This Monday Movement Series‘ event at Brooklyn Studios for Dance was Authentic Movement lead by Katie Workum.
Some of my thoughts during this wonderful, quiet, three and a half person movement exploration:
- It is the watcher that gives movement, not the mover – i.e. I was so concerned that I was being too choreographic with my movement, until I became the witness and took a step back from my internal processing. Then I realized that as a witness I could choose or choose not to view the movements before me as performance, compositionally sound, and that it was my viewing them, the perception, that made them choreographic or not in a compositional sense. Therefore, although even while I was dancing I was perceiving it compositionally, that didn’t necessarily mean others were, or that I was doing the exercise incorrectly. It meant that I was viewing my own movement from an internal eye as I was doing it.
- That there are as many techniques as there are bodies, which is to say people. Technique is fun to think about for me, and how it is and isn’t the same as style. I like thinking about the words we use to talk about dance. But what I thought about watching these fellow women in the midst of their authentic movement is that each of us dance in our own technique, our own already established vocabulary through life experiences and anatomy. And that when we learn choreography we can attempt to inhabit the technique of another body in all its specificity for just a moment.
I’ll be writing more on dance soon. I’m going to be watching a lot of choreography in December, and I’ll be performing with Progeny Dance in January and February.
Mar I Terra 