Unarchiving: Amnesia & Innocence
"Use me"
Was it something from Pina Bausch or perhaps that one audition I did with my friend for a commercial where she needed a male audition partner? They showed us a little study of a male-female duo doing modern dance contact improvisation. They were from the Sasha waltz company, and it was material in a rehearsal studio from some piece probably. Or was it something that Sigal Zouk did where she dances but impersonally and without sentiment yet with poise and energy presence?
I wonder how it would be to meet the Buddha? Or Jesus or another enlightened figure? Maybe a Buddhist monk or other religious figure who is kind and not an asshole. Of course they wouldn’t be if they are what I’m trying to get at. I notice that when people are grounded into their bodies and their system is regulated (as opposed to dysregulated and in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn), they seem to be calm and easeful and not particularly excited but not bored or significantly tired either.
I remember borrowing videos of Forsythe’s “something improvisations”…some method or approach he developed and made a pedagogic video series on. The dancer exemplifying the movements was a modern dancer and very poised and clear. The movements were unemotional and exemplifying neutral and technical things like gravity, circles, over-curve, momentum, pelvis stuff, etc.
I have it in my body where I tried being emotionally charged yet separating that from my movement quality which was clean and clean and abstract. If I activated a position or created a movement into space, I would make sure to have the emotion fill it rather than an Ausdruckstanz approach of having the movement emerge from a body-emotion physicality. The clear, abstract movement would intensify the emotion and bring real tears actually. It’s as if my body was not allowed to represent an emotion and therefore the energy of the emotion had no way to be expressed except through authentic feeling…which resulted in real crying.
I remember dancing in the room with Ingrid who was guiding me faster than and beyond my logic-making and rational mind. I caught onto a memory that had an image with feeling attached, and she had me keep dancing the feeling. I eventually could let go of the image and the narrative and just let the feeling move me without me trying to “dance” or compose or control my form. She had me stream the energy. Sara has me stream the energy so that it doesn’t get stuck in space or in an image or in a role or character that the body or a person takes on and gets stuck in. To stream is to keep dancing through space and leave the images and the control and the sense-making or form-forming behind. It will come, but the energy needs to flow freely. I fear exhaustion, but more energy is usually hiding behind this fear.
I danced beautifully and simply to classical music. I didn’t force the emotions to come. I let my movement be a safe outlook from which I could contemplate and be in nature, somehow. I wonder if the queen of England, holder of the British ideals, does this sort of thing all day long?
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, aid programm DIS-TANZEN by the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland
