Workshop Jeremy Nelson & Luis Lara Malvacias
18.- 23. May 2015

My research seeks to understand in which way the body practice in dance and the thought produced during workshops and trainings that I have participated in can form a body as dance like art. What is dance as contemporary art? How can the body practice in dance and the thought that is produced in the context of the class/studio give agency and provide potent choreographic materials to create an art form and to structure possibilities of work of composition in dance? I participated in the workshop of Luis Lara Malvacias and Jeremy Nelson with those goals. It will be difficult in this writing to describe and analyze the whole experience and the propositions (practices) that we did during almost 30 hours of work. I would like to point out a few of those results.

Most of the results were choreographic: choreography through instant composition. In terms of choreographic works it is important to consider what Isabelle Ginot (2006) suggests about analyzing a work of dance not as an object of study but mainly as a site for knowledge, a site for theoretical production. Therefore the analysis of work becomes a practice that results in nurturing the piece: what emerges from the perspective of the movement? What disturbs our habits? Rather than searching for a meaning of what it tells us. Also we would try to see what it shows us and what issues it raises. What Ginot invites us to do is to carry out the work of the gaze, see what we are looking at, what we remember and what touches us longer than descriptions. This would be a lovely way to analyze the numerous little performances that we built during this week of work. As well this shows how Lara Malvacias and Nelson intertwined the practice of teaching, from the start, with the act of performing for an audience. Although the practices that we did are configured as exercises, they went beyond the premise of the exercise, towards the realm of art.

The workshop was organized in parts. Each part prepared us for what came next. The way to warm us up was thought to tune the body to the scene, to the composition. An example of this was an exercise led by Jeremy Nelson, which was focused on the possibility of exploring the body's internal structure, at the level of the skeleton. So a person would lie down on his or her back while two others would map the bones with their hands while exploring their shape and weight. The people doing the mapping would seek for instance: "where are the joints? "Where do they fold?" therefore searching for connections, the separation of body parts, the investigation of the touch, the manipulation of the joints away from the body, joints against the body. After the person had received the touch they would start to move aiming to explore the external space, extensions, falls, different levels and forms. As they moved, the person could always look for support from the other two people who had done the mapping, who stayed close and available. In this way discoveries and investigations were made by the person who had received the touch, but also by those who had given it. Could the body make use of the material of the sensitive knowledge generated by bodily practices in dance?

The concept of “resistance” was another exercise used to warm up the body and as a tool or part of the score for composition. The concept of "resistance" was led by Luis Lara Malvacias - he asked us to stand up in front of a colleague who was also standing up, for a certain period of time. The goal was to try not to move or dance straight away, but to delay many of our internal impulses to move. For Lara Malvacias and Nelson the point of this exercise was to give space for us to focus on our perception: How do we move? Why do we move? To whom do we move? When do we start moving? When do we stop moving?  The intention of this exercise of resistance was also to work to increase awareness, attention, to listen to every decision that we make. Lara Malvacias put to us that the clearer we become in ourselves in the situation, the more what happens around us can affect us. Therefore we make ourselves more sensitive to space. In that sense another very interesting thing that Luis said was about dancers in general: "as dancers there are many things we already know and there are things that are on the surface of the body that we want to do immediately, such as turning, touching someone else, or just doing certain movements." With the exercise of "resistance" the idea of waiting, denying or postponing impulses is to postpone things that we already know and want to show as dancers. Denying those internal impulses can get you to different places in the body. Being in this place makes it also possible to research how to respond to certain patterns of the others who are in front of me: "the person who is in front of me is a problem because I do not know what she will do and how her movement will affect me." (Lara Malvacias, notes of the workshop). Working with the concept of resistance made us more "aware of everything". And each time, the more we waited for the movement, the more interesting it became. Thus some questions have been raised like: why do you think to move in this specific moment? Why do we choose to move in that specific moment? We have so many impulses, an impulse to move an arm, an impulse to stay in that silence, the impulse to run. For me, for every impulse that I resisted, my internal feeling was of dizziness or fainting, a suspension in the space-time, an intense attention tension in the internal structure of the body. As well as a perception in the practice of something placed in the philosophy of Merleau Ponty that says body is space. It was interesting to see how through the "resistance" that is to not move immediately, it brought total listening from outside and from inside, within which many “becomings” could be created - Becoming in the sense of the philosopher Deleuze e Guatarri.

Another consideration is to use the resistance as scores to perform pieces. Resistance proved once again that the dance is not only made for the movement. Lepecki in Exhausting Dance Performance and the Politics of Movement appropriates the concept of the philosopher Sloterdijk (2000, p.26) 'kinetic reality of modernity the mobilization”. “Sloterdijk’s philosophy outlines a critique of mobilization by addressing modernity’s “kinesthetic politics” as an exhausting and exhausted ontopolitical project of “being-toward-movement” (Lepecki, 2006, p.13). In that way we escape   the “being-toward-movement” (body-made-for-the-move) without necessarily falling into a dance that is only "conceptual" or based on concepts of Somatic Education. In other words, no movement or in this case the resistance to moving immediately, opens up the possibility of thinking about the exhaustive possibilities of dance, a chance to think a self-critique of contemporary dance. Dance finally continues to question itself.

Maíra Santos

Dancer, Freelancer Artist and PhD Researcher at  University of Lisbon

Another thought by Jenni Ocampo Monsalve:

the workshop was a constantly work with "resistance". It was an important and significant tool we got from Luis and Jeremy to improvise and compose with movement. The individual and gruppal sessions were both very important in order to understand the process of resistance in ourselves and our own movement and in coexistence with the others and the environment. With this tool we could go deeper in experiencing our real impulses to move, we practiced our attentiveness and listening to them and developed a state of honesty with our own dance. At the end of the week when we were improvising together we were very deep involved collaborating and composing with each other in all different constellations we were forming; solos, couples, trios, quartets, etc. We explored and visited other places in our body and our imagination to initiate movement and to interact and talk with each other through movement.