# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Walkscapes  el andar como práctica estética. by Francesco Careri Maurici Pla (z-lib.org)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Edición para el proyecto Transcavaciones

# data[].attributes.body
Videodanza Theo Clinkard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Concept, Design and Performance: Theo Clinkard

Editor: Mariko Montpetit
Sound: Samir Kennedy
CGI Artist: Ryan Vautier 
CGI Artist Assistant: Sarah Blome
Camera Operator and Outside Eye: Charlie Morrissey

“For this work, I spent a night dancing in the woods. I wanted to embrace the wilderness in all it’s complex, messy glory as a home for rural queerness and experience how this nocturnal environment might disrupt or tune my practice. 
Crafted in collaboration with a group of fellow artists, Bent Wood is both document and fairytale, a film that captures these small hours whilst celebrating the folkloric tradition of the woods as a site for transformation, a space that is easily more bent than I could ever hope to be.” 

Commissioned by Surf the Wave and Pavilion Dance South West.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Love A Somatic View by Stanley Keleman (z-lib.org)

# data[].attributes.body
Sitio de citas/scores de improvisación

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
IMPROVISATION / SCORES

Improvisation and score making is an important tool and approach to creating and performing. Below are some ideas to explore from a range of disciplines.

Yvonne Rainer - choreographer, filmmaker
'...her first dance for the socially isolated.'

This one came out at the beginning of the Corona 19 virus. All of us were isolated in our homes- so this score is meant for inside your home.

You can walk, in any direction, or you can stand

If a stable, lightweight chair is available, you can sit or stand on it.

you can stand on the bed -or walk across it, without breaking stride. The same goes for couch, table and overstuffed pieces of furniture.

You might jostle a piece of furniture. You might wrap your body around that furniture or pick up and put down objects or, say, wash your hands - never too often now - all while maintaining a steady walking rhythm, which, the mainstay of the whole enterprise.

Once you stand still, it's over

SOUND: Although the score, like much postmodern dance, doesn't require any musical accompaniment, you can respond to noises in your environment. You can decide on several verbal cues from the radio or TV to put yourself into motion again, like 'virus' or 'pandemic. The high frequency of such cues should prevent extended stalling.

A point of departure: suggestions for any improvisor.
[from Mike Vargas - Notice & Contribute]
* Be aware.
* Be available.
* Be responsive.
* Be clear.

The Magic Envelope:
[from Rob Kitsos]
Many artists in dance and theatre use scores in a variety of ways. Some techniques are meant to cultivate a group connection or build compositional ideas. Other approaches offer structures for performing improvisation. One of the challenges in using scores is finding the right balance between enough structures that you feel free to move, but not too much that you feel restricted.

Below is a small list of concepts and scores that can be printed on a small sheet of folded paper and placed in a large envelope. A finite group of participants is selected to participate. The group chooses two folded papers and applies the concepts to the improvisation. The group should not discuss ideas- just take a few seconds to be in the space and go. It is also useful to include a finite amount of time. (Ex: Trio, 2:00)

It's fun to make up your own- but here are a few ideas:

Melody, Rhythm, Spatial Relationship, Movement Language, Contrast (time, space, dynamic), Story, Flow- continuous action/relationships, One focus, Sound Drives, Gesture, Obstacle, Object, Conversation, Kinesthetic Response, Image, One Arm, No arms, Attraction/ Repulsion, No Content, Collaboration, Chaos/Control, One Solo, Face up stage When Still, Speak When Still, Only Straight Lines, Only Curves, Secret, Family, Animal...

Rewriting Distance:
[from Guy Cools and Lin Snelling]
Rewriting Distance is a long durational arts practice and exchange between Belgian dramaturg Guy Cools and choreographer/dancer Lin Snellng. It is a performance/workshop creating an open space for allowing time to be felt and measured by our own looking. Where the cadences of time improvise themselves within various art practices simultaneously. Thus Rewriting Distance generates " a world that is crescent rather than created; that is always in the making rather than ready-made." (Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, Hallam & Ingold 2007, pp. 2-3).

The original form has three participants. A performer, a witness seated in a chair, and an audience person seated behind the witness chair. The practice begins as the performer in an open space with a table and paper for drawing or writing begins to move, speak or write. The witness can join the performer at any point they choose, and the performer can leave the space at any point they choose. The audience person moves into the witness chair, when the witness enters the performance space and the event unravels in this manner; as each participant moves through the various roles/time frames of performer, witness and audience. The table with paper and pen creates an island inside the open space where people are free to write/draw/read/sculpt. The form can take on many participants (one to 20) and in larger group settings there are more participants in the audience position who pass through into the performance through the threshold of the witness chair.

