Composing while Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion

Epilogue: Developing Your Practice

This is a book of artists’ practices—to be more precise, a snapshot in time of any given artist’s development of his or her work.1 These practices didn’t spring out of the blue—the work that went into informing them, sometimes years of it, remains unspoken of here except for a few biographical details and some context. While these methods, structures , and scores imply a certain permanence on the page, their practice requires living breathing bodies to inhabit them, and thus adaptation, refinement of ideas, growth, and change. How do you develop your own practice? An obvious thing to do: Make time in your schedule to work in the studio. Studying with artists who have developed practices can be inspiring and informative, but in the end, it comes down to asking questions from your own particular vantage point, living with them and in them physically, learning how you question and answer through the body. Find a space and the time to work, and obtain anything else that might facilitate your research: music, dancers, a studio notebook, and any other peripherals that might be useful to you. The amount of time you need in the studio will be an individual decision , of course, and vary upon circumstance. One way to discover your own predilection for working is to try out what has worked for others. If something doesn’t work for you, use it to point you in a direction that might. Deborah Hay advises “practicing performance” daily for an hour. (See “Performance Practices: Deborah Hay” in chapter 2.) If you are involved in regular study—with an artist of special interest to you, in a program at an institute or conservatory, or a dance major at a university—Nancy Topf suggests 156 Epilogue Developing Your Practice But isn’t it the height of self-contradiction to give exact steps for how not to follow instructions? Indeed. One often needs several attitudes at once. —Eugene Gendlin, Focusing spending a few hours alone in the studio each week to integrate and digest the material. There is room for variations on the theme. Some artists love spending long hours alone in the studio. Others find working by themselves to be excruciating and need to have people around—whether to work with them or simply be together simultaneously in the space while working. Susan Sgorbati offers a solo practice schedule that I find helpful as a starting place: fifteen minutes to prepare the space (arrive, set up, sweep); fifteen minutes to warm up, attending to your body; fifteen minutes to focus on work, which could include developing your personal vocabulary and giving attention to the material of the day; fifteen minutes to write. Keeping ambitions low—for example, aim to find just a few moments from the practice that interest you—helps maintain a nonjudgmental attitude toward practicing , if that’s an issue. Eventually you may begin to get a sense of your work cycle—how long it takes you to process ideas physically and produce work.2 A work cycle could be an arc of weeks, a few months, or several years. And, of course, there are arcs within arcs—an overarching idea is worked out, returns, and reinvents itself over many work cycles. An arc could be months, years, a lifetime, or even lifetimes, if you are working within the lineage of a dance form. In the current culture, the work cycle may be driven by the college semester or the producer’s schedule; being aware of the nature of your work cycle may prove helpful in navigating imposed deadlines. The Architects—an improvisational dance group made up of Katherine Ferrier, Lisa Gonzales, Jennifer Kayle, and Pamela Vail—are graduates of Middlebury College who studied Performance Improvisation with Penny Campbell. They have developed their own way of making improvised dance forperformancebasedontheirstudies,whichtheyofferinaworkshop:Movement Intensive in Compositional Improvisation (MICI). Musician Michael Chorney joins them as a fifth Architect. The group suggests four rules for dance improvisation, which they discovered in a book by anthropologist Angeles Arrien in which she describes four principles arising from shamanic cultures: 1. Show up. 2. Pay attention. 3. Tell the truth. 4. Don’t get attached to the results.3 E PILO G UE 157 Though otherwise unconnected to Arrien’s work, the Architects have adapted these rules for use in dance improvisation. They inform their students that the rules aren’t simply...