DANZ QUARTERLY No 3 April 2006
Dancing from the Inside Out/(Choreo)Lab Rats
By Melanie Turner
Jeremy is a great inspiration as a dancer, choreographer and teacher.
In January, Footnote Dance hosted the fifth annual Choreolab in Wellington. Choreolab is a three week programme of classes and workshops with a highly experienced, visiting overseas practitioner. It offers professional dancers and emerging choreographers the chance to extend their knowledge base and feed their personal practice. Thirty practitioners seized this wonderful opportunity, though not all attended for the full period.
Choreolab provides dedicated time and space for exploration without the pressures of performance. It supports the contemporary dance industry by seeding and feeding ideas about movement. This happens in three ways: through technique class, through facilitated composition sessions, and through laboratory time for choreographers to experiment with ideas. Composition input from the guest tutor is supplemented by workshops in related areas such as text, voice, soundscapes, dancer health and production. Selected lab choreographers also receive feedback from local mentors to inform their work.
This year’s visiting overseas practitioner was Jeremy Nelson, a New York resident since 1984, though we love to claim him as our own since he was born in the Hutt Valley! Trained at the London School of Contemporary Dance, Nelson has danced with Siobhan Davies and Stephen Petronio Dance Companies, and received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award in 1991. He is now working internationally as an independent choreographer, teacher and dancer, and is on the faculty of Movement Research in New York.
Jeremy’s series of composition workshops unpacked the theme of “Creating from Inner Experience”. These sessions drew on somatic experiences to initiate, create and develop movement, with a well-structured pedagogy for achieving this. Links between the dancers’ inner experience and choreography were clear and productive. Sessions typically began with a partner exercise, which doubled as a warm-up and a way to access kinaesthetic information. This led into an improvisation, followed by a composition task. For example, one partner exercise involved a dancer placing one hand on their partner’s tailbone and the other on the crown of the partner’s head to draw attention to the ends of the spine. The dancer lying on the floor used this information as stimuli for movement, minimally at first, then building into improvising freely without the partner’s hands. Later we used head/tail initiations to translate this kinaesthetic experience into a choreographed vocabulary.
Jeremy also used the dancer’s inner experience to develop movement, adding layers of interest with subsequent elements or concepts. One session focused on arhythmic breath patterns, using breath and sounds as sources for decisions about timing, rhythm and energy quality applied to an earlier sequence. The element of time in dance was a focus, and contrast also featured frequently.
A key tenet of Jeremy’s choreographic practice and teaching pedagogy is the use of limitations and restrictions to short-circuit “the censor”. By engaging the brain in problem-solving there is less capacity for our own critical commentary on our work.
Technique classes were similarly somatically based, beginning with concepts and images based around skeletal structure or the organ body. Each concept was explored in different ways during the warm-up and continued throughout the class into the final sequence. Jeremy’s classes integrate his influences in Klein Technique TM, Alexander technique, and contact improvisation, with references to Body Mind Centering and Bartinieff Movement Fundamentals. Anatomical concepts from technique class frequently provided a starting point for the composition sessions, for example, focusing on identifying where the leg meets the torso (at the level of the greater trochanter) in technique and following this into composition by using kinaesthetic sensations of the hip socket to improvise and create movement.
Jeremy is a great inspiration as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Cat-like and light, he constantly surprises with unexpected changes of direction, weight and articulation, sometimes in mid-air. As a teacher I was struck by the way he creatively and imaginatively combines elements of dance to construct fertile exercises that hit just the right balance of structure and space, and by the seamless scaffolding of activities in a session. There was a lovely sense of flow from one session to another. He is calm, centred, gentle, respectful, generous and encouraging, and pulls out the best of what he sees in a dancer. Jeremy appears to teach intuitively and his strategies are very successful.
The public presentation of workshop movement or work in progress frequently presents thorny issues. Often tensions and anxieties arise, generated through grappling with the expectations of an audience (and dancers) based on conventional performance settings. One mooted solution has been to not share the work with people outside a project, which seems an opportunity lost.
At the Choreolab showing these issues were neatly defused with a policy of honesty and openness. This manifested in a “guided tour” for the audience of what we had been doing for the past three weeks. The audience arrived in the space to find dancers engaged in exercises from Jeremy’s workshops. Jeremy was very open about the entire process, explaining the activities we had done to generate movement, with dancers presenting samples of the outcome. From a dancer’s and teacher’s perspective the showing seemed an educational experience for the audience, with specific details and examples to illustrate the often vague, abstract and inaccessible terms that abound when explaining the process of creating contemporary dance.
Choreolab is a positive model for facilitating exploration, experimentation and the development of dance. The input and opportunities the project provides are vital to the health of professional contemporary dance in New Zealand.
Choreolab was initiated by Deirdre Tarrant in 2001 and is produced by Tarrant and Carey MacDonald at Footnote Dance. Choreolab is supported by Creative New Zealand with assistance from DANZ for the mentors and related workshops. Tarrant Dance Studios continues its history of supporting local dance and theatre by subsidising the space. Thanks also to the Footnote dancers who generously shared their space with the influx!
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