What we do

I wrote this essay to accompany The Door’s Unlocked show February 2020.

It starts with Authentic Movement. We move, we witness, we talk. For each other and with each other. This is a foundational ritual and it is unwavering. We are building awareness and actualization. Through the body revealing the unconscious through movement, and the communal testimony of desires, vulnerabilities, and choices, the self-self and the group-self is brought to light. And these selves fluctuate.  We listen to what speaks up on that given day: our psychologies, sensations, intuitions, layered identities, our geographical, personal and cultural histories and currencies, our sociological selves as we relate to the group and the world around us.  We embrace this shifting as a reflection and reminder that everything always changes.  As a reminder that we are not static on this earth and we are all endless in our capacity for generation and regeneration.  

This is also an exercise for the witness.  What do we see as it is filtered through our own self?  How do we see?  Who do we see?  What are our patterns of seeing?  How can we give care?  What do we care about?

Real doing.  Real witnessing. Everybody listening closely.  Every meeting.  A place for total abandon within a safe group-designed and controlled environment.  This ritual allows for risk and empathy.  Then in this empathetic and risky space, we move towards more pointed improvisational scores to build and seek edges of choreography that invites us all to see our art form through a wider lens.  The lens of work, of effort, of surrender, of chance, of sculpted convergences, as magic, as everyday, as life.  To see choreography as not only a thing but as the dancers themselves and the experience, care and focus they cultivate.  This is important.  This work has reminded us that dance is a human form and the art is a value our shared humanity.  The dance is the artist is the choreography is the artist is the dance. It’s all connected and overlapping and equally essential.  

As artists we bring a changing yet vetted awareness to new areas: our landscapes, our unions, our bodies, our voices, our patterning and listening.  We build dances from these places, and of these places.  The improvisational nature of the work harvests the regenerating daily truths in the room.  The mind and body work in harmony or in opposition of each other, but always engaged together.  We can sculpt form or surrender to chance.  We decide not only what to include but what to exclude as our representation.  We can change our minds and bodies and our choreography how and when we choose.  And we also witness each other make these dances, these excavations and vulnerable acts that proclaim our existences.   We go back and we talk about what has happened.  In hindsight we unpack it to understand both its mystery, impact and hidden logics.  We hold the makers safely.  We create a place for each other to be able to hold oneself on the knife’s edge of creation and surrender, to court the empty space and the open body and each path we take. The witnessing group will hold the dance with love and care for it as if it were their own, because in essence it is.  This is a group and we are building together, whatever role we take that day.  

This entirety creates space for engaging in an endless deep dive: 

we know and we don’t know more and more each meeting.  

This duality is a driving force to just keep going.  The work is never over, never a culmination. By marrying the ritual, the care, the personal investigations with the ideas, strategies and very concepts of choreography itself, we will joyfully never reach culmination as we simultaneously know and un-know, together, again and again.