Welcome to (a new series I’m trying out called) REFERENCE MATERIAL. This series engages hypertext¹ as a site of study², exploring the question: what makes a piece of information ‘reference material’?

★ ★ ★

Dance, for me, has always been an outlet for art-making, and being a performer is part of how I’ve made sense of myself in the world. As my art & research continue to center around creative embodiment, I’ve been considering what that means for dance within my practice. This has called me toward a tension, to check myself about how I am using embodiment not as a mere metaphor but as praxis for treating my relationship to my body like a valid space of learning and creative depth.

So, today I’m sharing what has been helping me listen into that tension as I reconsider dance & public practice, for myself.

Here are some reference materials I’ve gathered:

1. A photo of sign on a tree, which includes the text: “I am not dead, I’m dormant.”

Annika Hansteen-Izora. “Trusting Creativity as an Abundant Source.” Annika is Dreaming. Published 30 March 2022. https://annikahansteenizora.substack.com/p/trusting-creativity-as-an-abundant.

One of the biggest challenges for me with dance has been accepting that my relationship to it has been going through a period of wintering. For a significant amount of time I was fighting that, and as my capacity has increased I’ve found it much more clear that dance and I have needed quietness, slowness, darkness. I experienced this as a dissolving of my previous public practice (I was running a team for 4 years and performing consistently for 7), as well as a gradual development of a solo dance practice based on movements that are accessible to me in my day to day (ex. breathwork in bed, walking around the park, listening to the environment around me). So uneasy was this transition–a cycle of forcing, forgetting, remembering, un-learning–but it has been an experience I’ve shaped toward the foundations for creative embodiment in all aspects of my art-making.

2. The Dance Union Podcast. "Life is Improvised." Published 2019. https://on.soundcloud.com/Alcp5qcA2UKWEzp94A.

‘Improvisation’ and ‘creative embodiment’ harmonize in ways that sometimes make me question which one should be my focus. Part of this has arisen from becoming more open to what movement language/s make since for me at this point in my relationship to dance. Looking into the style of Contact Improvisation led me to this interview with two dance practitioners whose work with improvisation have re-oriented me to an original desire: a life-long relationship to dance. They each offer possibilities for this in their own way, which is all-the-more affirming. I am also interested in what it means for improvisation to be a resource that supports other dance/performance styles, and how that might come up for my more public-facing dance work in the future.

3. “the body in movement” Are.na Channel by Alice Otieno. Published 2020. https://www.are.na/alice-otieno/the-body-in-movement.

I can’t express enough how this are.na channel puts breath into my body. I’ll focus, this time, on the channel’s description: “observing the body through space and performance; dance as a vehicle for living a more embodied life.” This sentiment carries so much of how I feel dance as a public practice is something that I’m actively experimenting with the meaning of, right now. Previously I hadn’t considered what I did in the dance studio or on stage to be connected to my regular movements in day to day life. Even that wording—‘regular’ movements–what I mean is technically clear, and yet these days I’m more strongly considering transgressing that boundary, in the name of creative embodiment: to learn how to bring a certain quality of creativity with me regardless of if I’m in a formal dance setting.

FURTHER STUDY:

• What references help you connect creativity to your body’s capacity for movement?

• Have you interacted with any of these reference materials before?

  • If yes, what made that interaction possible?

  • If no, what could have made that lack of interaction possible?

★ ★ ★

Thanks for being an audience,

Paris