What Does ð Make Your Body Want to Do? Adam Grant Warren How to accept, decline, and refine an offer of movement. How to ask for movement or draw it out if offers are not always forthcoming. How to do these things inside a culture of care: all crucial takeaways from this residency with respect to my development as a choreographer. But the lesson that will resonate through my whole practice -- as a choreographer, a dancer, a writer, an actor, and even an arts educator? Let the process be a process. I came to dance relatively late, from creative cultures built on corset-tight deadlines and excruciatingly short development cycles. So, on my first day (maybe my first couple of days) in the studio with Danielle Wensley, I had pieces in mind. I saw speakers mounted on tripods, each speaker offering fragments of text, story bits that would pull or push Danielle, or suspend her somehow between them. I still think that’s a pretty cool idea. As both a writer and a dancer, I’m permanently fascinated by the potential interplay of dance and text — the necessity of each to the other. Working that way, though, I realized I’d grounded the dance in the concept instead of in the dancer. Staying true to my interest in the place for text in dance and dance in text, I wondered: When you break them down, what do you have to work with? What are their essential units?
Adam Grant Warren © Mike Warren
Spoken language has its phonemes -- ʃ, ð, ŋ, and so on; there are 25 consonant sounds and 19 vowels. But in dance? What’s the essential unit there? The spine? No. The core? No. The eight-count? God, I hope not. At least not at All Bodies Dance. We work with plenty of dancers who don’t or can’t access those pieces consistently or at all. I guess, for us at least, the essential unit is the body as a whole. Whatever shifting, changing body we bring on the day. I asked Danielle, “What does ð (the ‘th’ sound in ‘this’ or ‘breathe’) make your body want to do?” By way of an answer, she stood on her left foot and ran the sole of her right down the inside of her left calf. The friction of it sounded like the phoneme itself. What followed was a few days’ work but, essentially, D a n c e C e n t r a l Fa l l 2 0 2 1
5
