Thank you Baton Rouge Panorama dancers and thanks to Molly and Sharon of the Baton Rouge Ballet Theater. It was a great week full of new ideas and breakthroughs - what more can a dancer ask? I am looking forward to returning in October with the glorious dancers of the Martha Graham Dance Company to perform for the people of South Louisiana.
Dancers, please continue to develop your concentration and focus - not to mention pelvic initiated contractions. Write to me here and let me know how its going.
Yesterday’s rehearsal was challenging and rewarding - the best kind. On our fifth day, the challenge was to keep our inspiration and enthusiasm vital. The dancers have the basic choreography and patterns and are now developing their awareness of the technique which will give them power and focus. We worked on standing - something people oftentimes take for granted in their everyday life. A person’s stance can say a lot about them if it is conscious, but without awareness much is left to chance.
Next, we worked on the standing contraction and release. I am finding it difficult to transfer the importance of initiation from the pelvis
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in this short period of time we have together. Perhaps the dancers reading this will continue working on initiating the contraction from the pelvis (I hope). I used Yuriko’s image of the ice cream scoop to help the dancers understand that the contraction is not a compression - it is an expansion.
Rehearsal ended with a good run of Panorama. I noticed some of the “fire in the eyes” I’ve been looking for, possibly because it was Friday night and they wanted to get out of there.
In composition class, students have created Movement ID’s. Using these ID’s, we started to devise text and collect images based on their movement.
Below is an initial collection of images and text curated by the class. If you’d like to see a slideshow in full screen, click here. These are all works in progress and will change over time - enjoy and check back as thoughts and images continue to develop!
This site aims to show the Martha Graham Dance Company at work. This site will be a resource in illuminating Martha Graham’s work, aesthetic, and ideas. Using the paradigms of the social web, our work will be open, shareable, creative, and responsive.
