Outdoor Dance and Movement Exercises ~ with Hana van der Kolk ~
10.31.06 / 11.07.06 ~ 8:00 - 10:00 ~
Hana starts her day (and our class) keeping in mind that the body has 100 trillion cells and at every moment these cells are getting what they need.
“[This] was a very powerful idea for me,” Sarah said. “It was the first time I’d ever bridged conceptual thinking with dance technique.”
And there was LOTS of conceptual thinking. Hana talked with us about how the performance of the audience is as critical of the performance of the performer. “It’s the act of witnessing that makes it so important,” Hana told us. This act of witnessing becomes all the more important (and intense) the more intentional a dancer is being in his/her movements.
“I like Hana,” Mark said, “because she took it to the garden.” In fact, most of Hana’s exercises took place in the garden. We might pair off with our very own “private dancer” as she liked to say and dance with them for a few minutes, creating frames and then a dance within the frame--the idea was to focus on the fact that with each and every movement we made, we were changing the space entirely—or we might stand clustered together as a group, dancing and responding to each other, one at a time, organically.
We all loved dancing in the garden, sometimes with partners, sometimes with the group, sometimes solo.
“I danced with and in a tree,” said Sarah. “I had an amazing moment when I was laying stretched out on the big limb of the tree and felt very tied to the present moment and the life inside me and inside the tree. Because I had been writing about similar thoughts in my manifesto it was pretty powerful coming together of ideas for me. I know it sounds hippie- cheesy but it’s the truth.”