Structure finding content

Today Jonathan and I started with some movement improvisation structures that I learned earlier this week in a workshop with Chris Aiken (he was in town working with the Dance Exchange and I got an opportunity to join for part of it). The structure is very much like the game "statue" - where one person moves the other person into a position. But, in this exercise the person being moved reacts to the movement initiations on a scale from 0 - 10. Responding at level 0 would mean that when the person is moved they stop when the manipulation stops. And, at the other end of the scale, the person takes the initiation and lets that lead them into a longer phrase of movement. The exercise is really a practice of different ways to respond to someone touching and moving you. I think it was very useful for Jonathan and I as it gave us another way to be in contact with one another. Hence, extending our range of partner dancing.

We then returned to our exploration of form/structure for "unmapped". The first random order of sections was very challenging and was not really fulfilling. We started in the space passing the guitar back and forth and that proved to be difficult. Starting that way didn't really supply a reason why we were passing the guitar - it seemed completely out of the blue, unconnected. As we went on through the improvisation we found more material and the improv felt stronger, but it still wasn't fully satisfying. The second run we did - with a different random order of sections - we added a starting point, an initiation. I have a book of photography of the body, from medical photos to athletes to erotica - and we used a photo from that book. It was a picture of two hands kind of wrapped around each other - I believe they were an older woman's hands - very wrinkled, almost narled. The photo is intimate, intense, somewhat disturbing. The improv we created from that image was, I think, also very intense. It also seemed intimate - lots of close dancing, kind of rough with one another at times. We ended up doing lots of hand gestures, repetition and in contact a fair amount - including some partnering similar to our earlier exercise. It was so much more satisfying, as it felt like there was depth and an inner life to the work.

In our first run of the work being in each section was challenging, but transitions between sections was also challenging. During the second run the sections made more sense since we had a context that they all related to. Just having that simple image to keep coming back to was a very powerful organizing point. In the past we had used words or phrases, so it was also nice that we did it without words. It, again, feels like it pushed us into new territory, into new discoveries.