Movement, shape, gesture, story, community

Spent yesterday with DX dancers Sarah Levitt and Ben Wegman at Towson University where they are teaching a week-long J-term intensive in Dance Composition. The class is entirely undergraduate women, some dance majors, some not, all of whom have experience and skill in both movement and choreography. They were perhaps confused by the presence of the 50-year-old non-dancing rabbi in their midst, but they were open to including me.

The structure of the day gave me exactly what I came to Dance Exchange for -- to see the company's "Toolbox" in action. What are the games and exercises they use in creating art but also in the creation of a company? How do you generate collaboration among a group of individuals who don't already have a dynamic connection beyond a shared interest? That could mean a class of college students each of whom wants to dance or choreograph, but in my mind it just as easily could be members of a congregation or a retirement community or folks on retreat, who share an identity (Jewish, gay, senior, or on vacation). Powerful potential exists to create together, and a mandate exists for some groups (congregations, certainly) to interact, learn, and build. What are the methods we'd use to accomplish those goals?

Kenji Oshino in his book Covering quotes Marvin Bell's teaching that to become a writer is to become "less and less embarrassed about more and more." That challenge presented itself strongly within the workshop yesterday. I could feel myself making choices about what I'd reveal through words or movement, and what I wouldn't -- and I have nothing to lose in this context. The students want to look good in front of each other and the glamorous guest teachers (although Sarah and Ben create as comfortable and relaxed a class atmosphere as one might wish for). So each person's choices to be audible and visible in the room are not simple; and some of the exercises pushed us strongly to be both.

Eventually, after a number of hours of exercises, Sarah and Ben had given everyone a vocabulary of individual technical elements in a dance that included: focus, proximity, transitions, shape, speed, architecture, leading/following, weight, contact, and relationship. For those creating a dance, within the big picture, there are always these choices, and they may be the most important ones at a given moment of the process -- not the larger concept.

That feels familiar from my theatre work. Sometimes we need to respond to the smallest component of the moment -- the picture isn't right, the lighting needs adjustment, that x from left to right should go faster. Occasionally we feel stuck and we need to shake up the pieces even if only to be reassured afterwards that things were well ordered to begin with.

Rabbinically, that instinct often gets trumped by some larger issue: the Tradition, the Law (even in a Reconstructionist community), shalom bayit (keeping everybody happy and peaceful), maintenance of momentum. Can't we, in the task of preserving and enlivening a millennia-old tradition, allow ourselves more often the freedom to "play," to examine and experiment with the purely structural sub-components of an experience, to see if that process more brightly illuminates the sacred?