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Adance may have costumes, sets or sites, props, lights, music, and text as well, and these may have more or less importance, but (most would agree) a dance isn’t a dance without a moving body. In improvised dances, the material is not limited to set sequences or patterns of movement but includes a means of finding or framing movement for viewers as the dance occurs. For some dancemakers who work with improvised material, it is the movement that although not set, defines the work—something inherent in it, something about its look or feel. For others, the interest in the movement material may be secondary to how it is found—as a trace of a process—or to how it may be juxtaposed or shaped with other movement or elements in a work. In this chapter the issue at hand is the movement material and how it gets chosen in improvisational works. The content, or what gets communicated through the movement material, is a different, though somewhat related, topic. The content may simply be the movement itself. But content might also be communicated through metaphor or abstraction, narrative or commentary, et cetera.1 Whatever the materials and whatever the content, there is also a context (cultural climate and physical setting, for example) for a work that shines light on what it is about and how it is to be understood, that gives it meaning. Here we’ll look at the kinds of movement materials that improvisational dancemakers have chosen and leave the question of content (What are they communicating through the materials they have chosen?) up to you, as a viewer, to research when you see dance improvisation in performance. 12 1 Materia Prima An important part of maturing as an improviser, indeed as an artist, is the process of choosing for oneself what to work with and how to work. Within what parameters, with what focus. —simone forti, “Animate Dancing” Using What’s Available Simone Forti set very particular physical conditions for her early dance constructions, anything from negotiating moving around on a slanted board or twisting while suspended in ropes to climbing over people or jumping off an unseen height. The conditions of the dance limited the available movement choices as a result, and captured very particular palettes of movement. For example, Huddle (1961) is a structure in which six to nine people form a tight cluster and take turns climbing over and rejoining it without ever detaching from it. Because Huddle is self-perpetuating, Forti recommends that it be done for about ten minutes. Although unset, the movement is precisely defined by the physical task at hand. Another dance created for the same performance, Slant Board (1961), has three or four dancers climb on an eight-by-eight-foot board propped against a wall at a forty-five-degree angle by holding knotted ropes, with instructions to keep moving up and down, back and forth. The set-ups for these dances delimit the kind of motion available , putting a thin slice of human movement on display in performance. Key to the design is that almost anyone can do it; the dance puts ordinary movement, not stylized or technical dancing, on display. When Forti made the dances, stylized movement defined mainstream dance. Today, because of dancemakers like her, audiences are not surprised to see some pedestrian movement in a dance concert; even in ballet it’s not unheard of. But in the context of the early 1960s, Forti’s choice of task-based movement material for a dance was radical. Later on Forti gave up these controlled dance experiments. Her focus shifted to an open-ended, less controlled process of listening to body sensation and responding through movement that she had encountered in her early dance studies with Anna Halprin, a pioneer of contemporary improvisational dance-making based in San Francisco, California. Source material for dances came from wherever Forti found them in her environment and travels, for instance, balancing on the wobbling rocks of a crumbling wall, or observinganimalsinzoos,anareaofresearchForticontinuedformanyyears.2 Since the mid-1980s Forti has been developing an approach to movement she calls Logomotion, which she teaches and performs. The names of earlier phases, “animate dancing” and “moving the telling,” catch the flavor of the developing work. Her breakthrough for this work came when she began to connect movement and speaking through the retelling of the news (News Animations, early 1980s). These pieces, often humorous, juxtapose serious world affairs with the intimacy of the...

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