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1 I N T E R L U D E 4 So Many Influences, So Little Time . . . There is so much movement influence in our lives that filters through us and becomes our dance “background”: not just our various teachers but other movement in our lives, such as sports, social dancing, injuries and rehabilitations , exercises, bodywork. Add to this the performances we’ve seen, which influence what we think of as dance and define what dance is. And the culture we’ve grown up in and its relationship to dance and the body also affect our understandings. There are many more influences I am sure I am missing, but you get the point. Even if you don’t think you have had much dance training, you could make a long list of movement influences. Here are mine in roughly chronological order: Doing yoga with Hittleman in front of the TV at age 3 Dancing at Miss Mimi’s ballet school Spraining ankle ice skating, getting thrown from horse at five years old Growing up with dachshunds and ducks Hanging out at community theater rehearsals and being dragged to the opera Horseback riding, body surfing, and rock climbing Mr. Richie’s circus-influenced gymnastic team and Mr. Wilhelm’s bareback riding acrobatics Cheerleading in eighth grade The movie The Turning Point Diving Bad back sprain from my own choreography in college Peggy Lawler’s one-woman barnstorm performances Eiko and Koma, Oskar Schlemmer reconstructions, and Noh Dance come to Cornell Losing a felt-sense of theoretical physics and finding my body through dance Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Ashton’s Cinderella Cecchetti Ballet and Miss Craske, the tendus and tales of Meher Baba on her back porch New York Theater Ballet, meeting James Waring and Michel Fokine through their ballets 32 INTE RLUDE Working for next-generation modernists: Chris Gillis, Matthew Nash, Jumay Chu, Ellen Cornfield Nancy Topf and Dynamic Anatomy Qigong with Chen Hui Xian The Lean Years: massage school and finding Contact Improvisation in Connecticut Graduate School: Bennington College Earthdance, more Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, improvisers from all over—the good, the bad, the ugly—all beautiful Late nights at Contact Quarterly Are we only born to be mime machines? To copy and pass on? To colonize ? Is there more to it than that? How do we digest all this influence? How are we to be not simply carbon copies or flags in the wind. It takes time to take it on—the study part, the going to performances, and so forth. And it takes more time to take it in—digest or spit out, metabolize, detoxify our movement influences. How do we find our own movement interests amid the flotsam and jetsam, the swine and the pearls? And swim? Here is my homemade digestive remedy: Take it on / Take it in: simile and metaphor practice. First try an idea or an image on your body, in a representational mode, as best you can. Copy, mimic, take a shot at it (simile phase). Keep working with it—watch and wait for a transformation to occur. Let go. Suddenly you are in it, no longer acting it from the outside, but knowing it from the inside; you’ve made it your own through experience (metaphor phase). Watch for the transition! INTE RLUDE 33 ...

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