I AM…

Tags

Ballet, choreography, Conscious Living, contemporary dance, Creative Flow, Dance, Modern, modern dance, Teaching, Technique, universal heart, Wonder

I am a maker of dance, both the ephemeral imagery in space as well as the physical beings who transcribe them. The shape of the space in which the physical reality of a work exists is where I feel at home in my skin. It is this transparency and manifestation of concept that thrills me most.

 

I like to speak with movement and express the desires of my heart through the physical articulation of bone and blood. As the body traces space, hitting point by point the architectural blue prints of choreography, the soul revels in ecstasy as it etches each work.

 

I like to listen to the world with my feet hearing the subtle churning and shifting of its rotation and the chaos of its populations. When the foot becomes receiver, the heart becomes the poet allowing for the majesty of imagery to create the kinetic hologram of dance.

 

I am a maker of dance. I am a shaper of space. I am a poet of kinetic proportions penning movement into magic and mystery.

 

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Words for the dancers of “Blind Sight”

Tags

Believing, choreography, contemporary dance, courage, Courageous Vulnerability, Creative Flow, Dance, faith, heart, journey, joy, light, love, Mindful Action, modern dance, Soul to Soul, Teaching, Technique, training

Blind Sight

 

If you were to possess the ability to see, that which does not exist, you would most clearly understand the depth and expanse of your immediate reality. You would understand that there are things that surround you, carry you, and support the very vibration that is you.

 

If you could allow yourself to trust in the Universe to guide you, humble yourself in faith so deep you would radiate the light, you would believe that underneath it all, you already possess the wings to fly.

 

What you do not know does not mean it is not already there. You already embody what is needed to soar beyond your wildest imaginings and the question now is whether you will be able to see it inside yourself and in those that surround you at this present moment.

 

There is a great animal inside of you. Let it be free. Let it be your companion on this journey tonight. You have built a relationship with it to no longer fear it. Wild does not mean without heart, it means living with an enchanted abandonment that our hearts hunger to express. Run alongside that animal, for it is the very embodiment of the spirit within.

 

These are the spirits I see with my blind sight; the spirit of your true nature in all of its glory. Do you have the courage to see it yourself while allowing for a moment, others to see it in you, too?

 

Questions of the Field

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Ballet, bodies, bodies in motion, Chi, contemporary dance, Dance, Energy, Field, Force, happiness, heart, joy, love, Modern, oneness, open body, open heart, open mind, soul, spirit, spirituality, Technique, Vibration

Is it possible that we are able to turn our vibrations to the frequency of joy and find ourselves in accord with happiness? Is it as simple as refining our current station and allowing ourselves to receive reality as it is rather than as we expect it to be out of choices made from our egos? Is it possible to make decisions about our everyday actions that come from our hearts deepest well of love rather than from our darkest points of fear?

 

It is.

 

All that is required to do so is to be open to the beauty that is acknowledging the incredible and infinite field of energy that is intimately connecting via the receiver of our magnificent bodies.

 

Something To Be Grateful For

Tags

adult dance, art, Ballet, contemporary dance, creative bliss, creative energy, Dance, Energy, gratefulness, Modern, Movement, pedagogy, Soul to Soul, spirit, spirituality, Teaching, Technique

Recently I was asked to share my thoughts on what I might be grateful for with the participants of an adult dance camp that I had the opportunity teaching at. What came to mind was the moments you see a student realize that they have the power to make physical changes and be conscious of a technical application. This moment is a tremendous light that is reflected throughout the body and radiates such joy that one cannot help but be grateful to be participating in such a wondrous event.

 

I think this moment is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching so much. In all honesty, I never wanted to teach in my life. I had a very different vision of what I would be doing, but for some reason, my path has created an opportunity to be in the act of sharing information that helps people to find their kinetic potential and realize the magic of dance that I so love myself. Watching students fall in love with movement and their development of a conscious relationship with their body and their moving spirit really is something to be grateful for.

