Dance Research Laboratory 2010-2014

I am a member of an improvisational ensemble of dancers based in San Francisco led by PhD Nita Little.
In this group dance and movement theories with practices of embodied attention in post-Judson dance improvisation with a focus on an activated ‘presencing’. Nita’s work emphasizes the instability of boundary definitions with respect to experience, selfhood, and the production of spacetimes.

We created two improvisation films:

1. The project weaves our binary notions of urbanity vs. nature in an Alice- in-Wonderlandesque tour down a path of interferences that disturb our grasp of ‘the actual’, the material. It wonders what is touchable? In making the film, Nita is asking the questions: “How does film bring to dance material the visibility of its relationship to the immaterial, the visibility of the dancing mind that seeks to know its passing sense of place?” And also,”What does dance bring to film that details the performance of presence and that emphasizes the indeterminate nature of the movement between the space of knowing and place of being?” The movement between the dancer and the place of the dance reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary. Ultimately the film asks, “ Where is this dance?”

2. The Geometry of Attention is series of duets that reveal the visibility of states of inquiry. It engages choreographically by directing dancer’s physical attention toward the purpose of recognizing the visible mind that is embodied and that is dancing. It explores this dancing level by highlighting the geometrical frames through which dancers articulate and communicate their tactile negotiations. This research takes place in formal and in formal performances in San Francisco.