Everyday Dance/Performance/Music: Creating an Arts Practice

Catalog description

In this workshop, joining dance, music, improvisation, performance, and movement-based theater, we will delve into the pleasures and rigors of movement practice. As movement artists/scholars, we will investigate questions invigorating contemporary experimental dance/performance, body/mind integration, and embodied knowledge. This workshop, reconfigured to acknowledge the particular experiences of art-making in today’s complex circumstances, assumes a double notion of the “everyday”: exploring the pedestrian actions/sounds/words of our “real lives” and recognizing them as art material; and creating Daily Dance (Music, etc.), committing to working (almost) every day, locating and developing our individual movement/sound/technical vocabularies, creating work from our experiments and experiences. Guided by improvisation, we will search for what feels authentic and consider what authenticity involves or implies. We will explore what is “natural” about our materials and examine their conscious/unconscious cultural underpinnings. We will make scores, studies, and interarts performances alone and with witnesses and collaborators/participants. Studio practice will be supported by critical, reflective, and historical writings from the arts, autobiography, creativity theory, philosophy, technology. Sources may include John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Halprin, Laurence Halprin, Ben Highmore, Allan Kaprow, Carl Lavery, Linda Montano, Haruki Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Georges Perec, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Rethorst, M.C. Richards, Anne Truitt, Marcia Tucker.