 

Another reason why this moment is so significant for me is that it allows the learner to release their walls of insecurity and fear. In doing so, it empowers them to understand the meaning and purity of movement. It encourages a confidence in them that they too, for all these collective moments, experience the great joy and magic of dance. It is truly a wonderful world to be able to live in. I am grateful that I am blessed with the opportunity to live it on a daily basis and share it. What brings me continued joy is that those that are able to glimpse that magic for a brief amount of time are experiencing it.

 

It is so very important that we as human beings understand intimately the power of magic in our lives. It is incredibly significant that we allow opportunities for ourselves to be in a state of creative bliss no matter how small or expansive those times may be. We, at our very core of our existence, are pure creative energy. We need to be congruent with that so that we can be at peace with our mind and body while inhabiting the creative energy of our very being.  All too often, we are held hostage to ways of existing that are not sustainable to our souls, our environment and one another.

 

Therefore, I am grateful. Grateful for the opportunities when I can see people stand with incredible courage in front of themselves and watch themselves dig deep within their potential and make shifts in their physical being. These very shifts will offer a magnitude of ripples in the rest of their lives. I hope that when they are faced with incongruence, they will remember the joy and magic of what they felt making changes in their bodies and realize they have the power to make changes in every part of their lives.

 

It is my hope that my students, whatever the age they may be, realize that in the end, learning how to dance is really learning how to navigate this wondrous life. The educational process of dancing is really a metaphor for our lives. We must daily put into practice a rigorous training so that we may pay attention to our physical being and our creative spiritual being understanding their balance and letting them be a partner in realizing our dreams.  If we are to truly understand life, we must reveal our souls to the process of living and the process of learning. I can think of no better way to do them both than the art of dancing, or rather, the art of gracefully falling through space being carried by the spirit of the work and the magic of dance.

Photo Credit: Doug Roark

Amaranth Contemporary Dance: “Transcending Chronology”

Choreography: Scott Putman

Dancers: Katie Contessa and Scott Putman

I Am

Tags

art, Ballet, choreography, Composition, contemporary dance, Dance, Imagery, kinetic imagery, Magic, Modern, modern dance, Shaping Space, Technique, training

I am a maker of dance, both the ephemeral imagery in space as well as the physical beings who transcribe them. The shape of the space in which the physical reality of a work exists is where I feel at home in my skin. It is this transparency and manifestation of concept that thrills me most.

 

I like to speak with movement and express the desires of my heart through the physical articulation of bone and blood. As the body traces space, hitting point by point the architectural blue prints of choreography, the soul revels in ecstasy as it etches each work.

 

I like to listen to the world with my feet hearing the subtle churning and shifting of its rotation and the chaos of its populations. When the foot becomes receiver, the heart becomes the poet allowing for the majesty of imagery to create the kinetic hologram of dance.

 

I am a maker of dance. I am a shaper of space. I am a poet of kinetic proportions penning movement into magic and mystery. 

 

Caravaggio

Tags

art, italian painters, master, masterful, painters, painting, poem, poetry, progress, recycled poetry, Technique

Caravaggio

Caravaggio

Caravaggio

Ugly words he used to speak

A brilliant resolution ignored, defiled

Figure by figure

Paint to canvas

Larger inside a compositional frame

Ingenious

Wittily and beautiful

Controlling his own exuberance

Strengthening his technique

The greatest painter of his time

 

Moving in the Direction of the Action

Tags

Balance, Ballet, class, contemporary dance, Dance, energetic pathways, equality, following your desire, following your heart, learning, life, modern dance, path, pathways, present, present moment, standing leg, Teaching, Technique

Move into the direction of the action is a familiar saying for me that is often applied in technique classes for the appropriate effort and placement of many technical principles. It is important to have technique to activate the desires of our dreams to dance, as well as important to activate the desires of our life.

