Allowing and Doing: Meg Stuart Workshop

Meg Stuart: Improvisation as Strategy
posted by Tim DuRoche
Saturday morning, Conduit hosted a workshop with Ms. Stuart that explored “Improvisation as Strategy,” attended by 33 folks of different dance ilks. Stuart began the workshop talking about developing material through improvisation (“seeds” for pulling up energy through the body). Mentioning the body as a (no pun intended I’m sure) “conduit for energy”–she echoed some of what I once heard Katherine Dunham talk about in regard to the dancer as a vessel and conductor of vibrations (something Madame D credited Kandinsky for). After some standard loosening-the-limbs warm-up, Stuart admonished to “bring it to a simmer”–an apt description for what followed.
For most of the next two hours, Stuart focused on the difference between DOING and ALLOWING, encouraging participants to “yield to sensation” (“This movement here is a memory. . .a trace”) to “focus on the story” (“what is the dialogue between your hands?”). “Who’s the agent of the movement,” she rhetorically asks.
Stuart once told an interviewer, “In dance, sometimes people are just sort of chatty. . .They’re using their bodies beautifully, but I don’t understand their drive–why they’re moving. For me the why, even though it may not always be clear to the audience, is very important.
“It’s not what you do,” she told the class, “but why. . .listen to your body’s memory–if it needs to bend, bend.”
Exploring micro-levels of movement (from the eyes–“allow them to blur, to sharpen, allow your vision to change”–to the toes, to legs–“make a drama with your legs, an opera, let them chase each other”), Stuart deployed a conceptual approach that was metaphorically closer to painting/visual abstraction and free improvisation/music.
The choreographer talked about scale and surface, tones and textures and expanded upon the given (in this case–the dancer’s body) and its “I do this/I go there” capacity, offering (to borrow from avant-garde music) extended techniques as strategies to bring the dance out of your body or (in the case of Maybe Forever) tuck it back in.
“The dance is already there on your body,” Stuart said.
The transformation was fascinating. At the top of the class, the corporeal shape of the room resembled a tai chi studio–intentional, glacially-paced unison development. As they began to find their own tension between doing, allowing, internal and external energy–not waiting for instruction but finding their singular pulse–the morphology of the room evolved from vertical vessels of breath and polite gesture to nearly-botanical forms, weaving like aquatic plants to their rhythm.
At one of my favorite points, Stuart et al were investigating small, lower-cased gestures of the hand. She asked the workshop participants to, “Make a Dance With your Hand.” this Fluxus-like instruction (reminiscent of a Yoko Ono or George Brecht score ), while simple on the surface, also unseats our expectations of what constructs or gets to be called a dance or story.
The crux of much of the workshop came back to intention and building awareness of body’s memory–“the individual voices and stories inside the body”–understanding that “sensing is as important as expressing.” What this afforded was dancers discovering how to unmoor themselves from their training, transcend their dancer-ness and embrace an unselfconscious sense of free play and the “unpredictable pathways” available to them. For anyone who saw Maybe Forever, you know also that in a vast palette of micro-gestures and emotions, one of Stuart’s staples is the choice to make stillness, silence or stasis a powerful and viable part of vocabulary–which while unnerving, is a subtle, emotional and sensual device for someone trafficking in movement and kinetic performance.
Towards the end of the workshop, Stuart had dancers circle off and explore sequence/flow and what might best be described as a movement-based, non-Cartesian cause-and-effect Exquisite Corpse –with dancers entering the middle, parsing the ambiguity of shared space, relationship and creating fascinating primitive counterpoint, varieties of unisons, flockings, and scrum. It was a great underscoring of the improvisational aspect of public conversation and group dynamics.
On the unison-tip, Stuart ended the session with breathing that “allowed” itself into an extended bout of sustained laughter–with whole body’s laughing–an apt reminder that dance, like laughter, can be one of the great arbiters of collective joy.