Bearnstow

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 18th 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.