What this means in technique is similar to what it means in our lives. When one begins to activate the muscular engagement for low to high leg articulations, one must fully activate the anchoring leg, standing leg if you will, in order to cultivate the necessary balance of engagement in the activity. There must be a little more descending energy applied pressing through the body to press the leg into place rather than by lifting.

The act of pressing allows the leg to float to its proper position through the support of external rotation and proper developmental pathways which support an actively balanced body ironically moving forward in the activity rather than moving back. The retreating of the body is a reaction to improper muscular balance and pulls one off their alignment and away from their desired outcome and task.

The irony here is that we must be present in the action of technique. It is crucial in the articulation and process that we are present in every moment of our reaching to activate the right musculature achieving the appropriate response. We must be in the act of doing by moving into the direction of the action.

Moreover, of course, what is true in technique is true in our lives, for technique is a direct reflection of our actions in other areas of our daily activities. We must be present so that we choose wisely, what is right for our lives and us. We must constantly negotiate the right pathways making sure we are moving in the flow of our own direction rather than the direction of others. We must move into the direction of the action of our hearts.

Training for the Love of Dance

Tags

Ballet, body, body knowledge, contemporary dance, courage, Dance, Dance Appreciation, Dance Forms, Energy, faith, Jazz, light, Modern, nueral pathways, sharing, Soul to Soul, speaking body., Speaking with the heart, spirit, Support, Technique, training

 

We push the body to expand its limitations while embedding spirit with that training.  Even though our bodies are not us, we are our souls that expand as the direct result of our training. In doing this, we build an intimate connection to all the emotions the body goes through while evolving through the rigor and technique as well as the continued rewiring and retracing of our neural pathways. We move mountains inside our physical selves creating space for place while expanding our souls creating space for grace.

 

It is the presence of this grace that exemplifies who we are as dancers; it is the energetic makeup of the performing kinetic body. It does not matter what kind of dance style we perform, what particular genre or technique; training is the act of deepening the physical and spiritual body so that we might allow the heart to speak through all movement.

 

It is this place that we should welcome our brothers and sisters in our forms embracing that we are all warriors of this thing called dance and that we share at our very essence the art of training, We should honor one another despite not understanding why we choose to manipulate or speak with our bodies differently. We should wrap our colleagues in support knowing that we too have needed loving arms to ease the burden of striving to better our physical and emotional selves.

 

It would be lovely to be able to see all our dance forms as building a larger community, understanding and learning from one another so as to expand our voices, build new audiences and drive the art form ever more deeper into our own hearts while sharing our humanity with an ever expanding audience.

 

Training for the love of dance is why we are here. Living for the love of life is why we share.

A Body Speaks

Tags

Ballet, Conscious Living, contemporary dance, courage, Courageous Vulnerability, Creative Flow, Creativity, Dance, EBAS, listening, Modern, practice, Soul to Soul, speaking body., spirit, Technique, training, universal heart, well being, Wonder

Our bodies speak to us. They communicate our deepest needs as well as our finest joys. Our bodies are intelligent organisms capable of incredible healing and transformation. The limitations established for this magnificent organic machine are created by the mind that is no longer capable of listening.

It is important to listen carefully to the fluctuations of the body’s voice. Every shift and alteration of functioning should be understood and evaluated so as to better understand whether or not the change is a positive one or one that should no longer be engaged in. We must train ourselves to listen again and to fully understand what is good for our systems and what might need better attention or implementation.

This is crucial in the development and training of dance. We must focus on learning through sensation rather than sensationalize external pictures or forms. If we are able to train ourselves to listen to our bodies feeling the very musculature necessary for a technical application, we are more likely to fully understand the fundamental function and integration of that function in the larger tapestry of our practice. We must allow time for the recognition and reflection necessary to hear and feel the voice of the body.

