I've just recently returned from Mt. Vernon, Maine where I participated in a Cooperative Practices workshop with BeBe Miller and K.J. Holmes at Bearnstow. Bearnstow is a summer retreat next to Parker Pond on land protected by the Kennebec Land Trust. Environmental preservation, awareness, and responsibility are core values within all workshops.
BeBe Miller, choreographer and founder of
BeBe Miller Company
http://www.bebemillercompany.org/who also teaches at Ohio State, offered tools for the creative process challenging, deconstructing, defining, and playing with form. We also looked at the relationship of 'set' and 'improvised' material, the boundaries and boundlessness of repetition, and setting structures inspired by the 18
th century poetic style,
Sestina. K.J. Holmes, a dance artist and teacher at NYU and Movement Research in New York, offered Body Mind Centering Practices. Body-Mind Centering® (
BMC) is an eclectic and dynamic approach to somatic training and re-education through systems development and evolution developed by Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen.
http://www.bodymindcentering.com/. K.J.'s unique teaching style offers possibilities within improvisational practices that explore the relationship between movement and language, and also introduces formal cues within improvisation that can adjust the performance one way or another.
Participants were given an opportunity to chose a 'site' on
Bearnstow property that they would return to throughout the duration of the workshop as a kind of integration place; a performance space where ideas could be tested, edited, and developed. Near the end of the workshop we mapped out the site locations and drew a map for our tour of presentations. The sharing of our site was to be a performance that was more about sharing ideas, concepts, questions, doubts, testing tools, using the information from now, --- rather than presenting a polished product.
The following photos are from my site sharing. Along with notes from some of the ideas-forms-systems I was exploring.
Venous Blood . Venus Blood .
Reading the Room
Grove of You
(from a previous showing of an earlier part of the process)
Phase IV
Thank you Timmy for all these wonderful photos.
My experience at
Bearnstow was and still is very transformational. My travel plans home were delayed and re-arranged a bit with Hurricane Irene. An incredible blessing to be given more time to settle and transition. And to be so well taken care of. I've been re-instilled with an appreciation for dance, choreography, structure. And also, sparked in utter fascination with the
BMC principles. Very inspired by teachers who use what is there, see the need, the dream, the wish and in subtle, brilliant ways, nudge things into being. Grateful to have met the colleagues and peers, and to have been a part of such a supportive, adventurous group.
Thank you Maine.
FRI NOV 4 2011
The Residue is inspired by watching loved ones suffer because of an inability to talk about or express an enormously life changing event. The series is built out of a map that charts the rhythms and patterns of the 7 days of the week and outlines a vocabulary and aesthetic for each day.
F R E E
"Open your eyes, I thought, and I thought I had opened them, but I couldn't see. Because a certain part of my brain was numb, the part that had to do with my eyes, and I knew it was numb because all around I could feel more than a normal amount of feeling."
"And I wanted to pick myself up off the ground completely, but then I thought, that cannot be, there is no such thing as a phantom event. There is always a sequence. One just had to come to be aware, I thought. All events happen in relation to other events. And if they don't happen in relation to other events, I thought, as in, if in the first instance of germinating an event doesn't even happen apropos other events, it doesn't even matter."
"In every situation, I thought, standing up now and feeling my legs, there is a way to take advantage. A way to control how one situation lines up against another situation, how one event layers itself upon another. One event in relation to another in the same way that it is also in relation to a third event. And a fourth, and fifth one too, I thought. And so on. That your whole life is a string of event taking form in a backwards manner."
"And what a lie it is, the present, I thought, because it doesn't even exist. There is only the moving forward of events and the moving backward of one's understanding of those events. To say there is a present, I thought, is to say there is a platform where events accumulate and then stop happening so one can evaluate their effect. It is what people do, I though, feed themselves lies. Everything is a lie in the first instance. And then the lie is purified, smoothed out, turn into a truth, because the present is always cycling into the past, or becoming the future moment. And the notion of the present is purified lie, because in the time it takes to say the word 'present' the moment has already passed and you are just a fool running out of breath trying to pin the moment down to evaluate. What misery, I though to myself, rocking back and forth on my legs. A whole system of lies, a whole system of belief. "
Hello?
Venous Blood . Venus Blood .
Grove of You
(from a previous showing of an earlier part of the process)
Phase IV
a collaboration:
The Residue is inspired by watching loved ones suffer because of an inability to talk about or express an enormously life changing event. The series is built out of a map that charts the rhythms and patterns of the 7 days of the week and outlines a vocabulary and aesthetic for each day.
Reading the Room
The Rock Bottom of You
...and Swamp Monster
Membranes facing way out
Sestina within the Sestina
This is not a shadow... this is the body... Shadow vs. Dominant
an amazing photograph I think you'll agree