Performance Piece #8 (Summer, 1965)
[from Alison Knowles - 'by Alison Knowles' see bibliography]
Divide a variety of objects into two groups. Each group is labeled "everything." These groups may include several people. There is a third division of the stage empty of objects labeled "nothing." Each of the objects is "something." One performer combines and activates the objects as follows for any desired duration of time:

1. something with everything
2. something with nothing
3. something with something
4. everything with everything
5. everything with nothing
6. nothing with nothing

Performative presence for solo improvisation:
[from Isabelle Kirouac]
6 consecutive solo improvisations:
a) Focus inward - dancing for you
b) Focus inward - dancing for the audience
c) Focus outward - dancing for you
d) Focus outward - dancing for the audience
e) Alternating focus - dancing for you
f) Alternating focus - dancing for the audience

Duet Four - A long distance relationship
[from Andy Fields - Six Duets]

Find a location high up where you can look out over the city

From here find a person somewhere in the distance they should be far enough away that you cannot read the expressions on their face only the movements in their body

Try to measure the distance between you and them

Try to imagine how long it would take you to cross that distance: 1) if you were walking 2) if you were running 3) if you were a bullet fired from a sniper's rifle

Try to imagine who this person is and what they are doing: where have they just been? where are they going? how well do they know the city? what is the loneliest they have ever been? what is their biggest fear? when was the last time they kissed someone completely spontaneously? do they miss being younger? have they noticed you standing here yet?

Real-Time Composition:
[from Rob Kitsos; see Joao Fiadeiro as another approach]
In this work- we set up a space for improvisation that is focused on composition. Each participant is making choices based on what the space needs- while keeping an awareness of the outside picture. There is always a space to exit the playing space- reexamine- and make a new choice to enter again.

As a large group, it's great to assign rolls before beginning and give time to develop ideas.

Choose a theme

Break into groups (players, Designers, Sound, Lighting)

Go away to build ideas

Come together and improvise

*add: Call out- Pause, Reverse, Solo, Duet, Trio etc. and Clear the space
Roles: Players, Light, Video, Sound, Visual Design
Players: inhabit the space/movement/text

Lighting: units and range of sources

Video: pre-loaded images/ real time camera and projection

Sound: acoustic- electronic- vocal

Visual Design: Set, props and spatial dimensions

Research on The Border:
[from Isabelle Kirouac]
Here is a series of workshops on exploring the idea of border. They can be done in sequence or individually.
Border Contemplative Walk
A: Each person goes on an individual walk outside for 15 minutes, thinking about the concept of border and how this idea intersects with daily life and their immediate environment.

Where does public and private space begin and end? What is hidden behind walls, doors or under the sidewalk? What are the lines of division that exists around us? What are the closest and farthest sounds we can hear? What happen when we get closer or father from a stranger walking down the street?

B: Group conversation about the experiences.
Corners/ Border Poems
A: Writing exercise, complete the following sentences:

B: Border Poem.

Collective reading on the writing exercise and combining a selection of sentences from different individuals.

Authentic Movement
[from Tedi Tafel] A Practice for Performers and Creators of All Disciplines
Authentic Movement is a physical practice of listening for and embodying inner impulses. The basic structure is simple: a mover moves with eyes closed in the presence of a witness, attending to impulses that arise from within and bringing them to from through movement. Setting aside the desire to invent, to direct, to be creative, the mover learns instead to listen and allow. By attending to sensory/kinesthetic impulses, we see what our body is asking of us, to what needs to happen next. Giving up controlling, pre-deciding or censoring, we enter a realm that is unplanned and often surprising, one that invites direct experience of personal and creative truth. The body is seen less as an object to be trained or brought under control and more as a source and inspiration, to be attended to with its stories, intelligence and perceptions.

There are many ways in which the role of the 'mover' in AM practice supports and even mirrors the work of the performer/creator. At its most basic level, it teaches one to develop receptivity to one's authentic impulses. When we discover a true sense of being non-selective, of having no agenda, in terms of what arises, more is allowed and available and the range and palette of expressive possibilities are expanded. Finding a felt sense of the moment, an uninterrupted connection of impulse into action, learning to self-witness, to stay aware of what is happening without prematurely shaping it, are all essential understandings for an artist. Authentic Movement teaches one how to tolerate not knowing, to trust and to remain present in the potential chaos of the creative process and not prematurely impose resolution before the excavation of ideas and imagery find their own completion.

