MORET: 

Jack and I started with a simple partnering exercise to welcome comfort, freedom and trust in the act of partnering, improvisation, moving. The result was a foggy window of authentic and instantly happening partnering moves. Those innocent encounters were meant to be part of the ground from which our questions grow off. After having “felt” the ease and happy experience of the spent time with a partner, we confronted the “students“ with some technical information and exercises. The focal points are a OWN body arrangement that sources direction, distance, sustainability and independency within individual bodies. This “crash course” was followed by a short infusion of some foreign physical theatre exercises that can remind of a “gagaistic” idea, called The Seaweed. The Seaweed opens the possibility to find another way to experience OWN responsibility and sustainability, but not own independency. Thus the line between partner-ing and solo-ing, ballet-ing and breakdance-ing, theatre-ing, wellness-ing, etc. is very fluid and relative to the dancer’s/actor’s needs and choices.

After all, how do you teach not?

The workshop ended with a couple of acrobatic moves. And at last got responded by a variety of duets made up by the dancers. Luckily Jack and I were “miss-understood” in this last score and by the result we gained a precious answer to our initial research question: How do you preserve the gift? à How do you remain authentic while attempting to learn and execute foreign material? And how to combine authenticity with learning other techniques?

In our group there were different types of dancers. The reason why they attended our workshop is as variantly as the number of attendance. We would never really know why a dancer is curious in studying partnering. However some of the reasons are repeatedly pupping up and if I choose to remain floating on the surface, I can name a few (and I might be ignorant to some due to my curt curriculum vitae):

“I want to enjoy myself, because if I have a partner suddenly I can focus on THAT challenge and I don’t have to be busy with producing stuff by my own.”

“Partnering contains nice release practices that do therapy to my body.”

“I want to be social.”

“Its much more interesting to inter-act than to hold a monologue.”

“I want to be involved.”

“I want to do more than I can do alone.”

“I want to perform. I want to be “me”, fully, in whatever environment I find myself moving in.”

As Jack says, our learning curve as teachers and as makers is about “how a core group of fundamental exercises and experiments can create a new ground for aesthetic and political (re)presentations.”

We are interested in how by mixing both improvisation and set material the exchange between bodies can remain honest and true to the actual physicalities, same as how that happens when mixing contexts such as creation, rehearsal, performance (à Space and shifting attention).

We think that “the 'burden' of material generation can interfere with the sensing, responding and more so with freshly proposed principals and guidelines; The crucial transition step between improvisational based exchange and goal oriented exchange.” (see Jack’s reflection) At this point I would inquire how it would be, if one would not give any importance to this phenomena of interference. Who are we then and how do we learn? Or who are we when we learn and practice? And how does the environment change, when I look for the teacher in my self? Jack and I find it interesting to ask “What is being danced.” I believe that when interacting with an OTHER body, we have to first find the “overstanding” of interacting with our OWN body. …and eventually, in a best case scenario, disintegrate the difference.

GALLAGHER:

We started with a proposal to mix vocabularies, different styles and levels of physical experience  in a "lab" type exploration and get a process going of partnering based exchanges.

Our learning curve as teachers and as makers is about how a core group of fundamental exercises and experiments can create a new ground for aesthetic and political compositional tools and (re)presentations.

Our  Research Question: How and What to do - to initiate mindful and artistic exchange between bodies with both improvisation and defined material. One demands familiarities that the other doesn't. Whilst improvising, he 'burden' of material generation can interferre with the sensing, responding and especially interpretting the result. Often improvisors have sporadic recall at best.  Freshly proposed principals and guidlines also occupy brain space. The 'cognative burden' of applying skills and simultaneously creating movement can interferre with the contents and significance that appear durring the exchange. On the other hand, setting material, reproducing know feats might might allow for more immediatly cognitive interpretive feedback, might clarify the "why's" of skill aquisition and folowing instructions, as they are more integrated into the feat, might invite more stratified layers of content recognition, but often lack the sense of authorship and authenticity (read: personal experience) that we so value in todays dance. Set material tends to assasinate all sense of personal timing and the experience of the exchange event as unfolding (even when it does unfold). 

How to initiate a process which undulates between these polarities? 

So we proposed a schematic build up, starting with touch and it's issues, and advanced the proposals by addressing content communication through touch, maintenance of self management/duality durring exchanges, preparing the full body weight bearing axises, to end up in collaborative, relatively spontaneous (but not improvised) duet building.

As the proof in our pudding relied heavily on witnessing the cumulitive effects on our colleagues as exemplified by the enthusiasm, freedom and inventiveness of the collaborative 'composing' at the end of the session. This was of course ambitious...is that a bad characteristic? There was little time for feedback gathering along the way. Little time, but nonetheless we paused in the middle at the crucial transition step between improvisational based exchange and goal oriented exchange, i.e. setting out to acomplish moves which require and to a significant degree demand, (especially on a sunday morning!) the execution of carefully considered physiacl parameters. This is when the genre buttun gets pushed in the artistic context.

