Dance Techniques 2010

Gill Clarke — Minding Motion
203
one can allow students to stay with a little confusion and
trust that over night—through sleeping and living and
reflecting—something will begin to make sense rather
than feel every class has to be a ‘successful’ unit gauged by
having done a bit of everything and feeling satisfied like
after a good meal.
What does the term ‘technique’ mean for you?
Technique, in a way, is only some skills and tools that help
somebody do what they want to do. We need to think
about what we call technique as a means to an end. And
the end, or the aim can be about the embodied understanding,
which can then feed everything we do—making
work and choreographing, but also performing. It is
also really important to relate all of this inward attention
out into space. Both through our seeing, but also through
sensing the volume of our body. Making our body
permeable, ‘see-able’. Deborah Hay has a wonderful
phrase: to invite being seen. So we make that information
readable, otherwise it becomes more about personal
development. Sometimes during the process of learning, our
attention can go very inward, but our aim has to be to
make the form and experience connect to a world.
How do you prepare yourself before starting to
teach? I partly prepare by preparing my own mind
and body; I could not walk in off the London street and
be ready to teach. Because I am giving information
or suggesting attention from my own embodying in the
moment, it is like preparing oneself to perform or to
improvise. I have to try and be in readiness. I have to access
a connectedness of mind and body before I begin.
And then, of course, I prepare in the sense of the theme
of the day and the imagined sense of that progression,
the stages, the language. But there might also be different
alternatives, and which route we take will affect what
we do the next day.
When, would you say, a movement is
accomplished? Accomplishment, I would say, is when I
see an intelligence at play in the body. When I see
connection through a body and that a body has a sense
of this whole system, this whole organism working
in agreement. Working in relation to gravity, and to space.
When it is open to be seen, when I feel that I see
decisions being taken in the moment rather than a predetermined
form being followed. In other words, when
that concentration in the body can sit lightly enough for
it to go in any direction at any moment and experience
that moment—which, to me, is something about connectivity
of the body, about how one part relates to
another so I can move it this way as a whole, but at
any moment be ready to redirect somewhere else.
Where do you see the meaning and place for this
work in the future? As for the future, one of my ongoing
questions now relates to teaching dance material, or
even dancing dance material: What is the role of dancing
in movement learning, and what is dancing? For example
in this project, many of these dancers are more interested
in making their own artistic work than dancing
for other choreographers, so the way that they will use
that embodied information is diverse. One aspect I
have come to emphasize is the questioning of the information
and the material, and the sensing of it as principles
and puzzles to play with—and not as a movement
vocabulary to replicate. Also, what has felt really important
for me is that we take one day in the week that
is a laboratory. I am there if I can be of use in any way,
but the students spend time exploring, assimilating the
information, or abstracting what is useful to them, applying
it to what they are working on at the moment in
their own dancing or their own practice, using my resource
of books. So it is about reinforcing the notion that the
work is only a means to an end, some tools for your
curiosity and that end is what you are trying to do or investigate.
It is not that I want to draw you to do what I
am doing as a style or aesthetic. How to make that explicit
in what I do, whilst retaining the rigor and particularity
of my focus, feels an important question for me at
the moment.
On a bigger scale I feel this work is vitally important
because our society leads us more and more outside of the
lived body; it leads us towards digital technology where
what we need is a brain, where we don’t act so much
physically. And we no longer see wonderful metaphors in
jointed, articulated machinery, we just press a button.
And we are losing connection with our natural world. So
for me, this work is vitally important in turning that intelligence
back into our own system. And acknowledging
it as a system, a system that is always in relationship,
the internal to the external, to each other and the world,
which feels to me an important tiny contribution in refinding
a sustainable relationship with the world through
acquaintance with ourselves. And in the twenty-first
century, it feels like we have got to address individuality
and complexity and systems and relationships rather
than old notions of harmony and truth.
What do you want to deliver to students? What I
want for students is to feed their curiosity as being
the most important thing, in terms of their learning, in
terms of being an artist, in terms of being in a learning
situation and asking questions of it. And in terms of
movement, I suppose, I would say something about
tuning. Tuning the mind, the body, and the imagination
as one thing, which is our instrument, our medium.
And to go further with finding its possibilities, its information,
its wisdom. And finally, that the learning goes
on, that dancing is not isolated or separated from life.
That the learning, and our movement, and our dancing
in effect happens everywhere, at every moment.