I’ve been watching a brilliant weekly series of videos produced by Cedar Lake Dance on youtube. This weeks was called Where I know and talks about trying to find a new experience outside of what you already know and how difficult that is because it’s so easy to slip into the usual way of doing things.
Oh man does that speak to me. Not only in a dance context, but in all this work I’ve been doing. So often I find myself falling into the trap of using my usual way of thinking to approach this new thing, and of course it doesn’t work.
One way out of it in dance is to work with a partner. You both create something, then you learn each other’s. You can try to really take on their style of movement, to push your body outside of it’s comfort zone. It’s an amazing way to open up your own body to a different way of moving.
An equivalent with the mind? I don’t know, but it doesn’t work nearly as well from books/blogs. I think the most powerful way of trying on new thinking is in that real-time, interactive space. I think that even the telephone is a compromise.
Again, I’m wishing I had people IRL that I could share this with. It’s not that I love you any less, but I want something you can’t give me.
Of course, the responsibility is then on me to go out there and find that somehow. Now that’s stepping outside of my comfort zone.
If you haven’t seen me twitter relentlessly about this then go check out the synchronous objects website.
They’ve taken video of a wonderful contemporary dance piece called ‘One Flat Thing, reproduce’ by William Forsythe and created computer imagery in order to help pull out the themes, movements styles, cueing, counterpoint and various other details that make this piece so exciting.
I realised tonight (this morning) that the only reason I don’t do a vid is because I forget that I can. Today for some reason I realised that despite having danced all day and then gone out to a concert (classical – Brahms and Beethoven – and meh) and it now being silly o’clock am before another day of dance that I could still (despite a couple of technical hitches that set me back) get a 12 second vid out. In fact I did two today, I like to think it’s because I’m making up for missing days, but the truth is I couldn’t pick which 12 seconds to show and figured I’d just share both!
Anyway, if you don’t see a 12seconds post from me every single day you have my permission to creatively kick my ass using whatever method you feel best!
