Teaching Dance

Artist Molly Brennan installing sculpture At a faculty event recently one of my senior colleagues shared that she just doesn’t get art, or dance. While that disappoints me in some ways, I found her honesty refreshing. The natural urge to search for meaningful patterns in life, leads many, when looking at art, or dance, to the same exasperated revelation: “I don’t get it.” The truth is, more often than not, there is nothing specific to get. Art can be, but is not often, about communicating a clear, specific message. From my perspective, it is most often about the experience, the spark of connection, between the artwork, the viewer, and the artist—not the message. For example, a series of singular events, makes no attempt to convey a message. Rather, the work developed out of an exploration of three continuums: the micro to the macro, the biological to the technological, and the fragmented (singular) to the connected (series). If I arrived at any final me...

Be warned, these are clips from a studio rehearsal with unfinished costumes...just a peek (quite literally) into what is coming up this weekend!

In a week I will premiere my first work for the Webster University Dance Ensemble. The piece, a series of singular events , began as the Singularity Project and I have shared elements of the creative process that went into its creation here on this blog. While movement phrases--and their development--have been posted here, I have not talked much about the technological aspects of the work. First, I created a soundscape by editing and mixing recordings of Tibetan singing bowls, electronic chamber music, and good old analog television static. Does digital cable television have static? I wonder if there soon will be a day where, when I use the word static, young kids will look at me as if I am speaking a foreign language—much like they do now when I mention a typewriter. Anyway, I used Logic Express software on a MacBook Pro to create the soundscape. In addition to the soundscape, I created a video collage from public domain footage I gathered from creativecommons.com. I edited th...

This is the piece just before we entered Spring Break. When the dancers return to rehearsal we will have less than four weeks to complete it and get it performance ready.

We are in the fourth week of rehearsals for the Singularity Project now and we have begun forming phrases from the vocabulary of movement the dancers discovered. In the first week and a half, I gave the dancers group, solo, and duet improvisational tasks. I recorded the improvisational studies and plucked from them the movement ideas that piqued my curiosity. Using the movement ideas, I again asked the dancers to improvise with a partner through the third week of rehearsals. From the recordings of these explorations, I chose to arrange certain phrases into sequences with small transitions to connect them. The five phrases on the video are still rough, but they developed directly from the dancers explorations. Had these explorations occurred with a different set of dancers, in a different time, or with different cues, the phrases would be entirely unique. I am particularly interested in the singularity of these phrases...that they are unique to this group - at this time - and no...

Fun with Partner Yoga?! In this rehearsal, we played with poses from Melissa's (my better half) book on partner yoga. It turned out to be a fun, somewhat silly rehearsal.

Here is another round of movement culled from our original explorations. This batch of movement includes more silly and idiosyncratic bits as well as some athletic partner work.

We are two weeks into rehearsals now and some intriguing movement vocabulary is developing. I had reviewed the videos from prior rehearsals and chose the movements, concepts, and moments that peaked my curiosity. I presented those concepts to the dancers for another round of movement explorations, asking them to focus on these scraps and bits of movement to see where it would lead them. Each of the experiments for this last rehearsal derived from the results of the prior rehearsals. Currently, the dancers and I seem interested in the vocabulary developing that  comes from interdependent, organic momentum where the dancers move into and through the floor in fluid movement patterns that could only be found in the space of ability between two or more dancers. The video captures some of these raw moments.  Please, if you feel so inclined, take a moment and share your thoughts. And, Kam - since your comments indicated you liked Kat's foot dance - the opening and closing are fro...

For our first rehearsal on this new project—Singularity—I started off by sitting down with a group of dancers from Webster University to discuss the concepts for the piece and the processes I intend to use for this exploration. Singularity—as I am using it—has two meanings. Principles/Hypothesis/Intention First, singularity is used to mean an once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. In this sense, it is the idea of any performance being unique and unrepeatable. Drawing from theories of relativity, I want to explore this concept where the audience members actually impact the unfolding of the dance—like Schrodinger’s Cat . My intention is to explore, through the use of interactive digital media, the audience’s participation and impact upon a live performance. The second use of singularity is the idea from Ray Kurzweil that biology and technology will merge at a point in the near future. Now, I am not as much as a futurist as he, but this does lead me to think abou...