As we then practice being witnessed by another, we learn how to consciously and willingly surrender to the experience of the moment and to be consciously and willingly seen in the midst of doing so. This is the work of the performer as he or she meets an audience. As we practice witnessing another, we again confront what gets in the way of truly seeing. We notice how patterns of perception and judgment remove us from more fully being present and we come to understand that by opening our awareness beyond our interpretation and analysis, we are able to include and to experience, much more. For an artist, this opportunity to become conscious and work with limits and habits holds great potential for expansion and growth.

Element Chart:
[from Rob Kitsos]
Here are elements in improvisation in divisions of time, space, design, sound and choice. This was something that helped identify what I wanted to focus on and what spanned each element (many are interchangeable).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This one came out at the beginning of the Corona 19 virus. All of us were isolated in our homes- so this score is meant for inside your home. You can walk, in any direction, or you can stand If a stable, lightweight chair is available, you can sit or stand on it.

# data[].attributes.headline
Process of Improvisational Contemporary Dance

# data[].attributes.subject
Process of Improvisational Contemporary Dance

# data[].attributes.headline
Delante de tus Ojos Semillas de una práctica de la danza. Lisa Nelson

# data[].attributes.subject
Delante de tus Ojos Semillas de una práctica de la danza. Lisa Nelson

# data[].attributes.body
Improvisación

# data[].attributes.body
The Thinking Body

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The poetics of touch: NANCY STARK SMITH, a pathway into contact improvisation

# data[].attributes.body
The movement of Attention 2005

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Simone Forti
Photo by: Daniel Lepkoff, 2000

Can you say in what realm your questions or your thoughts are? Are they aesthetic or related to community, not that you'd have to separate those?

From my observations of people around me in dance classes and performances, especially here in NY, I sense that a certain fundamental understanding or approach to dancing that used to be common knowledge and that once surrounded me is absent.

If I understand you are saying there is a set of understandings or a field that used to be shared and that you operate by and that they can be forgotten if they are not reiterated.

Yes, for example in this improvisation festival that just happened. I feel many of the younger dancers who are exploring improvisation or spontaneous composition are unaware of a wealth of inspired research and developed knowledge that I think might be very apropos to their questions.

I recently attended two performance showcase events at the "Improvisation is Hard" festival. I went to see my friends Vicky Shick and Diane Madden perform but I saw many different performers on each night. After the second show I realized that the atmosphere in both of these concerts offered no empty space. Both evenings I attended were facilitated by MC's. The MC's did more than facilitate the flow of events, they were themselves full blown theatrical standup comedic acts that kicked in between every piece, a rhythm similar to television. There were no gaps.

In many of the pieces I saw I felt the artists placed an emphasis on manifesting a striking and unusual image performed with total confidence and conviction. This idea that the performer is the creator or manufacturer of the image itself is a different paradigm than the performer as a vehicle for the audience's images; that performing is a communication and when something magic happens in the theater it is created by a confluence or symbiosis of both the audience and performer together.

I think of years ago, what we were doing was exploring various interests, and performance was the medium in which we would explore them, so it wasn't so much of a presentational thing as a sharing of thoughts and interests...and...it wasn't that performance was something you could do...there was no pattern there that you could do one of...it was more a question of "lets look at this"...and it could be very kinetic...by ideas and thoughts I don't mean just verbally thinking.

Anyway, you said earlier there were certain understandings that you do not see now. Could you shed some light on these understandings? Let's continue in this direction.

My reaction to these recent performances shows me again that emptiness is very basic to my creative process, to my approach toward researching movement...an approach that involves observation, quieting oneself and having the presence of something come to you.

Watching Diane (Madden) was interesting for me. Years ago, Diane and I worked a lot together in a group called Channel Z and we also made two duet collaborations*. Ultimately Diane devoted herself to the work of Trisha Brown and even at the time we were working together she was deeply involved with Trisha's work. So Diane's dance career has been very different from mine, yet watching Diane dance I saw a physical practice that is very familiar to me. She walked into the performing space and began by taking time to tune herself to her physical state; how she felt in the first moment she entered the space, standing before the eyes of the audience. She listened to the movement that was there in her initial stillness and didn't try to hide her nervousness and appeared to notice how her body was vibrating. It was obvious to me that she had a basic relationship to the activity of "being present" and tuning to what is; that "being present" was an acquired skill for how to arrive into her physicality.

