[relayed]:
Dear Johannes, dear friends,
Before writing some notes for our topics, I feel the need to add some sentences
to my bio. I am an artist, a dancer who compose his dances through using the
Eshkol-Wachman Movement-Notaion (EWMN) an israeli invention (1958). This system
describes the human motion within geometric method. As such one can analyze the
humans movement expression, and animals behavior as well. EWMN is giving us the
possibility to see dance as part of the wonderful vast movement phenomena.
My experience with the EWMN brought me to establish a movement department in
the Jerusalem academy for music and dance. Since 1972 I am working with
"Tnu'ot" dance ensemble, preforming my written dances. At 1989 I started the
Room Dances Festival - a chamber dance festival, to forward dances created
through notations or any kind of scores, the whole scope from composed to the
open improvisation. Few years later I started a new form of dance, when I
design the score and each dancer is composing his/her own part, and creating a
dance composed by the performers. Along the last ten years I introduced it with
dancers/creatures in Israel and in Europe.
Slowing down is part of an early thought in the modern western movement
culture. It was introduced already in the 19th. century, known as the
Fechner-Weber law, claiming that the smaller the stimulation the bigger is the
sensation. One of the first to apply it was Elsa Gindler (1885-1961) the
german movement educator reformer. At the mid of the 20th. Century, Moshe
Feldenkrais (1904-1984) applied it in his teachings , as well as more systems
included slowing down with different accents: Mable Todd (1880-1956) Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen and others. Yet the connection to the art of movement – dance,
is not yet integrated. From Isadora Duncen (1877-1927) attempts has been done
to get dance connected to the basics of the human movement, but to these days a
lot of dance education is done in an old fashion way. Not real 'education' but
just conditioning, very much like training animals in the circus. It is still
surprising that it can happen hundred years after Freud (1856-1939) discovered
the importance of the unconscious in the human being behavior. Ignoring the
individual body-mind, and with printing the body movement language, fixing also
the aesthetic views and not letting the individual to find a personal way to
the movement world.
Although already Laban (1879-1958) offer a new ways for dance education, and
insisted on the need for a written language, and created a dance notation where
one could record dance, and as such express the gestures in different speeds.
The American dancer Erich Hawkins (1909-1994) applied the Meble Todd method in
his dances, teaching his dancers way to include the knowledge of anatomy while
learning his dances, he claimed that using the images of the human skeleton
improve the execution of each dancer and helping the process of integrating it
to his/her own body-mind reactions. Watching his group dances one could see
that the dancers archived a common language yet without loosing their
individuality. In the middle of the fifties we find the wonderful contribution
to the somatic dance education through the contact improvisation. A development
of the American dancer Steve Paxton. Paxton stressed the power the gravity and
the momentum playing when two moving bodies are moving while touching each
other, shifting the weight, acting and reacting and learning their movement by
trail and error, exploring and expending their movement world.
I am claiming here that learning to move we need to respect human being as a
unique individual. Exploring our gestures, new and old we need to preform it
different speeds, from regular-habitual to slow it down to the point of only
vibration an inner movement. Or accelerating the gesture to wide speed range as
well. Listen that each speed the body-mind is organized and perceived the
movement differently, different feelings, recognizing the new experience.
Last word goes to the art of movement - DANCE as well as movement GAMES are
based on unspoken contract between the PERFORMER and the AUDIENCE. The two
agree to stay alert, to be consciously active during the whole performance. One
is active PREFORMING, the other WATCHING actively. (This ideal is far from the
reality neither in the theater hall, nor at the dance schools. In both cases
less attention is given to the act of active observation. Both groups
performers and audience need to accept consciously the terms of the contract,
otherwise slowing down will be only a self indulging act (which happens so
often while improvising in public).
Amos Hetz
++++++++++
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