Language - post 2!

1. Shifts: I know this term in a couple different contexts within dance. For example, shifting weight from one leg to another, or from the heels to the balls of the feet. So we can experience individual weight shifts, and we can also share weight with each other and shift weight from one person to another. Another shift I was thinking of was compositional shifts that happen in group improvisational settings. I was in a workshop once where we were working on shifts and coined the phrase, “shifts happen”. I’ve been fond of them ever since.
   
2. Warming into moving: I know this phrase to be used in improvisational dance settings. It is the time that you spend warming your own body up - listening to your own impulses for movement and allowing yourself to follow them. Listening and saying “yes” to these impulses. As you continue to move you often start to increase your awareness of others and your compositional choices for movement while also trying to stay with and keep awareness of your own impulses. I am drawn to these words as they represent a key part of the improvisational process.
   
3. 4th Wall: I’m not sure if this is secret, but in breaking away from the proscenium style theater, the “breaking of the 4th wall” is key. The fourth wall is the area at the front of the stage between the performers and the audience. I’m a fan of site-specific work that incorporates the history and space of a performance site.

Here’s what I’ve heard a lot… “oh I’ve seen modern dance, on So You Think You Can Dance”. My grandmother said this to me after asking me if I watched the show. I said no and that the show was more in the vein of commercial dance and I study modern dance. I nodded and smiled of course, it was my grandmother, but this is a standard conversation I have experienced. It can be tricky when a person outside of dance sees something labeled “modern” dance on tv and not know the difference between that and the long lineage of artists that developed and continue to develop and expand that extremely broad category. I think some things about the commercialized version of dance that really get to me are how it’s “beautiful” “emotive”; dancers are “gorgeous”. Conversely, some people also know modern dance to be “weird”. Dance does have different genres and dances that stem from different cultural heritages. It is everything of the body, of life, and often beyond the body through imagery.  It can be anything, and everything - it is expansive, not limiting. This is my belief.

-Molly