K3 Proposal:

Body Weather / MB Training

Body Weather is kinesthetic and movement research founded by dancer/farmer Min Tanaka, and further developed independently by exponents worldwide. This training proposes and generates questions about the body and vigilance towards its immediate, ever-shifting internal and external states. We work with our direct senses, imagery and varied interventions towards the ceaseless porosity between flesh, bone, imagination and space to yield impossible and/or newfound bodies. Applicable to movement generation, improvisation, perception and performance, this comprehensive movement training offers a progression of open, incisive investigations. The training challenges physical limits, scale and timing, evoking sense memory and rigorously re-examining the body as a dynamic, transformative environment.

Proposed for K3, I will hone in on one particular line of training which Tanaka coined "MB" (muscle and bone, mind and body, movement and balance, m_____ and b______). While MB often works within a format built on a series of progressive and dynamic movements across the floor, serving to open the body to new possibilities of movement through challenge, (dis)coordination, rhythmic study, exhaustion and raw physicality, it resists being defined as a "technique" in the traditional sense of developing specific vocabulary to apprehend and lock down. Rather, the movements proposed serve to decontextualize the dancer's known/mastered body, demanding individual observation of habits/tendencies, acute observation and drawing upon group energy, and refusing to settle in a single point of movement reference. As such this training engages the interplay of physical and mental speed, and strives to surface for each participant the indivudal borderline of limits in balance, endurance, awareness and speed.

The intent of MB is not about "getting it" but of searching for and pushing the body, mind and senses to the borderlands of "not getting it" within the proposed movements, with the intent to open new possibilities, bodies,  observations and terrains.