Interdisciplinary artist and contemporary dancer Carol McDowell has been creating an improvisational score on Shyamala and myself for our upcoming performance and installation, "Trace," at Sea and Space Explorations. We've been working with our personal dance memories, which are quite varied and hybrid for both of us, though differently so. Having a conversation -- a dialogue -- about our dance memories is central to the score. It is a gift to discover so many new things about Shyamala (she once did a Hungarian bottle dance?) when I thought I knew her so well as a mover and person.
What is your first dance memory? What is your most vivid dance memory? What is your favorite dance right now? Where in your body do you remember the dance? Can you do you a finger dance of it? Does this dance have a name?
Among other sources, we've been drawing on the somatic practice of Authentic Movement, with a witness or spirit guardian who protects the body-who-moves-in-remembering. I had never heard of the witness referred to as a spirit guardian before (though I have posited the witness as the rasika in past explorations of mine). Since my family is Taiwanese, and ours is largely a culture of ancestral worship, a spirit guardian made me think of an ancestral spirit. And in our rehearsal last Monday, Carol introduced the idea of an ancestor to our score. We went through our memories and wrote down whom we thought would be the ancestor of each particular dance memory. They included: the wind, Medha Yodh, Mama Kariamu, mud, Eiko Otake, a Taiwanese aborigine.
What would it be like to have an honest conversation with the ancestors of your dance memories? How might this structure enable imagined dialogues with our teachers and historical predecessors that might be impossible in real life?
The score was as follows: (1) do a small dance of your memory (2) take a step back, name your ancestor, and respond to the first dance as the ancestor (3) take a step back, respond as the protector. The audience can ask questions throughout.
The results were sometimes poetic, sometimes argumentative, at times downright hilarious.
This is so interesting to document b/c memories to me are my home and my roots. Please post a video of this when the final product is done. I'd love to see the outcome.
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