May 16, 2014 - Breath and Weight of the Body

The only thing you have at the bottom is the breathe and weight of the body

March to May was extremely busy for me, and though I maintained some degree of involvement with Karen Jamieson, the solo|soul project and the Carnegie Dance Troupe work, I must admit I am now playing catch up with the Elder Project we have just begun.

Some of the projects I have just concluded are dancing and performing in MFA student Isabelle Kirouac’s Borderlines, and a choreographic experimentation at Mascall Dance’s Bloom. In both works, I found the energy body work useful, and a point of source material for generating movement and performative tasks.

In rehearsals with Karen, during this time of packed schedules, Karen sometimes needed time on her own in the studio, so it actually worked out quite well. On those days, if I came in to the studio, I would do an opening banda/vayu practice with her as warm up, stay for about an hour and then leave. This allowed me to stay connected in some way to the creative process.

Sometimes the way movement is described in rehearsal sounds like a life lesson or insight, in a practical rather than preachy way. Some that come to mind are, the only thing you have at the bottom is the breath and the weight of the body; to find suspension don’t create movement, find it inside – however small – then move from there; if you talk about something, you are not in it.

D.D. Kugler drops in periodically. There is a lightness to the depth of questions he brings into the space, a soft way of prodding into the material and the reasons the material is presented the way it is. A good question he asked at one rehearsal was: do you want to experience the thing then define it, or define it then experience it?