Being Seen, Being Moved

In this article Andrea J. Olsen explains and explores the idea of Authentic Movement, an idea that is very appealing to me. From what I could understand, Authentic Movement is a kind of improv style of dance where the audience and the dancers are connected through the deep kind of movement the dancer is doing.  The dancer dances by following their urges and executing them using their technique and their aesthetic. It is hard for me to imagine this complete trust of ones body and the relinquishment that comes with it. Still I find it ironic that we were supposed to read this as just yesterday I was asked to do something extremely similar in another class. 

In my acting class we are working on shakespeare monologues. Do to the extreme stylization of shakespeare it can often seem sedentary and stiff. Because of this our teacher had us improv rhythm, tempo, and melody while reciting it. The catch was we had to keep moving in exaggerated ways the whole time. In the better ones, where it was clear people felt more comfortable being a little silly in front of people, the monologues transformed into a kind of modern dance with text, much like the choreography of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.  When it was my turn I decided to focus more on the movement than the text because I was interested to see what would happen. I found myself doing variations on movements from the class' choreography almost instinctively. Perhaps this means that I am finally getting comfortable with it? This also proves her point of how you have to develop resources that you are able to pull from.  This class was something that I was able to pull from.

When I was reading this article I thought back to the beginning few articles we read about Black dance and what it meant and I thought that perhaps one very good way to show a difference between "White dance" and "Black dance" would be to have two dancers from different dance backgrounds do this. There is no doubt that they would be completely different as Olsen says "movement that is unformed or developing needs time to unfold" and so you pull from your training or things that are ingrained in your blood and body.