Daniel dancing with students in Orvieto
Photographer: annonymous

In my own work the idea of "being present" was always fundamental, but as a dance concept "being present" is difficult to define in technical terms and sometimes I could only think of this as some kind of spiritual activity. The two movement forms I practiced in my early years of dancing, Contact Improvisation and Release Technique each proposed a more or less technical approach toward the activity of "being

present." Continuing to explore the physical details of this concept through the years, I have realized that "being present" is actually a movement and I have identified what is moving. "Being present" is the "movement of my attention". This has been a slow but exciting process of realization for me. I now have a set of simple exercises that highlight specific elements of this activity. It seems to me now just as direct and simply to practice "being present" physically as it is to practice a plie for example.

* - (Channel Z was a NY based collective alive in the 80's that rehearsed and performed improvisational work and included Robin Feld, Paul Langland, Daniel Lepkoff, Diane Madden, Nina Martin, Stephen Petronio, and Randy Warshaw)

Can you be more specific?

At its roots my dance work is focused on everyday movement, the functioning of the body, how we navigate physically and how the mind and body work together to compose our movement. One basic fact that determines the nature of all my studio work is that our everyday functional movement is always in the context of a physical dialogue with our environment.

The relevance for dancing is that this dialogue is highly composed and full of personalized knowledge, sensuality, and imagination. As a child, physical interactions with our environment are wondrous. As an adult we come to rely on tried and true habits. I've discovered that when I unhinge myself from my first impulses and read, re-read, and re-read again, where I am, my current physical circumstance, and I take a second, third, fourth, and fifth look, my environment literally transforms itself... it becomes a sensual presence, anything but neutral, and stimulates my imagination. This experience is a delight and fills me with a desire to engage. I really am hopelessly in love with this kind of dancing.

Taking a second, third, fourth, or fifth look is what I am now calling the "movement of attention." In the ordinary course of events most of our actions, at a deep level, are automatic. Walking for example is ordinarily relatively effortless. Imagine, however, you are walking out on a frozen lake; you are not sure the ice is strong enough to support you; the gracefully effortless walk becomes halting, hesitating, you listening for the sound of ice beginning to break, you test and feel the subtleties of the support as you shift your weight slowly from one foot to another foot. The boundary between what you imagine and what is real is slightly blurred. In this situation the movement of your attention is heightened; your attention reaches out and precedes your movement. In my studio work, I am experimenting with a physical state in which the movement of attention precedes the commitment to physical action.

This concept is a key for physical improvisation, but also for dancing set movement. I imagine what makes a classical piano player great. While they are playing a highly complex piece, their attention is able to move so they can hear the music through more than one filter, listen to the rhythm, harmonic structure, rhythmic phrasing, emotion and...all before the next note is played...so what sounds fast and complex to our ears is actually full of time and space to theirs. In the movement of a finger from one key to the next is a space in time that allows them to fine tune their impulse, hesitate or stretch the time between one note and another. This is music.

Daniel Lepkoff with Chair
Photo by: Gabriel Goldman, 1978

Can you give a specific example of how you work with this idea in the studio?

I have an ongoing fascination with the eyes and vision in connection to movement and performance. Recently I read in a book by Aldous Huxely, "The Art of Seeing" that in a state of deep rest, the eyes are actually in constant motion. To keep the eyes still is a strain. This reminds me of the breath. You can hold your breath, but you cannot stop breathing. You can keep your eyes still, but eventually, when they relax, they move.

I have learned to feel the movement of my eyes while I am dancing. On a level of sensation the movement of the eyes is a stretch sensation. On the level of perception, the movement of my eyes is inseparable from the images of the space I am living in.

When you first enter a new space, walk through a door, there is a "reading" that you take. I've realized this activity is literally analogous to the activity of reading a book. You cannot get any information from the page of a book if you just blankly stare at the page. You have to place each letter in the center of your vision and move your eyes from letter to letter, only then does the meaning come to you. Likewise, you need to move your vision to build a sense of where you are in space, you need to take a reading. Once I became aware of this activity of reading space I could allow myself to play with the way I read space, and feel and shape the rhythm of that reading. I have identified different ways to move my visual attention and these have become movement explorations.

I have become interested in tracking how the space changes as I move. If you quiet the movement of the eyes and move the body's center, as in walking while the eyes are relatively still, the visual image changes because your point of view shifts. It is interesting to experience "moving space" rather than "moving through space". When you reverse your movement it is exactly like running film in reverse. I describe this exercise as panning. When you pan with a video camera, the motion of the image is created by the motion of the camera but when you watch it back on a TV, it is the image moving in the frame of the TV not the TV moving in the space. I noticed it is easier to experience this most profoundly when walking backwards. I once took my class, in a workshop I was teaching in PARTS, for a walk in the park across the street. We walked backwards for 1 hour, watching the environment move.

