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Let’s face it. I am NOT a dancer. In fact I don’t think I have ever previously thought of my body as useful for anything else but carrying my head around. Yet I have spent the entire week under this very label - Dancer. With the working title “Landscapes” my job has been to “unfold my inner landscapes through improvised modern dance” – How interesting!
With this in mind I find myself a few days later lying on the floor, panting, sweat dripping and exhausted. My right arm is unable to move more than 45 degrees without hurting and multi-coloured bruises beautifully decorate knees, hips and shoulders. For the last 40 minutes my every muscle has been tense, trying intensely to work my white-dressed body out of a corner, angling lines and square connections between the walls in a dark UV-lid room stuffed with 10-15 other white dressed dancers. Makes sense, no?
I will try to explain, then. The main idea of this workshop week was to create certain “boxes” and bring a certain mood/feeling/landscape to the box. In order to do this we were all divided into three groups. The “music/sound group” would be in charge of creating the interior of the boxes by using light, smoke, sound-effects and other props if needed. In one box, the makers wanted to create a cold and hostile landscape by covering the floor with ice-cubes and bringing scary sounds/music, smoke and coldblue light into the box. Another box had the “creation of the world” as a theme. In this box you would find earthquaky nature sounds, (also) a lot of smoke and branches on the floor. Of course there was also the room with UV-light and white-dressed people also known as “the Space-room”.
A second group was the physical theatre group led by the lovely Michéle, guest teacher from Italy. This group joined the dancers in the task of bringing life to the boxes. Where the dancers worked mostly on creating meaningful shapes, movements and patterns the physical theatre people didn’t hesitate from using different objects as well as their voices. At this point I should underline that we were all free to use whatever we wanted: voices, props, costumes, instruments, whatever. This may have made it difficult to tell the difference between a “dancer” and a “physical actor”, but at the same time it was clear that we worked towards the same goal.
 The last and obviously most interesting group was the MODERN DANCERS. - Especially because of its lack of experienced dancers. But with Alyssa (the dance teacher)’s support and patience I for one got a pretty good experience with the whole modern dance and improvisation thing. We spent the first two days becoming acquainted to the concepts of “shape/meaning”, “dialogue with space”, “the bubble”, “textures”, “weight of space”, “using senses”, “locomotion”, “curiosity”, “commitment” and (the famous) “five lines” - to mention a few.
You will have to become a student of Performers House to get the true meaning of these directives, but the essential point is to improvise a dance based on your impulses and bring life to the space you are in. With your body you can create shapes and patterns that should have a certain meaning. Which means you should always have a story to tell; maybe not a concrete story, but whatever comes to you.
Let’s return to my panting body on the floor. In this situation my story had been to get out of the corner and to always connect my limbs and body in squares and angles and if possible connected to the wall (do you follow this far?) At one point another dancer approached, and suddenly the attention was split between the wall and the other dancer, so now the dance was built on that. And yes, I am aware, that this sounds complete freaky, but believe me, it makes sense once you are in it. And it is actually very interesting work and not at all useless for an actor. Especially being able to commit to the moment is so very important in every genre of performing arts. Otherwise it’s simply not interesting to watch.
BUT to avoid getting too technical and abstract I will hasten to mention the artist from the Menuhin foundation who came to the school Wednesday and brought even more ingenious freakiness to the work! This is an international non-profit foundation created in Brussels in 1991 by the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The very poetic formulated goal of this foundation is to “give a voice to the voiceless” by establishing many different international artistic projects. With this goal the five artist, one a singer, one a musician, one a painter, one a dancer and one an artist working with the visual media, gave the entire group a nice long voice and body warm-up and divided us into 3 workshops. One worked with music, one worked with drawing sound with natural colours and one worked with the body. Being the eager modern dancer I am (!) obviously I chose the latter. In this workshop we learned to go with the first impulse and with that creating something worth watching within a certain time limit.
 All in all it has been an interesting, bizarre, inexplicable, body-breaking, tough, enlightening, extremely fun and exhausting workshop that concluded Friday afternoon with Alyssa announcing that she - apart from a major cleaning up task - had a FUN surprise for us. Personally I was rooting for cake and was therefore somewhat downcast to learn that the surprise was to do-the-entire-thing-again (!) all people in all boxes at
 the same time in the same room Monday with Silkeborg Højskole as the happy audience.
Even though the audience was expected to get freaked out, their response was actually both nice and sensible. And despite the fact that I got soaking wet from a (very artistic) dance/roll-around in the ice-and-water, it was a nice ending to the week!
Still would have liked that cake though …
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Story: Anne Marie Rützou Bruntse
Photo: Sasja Larsen |