This way of working is by no means an excuse to diminish the technical proficiency of our forms, but rather a way of heightening our awareness and understanding of how to engage our bodies in a more holistic and healthy practice of training our bodies establishing new limitless boundaries that support a more conscious and soulful form. We must understand how technique works to expand the limits of what we currently think possible.

There is so much noise in our dance culture that we are not able to sense or feel the artistry within the art. We have stopped listening and have only been manufacturing the external sensationalization of jumps, tricks and turns. No one longer wishes to establish a fundamental practice to support these very virtuosic activities and therefore find them no longer able to participate in the very activity they love because they have injured themselves. This seems to be a reflection of our culture and society with wanting everything possible immediately without ever having worked for it. The student becomes a hostage to a very flimsy house of cards in which hope can no longer be a reliable foundation.

It is time for us to take time to train through listening. It is time to slow down and allow the students to hear their own bodies so that they might make informed decisions in which they become empowered as artists, creative choreographers and educated teachers. The irony in slowing down is that you speed up the consciousness for the student. If a student achieves more awareness they are able to make connections and integrate their technical and creative process allowing their practice to function like the central nervous system in our magnificent machines; making neurological and physical shifts and changes at the speed of sound, the sound of their bodies voice.

Takeing Time for Technique

Tags

Ballet, Believing, choreography, Conscious Living, contemporary dance, Courageous Vulnerability, Creativity, Dance, EBAS, Fierce, hope, joy, Kindness, Modern, Movement, Musculature, patience, peace, Support, Teaching, Technique, training, Vulnerable, well being

The Elemental Body Alignment System was designed to help the learner activate the intrinsic musculature allowing them to immediately connect with firing them and overriding the natural impulse to immediately fire the gross musculature which inhibiting range of motion and promoting an imbalance in muscular engagemen. In EBAS and both ballet and modern techniques in which I teach, this deep activation of musculature necessary for articulating and supporting movement from the appropriate place is crucial in ones ability to successfully achieve the technical concepts given.

Students of all levels are able to access this musculature if in fact they are given the time to feel particular activations and allow the mechanics of the movement to assist them in doing the work or task given. All to often, when I take class or observe classes being taught, there is this push to do everything fast. It is almost as if speed is the benchmark for excellence. Do not get me wrong, speed us crucial for dancers and we should all be able to move well on a large spectrum through various speeds indeed.  However, we do need to be sure we are doing it technically and holistically correct.

When beginning to train and well into the training of advanced dancers, we must remember to allow the body time to fully experience technical concepts. If we don’t allow this gentling of space and time, gross musculature engagement will override the balance and equality necessary for healthy technical principles thus slowing down technical progress and the healthy development of a dancers training and therefore their elongated career.

I for one would prefer a dancer to take more time in the beginning rather learning how to activate appropriate technique with the right balance and promoting the momentum of success for them, rather than beating them over the head with speed causing frustration and in many ways, humiliation. There are better ways of building speed and using momentum and the building of positive muscular feedback loops is the way to go.

You see if the student knows how to activate deeply from the muscles closest to the bone, they will be able to access the fine-tuning muscles necessary for the articulation of all forms of technique. They will successfully be able to repeat those sensations while building confidence and courage identifying what is necessary and how to accomplish the task of speed efficiently.

I often feel as if teachers who give material to students excessively prematurely are simply masking the fact that they themselves have no idea how to teach fundamental principles. I feel they are simply trying to fool the student into thinking they know what they are doing by making the student feel as if they could never do things properly or fast enough to ever make it as a dancer. This certainly does not allow students the opportunity to succeed in our art form not does it promote appropriate and healthy technique.

We need to take the time to slow down learning how to stand and be. We need to allow our students the luxury of time now so they can save time and frustration later. We need to encourage the student to feel technique from the inside out rather than promote training the façade of the body. We need to train dancers who can feel themselves deeply and therefore deeply feel. These are the kind of dancers who speak the magic of the art form to the audience. These are the physical storytellers so desperately missing in today’s work.