learning, intelligence, fun, dance criticism, dance lesson, social network, improvisation, Julie Cruse, VICKI, choreobot
For the last meeting of my class last semester, 12-21-07, I had Julie Cruse of Ohio State’s EMMA Lab as a guest to share her research in developing Chorebot VICKI. VICKI stands for Virtual Improvisational Choreographer / Kinetic Instructor. She a virtual automaton who guides a dancer through a structured improvisation using randomly generated verbal cues. Upon initializing VICKI she describes her purpose.
She says:
Choreobot is designed to challenge a dancer’s movement skills, and asks the dancer to draw upon advanced improvisational interpretation. I am programmed to make dances using theme and variation as prescribed by my creator. I use textbook dance methods, but - I am unpredictable. The dancer will demonstrate as I begin my next new dance.
Read more of Julie’s description of the technology HERE at the project website.
Before the lecture demonstration Julie and I had to rebuild modules of the assembly so that we could get VICKI to talk off Intel-based Macs. Retooling software under time constraints can be terribly stressful but I am glad to report we patched things up in time for the class. Julie’s lecture/demonstration was wonderful. She took some time to explain her impetus for building the machine and gave the students a tour of VICKI’s inner workings. Next Julie fired up the choreobot and demonstrated how she danced under VICKI’s instruction. Next she invited the students to try. Watching the student’s improvisation was exciting.
The system forces the dancer to think on their toes and make quick decisions. With time I could see a dancer becoming expert at navigating in this environment. Julie has clearly taken the time to do this. For her it was the first time she was able to observe other people dancing inside her system. By the end of the class everyone was incredibly energized and immersed in conversation regarding future research using choreobot VICKI. Julie has left us with a copy of VICKI and has encouraged us to continue experimenting with and mutating the system.
Matt Gough has taken a good deal of time developing an analysis of this work. In particular Matt takes issue with the description of the work as an “artificial intelligence” simply seeing it as an automated version of Cunningham’s method of chance procedures. Julie has documented the critical discourse HERE.
I met Julie inside Sector 9 of the blogosphere. There she has made bold gestures regarding dance-technology as a field. Like Matt Gough, she has voiced discontent over the current state of dance-tech.
She writes:
When I hear dance and tech, I think - it better not be ANOTHER interactive audio/video environment. It better not be ANOTHER…
…dance contextualized by projected videos
…dancer controlled by robotics or sensors improvisation in real time that composes the score
…motion capture in real time translated to animated projections
…wearable technologies that do something with sound or video
…animated avatars in second life real time “telematic” improvising
I find such pugilistic remarks invigorating and am excited to see what trouble Julie stirs up in the future.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 26, 2007 at 11:35 pm · Filed under dance, rehearsals, germany, opera house, performance, modern dance, premiere, improvisation, philip glass, KRISTIN O, staatstheater kassel
Until yesterday my schedule as a guest dancer with the Staatstheater Kassel has been something like this:
10:00 – 11:30 Class
11:45 – 2:15 Rehearsal I
2:15 – 5:30 Break
6:00 – 10:00 pm Rehearsal II
This daily configuration was due to limited pre-premiere stage availability but now we’re back to the typical 10 am – 7 pm schedule. The Theater is an extremely busy artistic haven and technicians often “load in” and “load out” multiple times a day. Despite the hustle, everything seems to run with the efficiency of an office building except our halls are enriched with the echoes of opera singers, pianists and Schauspielers (actors). Nestled on the top floor of a seven-story building, jolting hyper-energy through the floorboards, are die Tänzer. The theater has two stages, plus a performance space in the neighboring Fridericianum Museum, and on many evenings three performances occur simultaneously. Since Kassel is a relatively small city, I often wonder where the audience members come from…two words: suburban radius.
On October 20th, the Tanztheater premiered Portrait and Le Sacre du Printemps after only six weeks of rehearsal. A completely new work set to “Symphony No. 3” by Philip Glass, Portrait is a collection of self-composed solos tweaked, supplemented, and compiled by Johannes Wieland. To keep it intimate, he divided our small company of 14 dancers into two casts, creating two completely different compositions for the same piece. The first creative step: Johannes assigned specific sections of Glass’ four-movement symphony to pairs of dancers (one from each cast), having us improvise while we clutched our iPods or Discmans. The process was a grueling one and continues now, even after the premiere. Three minutes of movement to capture “who I am?!” This type of quest requires a seemingly infinite amount of physical and mental exploration! Meanwhile, we’re learning and perfecting huge chunks of detailed movement, taking very specific stage directions, and diving into huge tanks full of water for Johannes’ rendition of Sacre (stay tuned for more on this WET portion of Tanzabend I).
The process for Portrait became a series of “show and tells.” We would periodically show Johannes some dancing, explain or reiterate our individual concept, receive a bit of feedback and then be left once again to our own creative devices. Check out Dance Minute for clips from the early stages. This process continues because, naturally, directors always have notes. Johannes has been very effective at stylizing movement without changing the essence of any dancer’s solo. One day his commentary for me was “I think it can be more ‘Kristin,’” and then, “it’s a little too symmetrical.” Another day I was told to “go through and take out every contraction.” Though it can be self-debilitating and frustrating (I’m somewhat of a perfectionist, as most dancers are), I still find it a bit surreal that I am in Europe performing my own improvisation turned composition - while working for a Theater funded by the government. *Pinch* I have a full time job and earn money for just being me!
Recent Posts by kristin osler
October 18, 2007 at 5:17 am · Filed under dance, film, MEGAN, california, the headlands, improvisation
Chloe on the left, Hallie on the right.
Heather
After the improv, Heather and I wandered around to catch a last minute glimpse of some of the artists’ work. We met Hubert Ho, a composer, and saw some curiously hypnotic video clips of hands by (I think) Ginelle Hustrulid. We also found an old Steenbeck film editing machine:
Fun, huh? That avocado green makes it extra endearing. Can you just imagine someone clipping and trimming away at film reels, tossing all the bits that don’t work out, and sticking the rest together for their masterpiece?
Recent Posts by megan kurashige
