My work is an essential desire for creating experiences in my life that have significance, meaning, depth, clear listening, communication through alternate means, entering into a shared space and time where we don’t know what will happen, an experiment, and an adventure with each other that has possibility and results in change, connection and trust.
Dance Improvisation involves paying attention to a somatic state. Somatics is defined as a dancer’s close attention to proprioceptive information about the position and motion of each part of the body and techniques whose primary focus is the dancer’s personal, physical experience, rather than the audience’s visual one.
Dance Improvisation also includes making work in front of an audience in performance. The Six Viewpoints as described and developed by Mary Overlie are a guide or map for making material that consider audience perspective. The components of The Six Viewpoints are as follows: Shape, Space, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story (SSTEMS). My work falls under a postmodern umbrella where the stage is there to enact microscopic interrogation of our physical, mental and emotional world.
The project created for LakeBottom’s FreeSessions, titled ‘Bubbla: How to Animal’, involves a three part dynamic. ‘Bubbla’ is a self declared and created search engine platform for asking ‘How To’ questions from the work.
1) I want to develop, practice and use The Six Viewpoints with collaborating dancers and musicians to inform improvisation performance.
2) When I create something, I sometimes experience hesitation and question myself. I worry that I don’t know how to do something even though I do. So, I took this act of ‘questioning’ and put it into the work by asking ‘How To’ questions of an unusual nature. And through these questions, I allow for answers to come through the body in the dance improvisation work. This unknown space is alive in improvisation.
3) Finally, I want to propose and consider that our bodies are the most sophisticated and advanced technology to date. With the information and technological age, came more state of the art computers, phones and devices, not to mention more ways to connect and find out anything we wanted to know. I often find myself caught up in this wave and seduced by its wonder. I want to continue to alter the paradigm and experience this same if not a pure taste of wonder with improvisation dance and performance with other artists. I want to remember to ask myself, ask within and ask my body the questions rather than search for it outside of myself.