I have identified other visual activities that do not yet have names. When you "see" you also compose relationships between the various objects in your field of vision, you match groups of objects with each other and organize them in relationship to other groups of objects and in relationship to the background or foreground or what is above or below. I noticed this organization can shift and there seems to be innumerable permutations of how a single scene can be composed in ones vision. I experience these shifts of composition as a slight stretch sensation in the eye and at the same time as a movement in my mind. To dwell in this activity is quite pleasant. I often entertain myself with this activity, while walking the streets.

Once in a workshop in Paris, after we had been working with the field of vision while walking as a group through the spaces between people, I asked the class to stop and sit against the bleachers in a certain place where the sunlight was reflecting off the dust particles that were floating in the air. From this vantage point the dust appeared as brilliant weightless crystals. We watched these crystals do their ensemble dance in mid air and began to laugh because the dust particles started to seem as if they had minds of their own and many of their choices were very clever and funny. I think the dust particles came alive because in fact we were moving our visual attention and gathering information, and not just staring blankly into space.

There is more.

If I think in terms of performance I have confidence as you're doing this activity of shifting your attention that I can tell by your timing of when you move, when you turn your head, the choices that you make, I can somewhat tell what is going on and so through you I can experience something similar to what you are experiencing.

Daniel:

A lot of what I know about performance is through being an audience. The activity of moving my visual attention has really enlivened my own audience-ing and perhaps has altered how and what I now see when I watch a dance.

There is something fundamental in how people can understand each other though reading each others behavior. We can look at someone and assess if they are sick or shy or aggressive or whatever may be going on. We are sensitive to these things.

When a performer is engaged in this activity of "moving their attention," unhinging themselves from the inevitable and taking a moment to alter their view, shifting their intention and playing physically in this way, as an audience we may not immediately understand what we are looking at. The behavior doesn't read in the usual way. This creates a space for us, the audience, to move our own attention to compose what it is that we are seeing. This activity is deeply reflexive.

On the other hand when performers do not shift away from the transient images or perceptions that randomly pass by but identify themselves with one particular relationship, this becomes a label. A label is like a billboard, the performer is the billboard saying "look! I am sexy," "look! I am serious," "look! I am funny." Where is the space for the audience to create their own images?

One thing I have come to value through my dancing is the importance for people to have a way to assess their own situation and not defer their opinions to someone else who supposedly knows better. In this time there are very divisive and powerful forces at work in our government and in the corporate world. We are surrounded my media images that are designed to manipulate our attention and control what we know and do not know. This is why I become concerned when an art event seems to offer no space for the audience to create their own images or meaning.

I think it is important to make work that does not tell people what they are supposed to see, or what it is supposed to mean, or indicate what is good or not good.

Simone:

I think you have got at something very subtle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Simone FortiPhoto by: Daniel Lepkoff, 2000 Can you say in what realm your questions or your thoughts are? Are they aesthetic or related to community, not that you'd have to separate those?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.julyenhamilton.com/videos.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
La Caldera Summer stage 2016  Julyen Hamilton

# data[].attributes.body
Conversación sobre su trayectoria

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chance Conversations: An Interview with Merce Cunningham and John Cage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trisha Brown in "Watermotor", by Babette Mangolte (1978)

# data[].attributes.headline
IMPROVISACIÓN PARA LA INVESTIGACIÓN DE MOVIMIENTO

# data[].attributes.subject
IMPROVISACIÓN PARA LA INVESTIGACIÓN DE MOVIMIENTO

# data[].attributes.headline
IMPROVISACIÓN COMO PRÁCTICA DE CONOCIMIENTO

# data[].attributes.subject
IMPROVISACIÓN COMO PRÁCTICA DE CONOCIMIENTO

# data[].attributes.headline
"The Landscape of the Now" Kent de Spain

# data[].attributes.subject
"The Landscape of the Now" Kent de Spain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Landscape of NOW: Interview with Kent De Spain - 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Underscore The Underscore is a long-form dance improvisation structure developed by Nancy Stark Smith. It has been evolving since 1990 and is practiced all over the globe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
EP6 - Deborah Hay by Dancehouse Melbourne

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In conversation with Angela Conquet and Philipa Rothfield

# data[].attributes.headline
Tecnologías de Improvisación William Forysthe

# data[].attributes.subject
Tecnologías de Improvisación William Forysthe