I walked before I crawled. Then my motor neural wiring brought me down to crawling as movement exploration, and here is when my home practice started. As a child I followed my mother around as she cleaned and cooked; I imitated her actions in abstraction, hoping to entertain her as she toiled. By the time I was a teenager, I had taken over the basement as a studio, and everyone in my family apologized if they walked in on my dancing. Home practice doesn’t just support public practice—it is the most important thing we can do to develop as artists. It is a place where we create our own economy for our work and are only limited by our commitment.

One night, in late 2013, Rowena Richie admiringly mentioned Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for Strayed’s goal of walking the Pacific Coast Trail for 100 days. Rowena said she wanted to do 100 days of something. I offered to create 100 days of prompts to support Rowena’s curiosity. Rowena began the 100 Days Score on January 1, 2014, and she finished in early April of that spring. For input from Rowena, including photos, and personal statements of how the 100 Days was for her, please see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWkSKEJ3r_M or contact her at rowena_richie@yahoo.com

Even more recently, San Francisco-based choreographer Erin Mei-Ling Stuart completed the 100 Days Score and chose to make her documentation public. Please visit http://100daypractice.blogspot.de/2014/11/before-i-begin.html for Erin's entire 100 Days Score experience, including the prompts I gave her to work with.

The 100 days score is simply that: a list of 100 prompts to spark movement and creative (all of the prompts can be done in any media) investigations. The prompts are designed to take place in your apartment, in rented studio space, outside in both urban and green environments, in cafes—anywhere you can make them happen. The qualifying stipulation is to document, for yourself, the entire process.

The goal is to support home practice in direct and tangible ways, to direct practice towards exploration and away from production, to examine our first choices and immediate instincts, and to invite in influence from other media as a means of enriching creativity. The score can be used for compositional, improvisational, and/or physical-mental conditioning ends. Most importantly the score values autonomy and the freeing of exploration from productivity.

Please join me at Impulstanz this year, on July 25th at 10AM, for a Symposium featuring my 100Days Score. We'll pass through the score whirlwind-style, and offer support and connections to each other for continued sharing of our individual home practices!