Kimberley McIntyre conducted a workshop in Improvised Dance at the Redfern Community Arts Centre last Saturday. Arriving exactly on time, I saw nobody else was there. But I knew a friend of mine was coming, so there would be three of us at least. I was interested in Kimberley’s teaching practice, and to know about her performance work.
Sweeping the hall floor together, we talked as we walked back and forth down the room. She told me she had been dancing in response to animals at the zoo, and that next week she would perform some of this material. This project was supported by Critical Path. This is a Sydney-based organisation supporting choreographers, that “brings together Australian and International artists in a laboratory environment where risk-taking, play and experiment are encouraged.”
Kimberley was interested, she said, in finding out what it would be like to respond, through her improvised movement practice, to some specific material – to animals, in this instance. I got the impression that her dance work to date had been about moving more in the moment, responding to the chance elements in an environment, rather that to specific material. Bringing that open approach to specific material really interests me.
Seeing some connection with my own work, I would like to learn more.
So what connection can I see? I am animating in response to specific material – Antarctic landscape, and wanting to maintain that sense of wonder that comes from responding to things encountered just by chance. I have felt this sense of wonder when improvising in dance, and can see it in others performing. I have felt this sense of wonder in Antarctica, and recognised it in others who have spoken to me about their time there.
The problem I have been experiencing with animation is that it is very slow work. The myriad technical possibilities can distract you. And it is easy to fuss too long with timing and shaping. You can lose the sense of flow. When you dance, you’re in a moment. You move and shape space as you think-feel together, like there’s no line between thought and action.
Since beginning this project I have reduced my tools to a minimum. I animate lines drawn and bodies shaping in response to Antarctic texts. Animating these forms within clear rhythmic patterns, I aim to maintain a sense of the dance, to keep the initial responses alive. The rhythms I use are from my own body, and from those of Milankovitch cycles. I have a long way to go still with this work.
Kimberly began our warm-up – a slow meditation on breathing and moving, drawing spirals through the mouth and tail. This primitive, embryonic motion, reminded me of the moving with all six limbs that I had done with Sandra Lauffenberger just recently [Dance Therapy Professional Development workshop, Wesley Institute, 28-29 June 08]. The feeling of interconnectedness of all parts throughout the body is palpable, and extends through to interconnectiveness with the floor and surrounding environment.
The sense of there being no line between internal body and external environment is something I have been describing lately as the connection between internal and external landscapes. The connection is an experience rather than an idea. It is what many who have connected with landscapes most profoundly have attempted to described. Words alone do not seem adequate to describe the feeling. Siobhan Davies describes the connection we experience between our bodies and our environments as a fact that we forget moving around urban spaces.
She describes how experiencing this fact was heightened in a Polar landscape.
Speaking with her in London earlier this year I had asked her:
L. So your experience there [in the Arctic] shifted your perception of here…
S.
And it’s also an emotional knowledge. So although the scientists were terrific, and I benefited enormously from simply experiencing other people’s knowledge succinctly and intelligently put forward. That was just wonderful. In the end I think it was the emotional experience and knowledge which has been the greatest …I was going to use the word fire, but somehow it’s the wrong Arctic word for …an engine for a different kind of energy.And then the experience of gradually understanding this lack of line between myself and where I exist, that’s been ongoing as choreographic and dance artist… (pauses)…research. I mean, It doesn’t need to be research, because it’s a fact. But funnily enough it’s sometimes very …you don’t always work with the facts. You forget that it’s a fact. So you have to go back and work with it, as a fact again..