4 minute read
What Does ð Make Your Body Want to Do?
Photo of Adam Grant Warren © Mike Warren
by 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?
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, we kept asking that question until Danielle had devised a bodily response to each of the 25 consonant phonemes. Danielle’s contribution, of course, brings up the question of the dancer/ choreographer relationship in terms of what I’ve called “the offer” and whose creative voice takes precedence in the room. Harmanie and romham will say more about that. Me? I went to my understanding of theatre direction: I’d never tell an actor how to read a line. The actor reads and then we shape the choice together. “What if. . .What happens when you. . .? How might these pieces fit?”
What we landed on was a toolset for the translation of text to movement. We built a sharing on attempted communication and the differences in shape and quality between the words “anxious,” “anxiousness,” and “anxiety.”
But we’re still working on the really compelling questions. When and why does the “source text” fall away and leave only the witnessed movement? If that’s ultimately what happens, is what a dancer is trying to “say” as important or compelling as the effort of communication? Is the lexicon of movement that Danielle found in her body something that we can now teach to other dancers? If so, how will other bodies change the “accent”? The dialect? If not, what do the individual lexica of other dancers look like? What informs them; and if they work to communicate together, what’s on the spectrum between “together” and “in unison?” In the context of this work, what does it mean to communicate effectively?
I’d say I have no idea, but that’s not true. There's another whole spectrum between “I have no idea” and “I don't know.” It's a process, right? We’re working on it. And I think we're definitely on to something.
Originally from Newfoundland, as a settler on the ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq, Beothuk, and Métis, Adam Grant Warren now lives in colonial Vancouver on the unceded territory of the Musqueam,Skwxwú7mesh, and TsleilWaututh peoples. Much of his work to-date has dealt with the significance of his lived spaces, and he continues to reflect on and honour the stewards with whom he shares them. As an associate artist with All Bodies Dance Project, Adam's collaborations have featured at festivals including Vancouver's Art on the Spot, Victoria's SKAMpede, and Calgary's Fluid Festival. He’s also traveled to northern BC as part of All Bodies' touring show, See & Be Seen, a performance designed to bring ABDP's values of expression, inclusion, and diversity to youth in schools.
