WHAT FRANCES ALENIKOFF ISN'T TELLING - Movement Research

From one of Frances’ Performance columns in Craft Horizons: "But don't
be misled by the term. Improvised dances are not usually just sessions of letting it
all hang out. Most have a scaffolding which reflects the choreographer's goals
and preoccupations and is fleshed out in performance by the dancers'
temperaments and skills, combined with the specifics and urgencies of the
performing situation. Methods are as varied as the people probing them..."
For the dancer, the challenge of improvisation is to find ways to
strengthen the connectivity of motor impulses and flexibility that control the
coordination of spatial patterning necessary for interacting seamlessly with other
bodies. For the choreographer, improvisation tests the limits of how the
parameters of technique and composition can be deployed, the cohesion of
structures generated with the radar necessary to engineer and test the qualities and
tensities in performance.
Improvisation supplies a hermetic key too: how to be both inside and
outside the compositional process at the same time. Being a choreographer
involves a curious dialectic of being embodied within the animating structures of
a work, while simultaneously being outside of it to be able to see, conceive, and
steer its development.
* * *
The idea that your walk contains the kinetic gestalt and cipher of your
entire motor repertory is so patently obvious that dancers take it for granted, but
what's taken for granted opens up when investigated and deconstructed. Before
we began one of our work sessions, I reminded Frances about her unique walk,