When the physical exchange moves from the right brains instinctive tracking and responding (mostly unconscious, spontaneous and impulsive) to the left brain's linguistic and logistic facility, we dancers undergo a 'politicalization' of our body. The issues that are hyper sensitive and often hyperbolic in a dancer and his/her artistic representation 'field', i.e. their feelings about how what is transacted in an physical exchange start to stand in for what  is exchanged and therefor what is represented and even more importantly what is presented. 

This fork in the road is where processes must adhere to the participants pre-consieved notions about what is being danced. The big divide, steming from the fact that as dancers are instrument is our own body and we are interacting with an 'other' body, throws into stark relief, how interferrence, manipulation, control, teleological behavior, and how those issues and their close relatives (too many to list here) all accumulate into a grand issue of major political importance: Power. The triggers start working immediately within the body. A person's orientation to power in his/her most primitive and sophiticated body responses (attitude, confidence, risk and/or sensitivity, accuracy, reliability) produce the representational and political comfort zone and the boarders of that comfort zone. In other words, the cusal train of significance is set in motion. The interpretive facility starts conferencing with the tracking and tracing of feelings and the symbolic meaning of how and what is being proposed. Right brain and left brain start to rub against each other.

Since the right/left brain (body) split is the condition that stimulates the internal power politics (a spontaneous and thouroughly internal matrix of voting and selecting, proposing and evaluating, judging and reacting) it is at this juncture when spontaneous becomes teleological (schematically induced in our Partnering Beyond Genres workshop session) that previous orientations and preferences for artistic exchange processes become players in the game. In fact, based on our experiences in Vienna, I now deduce (as I write this) that the preferences for specific orientations, approaches, distribution of priorities etc. within an artistic exchange process such as dance partnering, is where the dance genre exposes it's political nature. As soon as the exchange activity is a priori designated as essentially belonging to a dance genre, it is immediately belonging to, piggybacking on, and or representing a policized discourse on power relations, which is the function of politics. As internal as this may be, it becomes a new partner in the duet. Exaclty how bound and hermetic the correlation of dance genre to political ideologies each dance genre is was not the focus of the inquirey. But it feels intuitively and experientially correct to recognise a strong corelation, no matter how problematic that might be. Oversimplification here will no do greater good whatsoever. Of that I am convinced already. And many difficult questions immediately arise out of this intuitive correlation Not the least of which is what is a dance genre? Is it only a market construct? Is it only an out dated way of acknowledging different (and somewhat consistent) differences in types of audience for types of dance? Has genre been replaced with brad in a late capitalistic shift from belong to discourses and promoting individual star voices? In defence of the issue uberhaupt, i add here that if the last statement is true, it would be consistent with the latest developments in national politics. And the real in politics is more often than not, a discussion about priorities more than ideals. Choosing priorities is about the choosing the sequence, knowing that there is everywhere a limit to resources, especailly the resource of time.

But back to the moment in the workshop session when we move from improvised, contingent exchnage to the goal oriented, the teleological. At this very juncture, a dear colleague form the Amsterdam group, Roos van Berkel, astutely pointed out, with a question, the presence of this internal political player that was emerging in the schematic developement.

I paraphrase - "Now that we are involved in the acrobatic, a pre-determined (by us, the research workshop givers) act of exchange, how is the authenticity, the preciousness of the gift (between the dueting partners) preserved?"

I am extremely greatful for the authentic question from Roos.

I took it with me. I'll carry it until it integrates with our workshop and still remember when and how it came up.

The purpose of creative tools, from analyses to propositions, from guidline to principals, from stimulating imaginatives to technical corrections is to add to the creative capacity and take away the blocks and the unnecessary risks to mind body and soul. Of course the risky options and the confrontations with blocks are the reward of having surpassed what came before.

So now I am looking for a tool, or a proposition that is instrumental in encouraging and preserving the "authenticity of the gift" if I get Roos's idea correctly. Is it, as is often the case in leadership, the smallest windows that one must pay attention to, such as the moment when the next steps in the chain, the next explorartions are proposed that one could avoid the hesitation, the threat to such a thing as one's authenticity? Or is it more fun to imagine a structural bridge between the dancer generated goals that result from principals to the pre-chosen challenges and feats and lifts and skills?

This is exciting to consider.

When watching the video footage back, we were very pleased at the inventive on the spot compositions. We were looking for the capacity to play with a broad range of actual physical exchange skills. Familiar boxes were ripped open. Something of an athletecism appeared that we want to pursue. A playing area where risk and sensitivity are both vigorous. Our next goal is to add the potential for conflict to be embraced and worked with.