Dance Techniques 2010

Gill Clarke — Minding Motion
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opportunities to dive deeper again, to take time to retune
the perceptual capacities, which might have been dulled
through overwork or under use, are then beneficial to add
depth and dimension to the embodiment.
Minding Motion approaches the work of dancing as a
physical, mental, and perceptual activity. The physical beginning
of the studio learning experience is enhanced and
complemented by an invitation for students to offer their
own reflections and self–observations. This opens a space
for personal experience to be valued and shared, and for
a dialogue between dancing and life experience. The work
stirs up a curiosity in anatomical matters, and it opens up
dimensions of physical learning otherwise often neglected:
reading and watching / seeing.
Minding Motion establishes a reciprocal relation between
teaching and doing, comparable to an apprenticeship.
In order to make this reciprocity work, a fixed structure
must be avoided. The interplay between imitation
and exploration (or in other words, between forming and
somatic experience) is a central issue in this conversational
approach and applies not only to the physical and sensorial
aspects. It also holds true for the development of an
individual’s work discipline and the constant application,
re-investigation, and expansion of experiences gained. In
this sense, an understanding of dialogical learning and
working processes and contexts is enhanced, drawing to a
large extent from the social skills of working together and
an openness towards the experience of others.
“Gill’s work is about readiness, a readiness
in the body to be able to move and not
to separate the warm–up session from the
session where you can only do certain
other material once you get to it. Such
a separation did not take place and I
find that rather exciting. Many techniques
were used as a basis although the repertoire
you work with afterwards is actually
something different.”
Julia Schwarzbach, student
The question of whether or not a method or technique is
product–oriented needs some reflection as to what ‘product–oriented’
might signify. One understanding might be to
enable a student to perform certain movements. Thus, doing
a pirouette would be a product of training / teaching. In a
more general sense, one might be skeptical about whether
or not any physical practice can do without some kind
of model or ideal–a Formung in German, something like
an ‘in-form-ing’—so that even an open–learning concept
like Minding Motion would still have to confront the fact
that a participant goes from one point to another with
specific expectations or intentions. Might this intentionality
be the product of the work?
However, it seems clear that Minding Motion is more
concerned with the process a student / participant will experience;
a particular physical process is offered, yet the
aim is to enable a participant to guide themselves and
ultimately to generate their own practice rather than reproducing
something existing. Again, the very openness
somehow contradicts the idea of a fixed learning outcome,
even though this process–orientation can be considered to
be a result that is sought, i.e., a product. The self–generating
of physical understanding is more concerned with
the how than with the what. In that sense, the movement
content (in terms of movement form) is a vehicle for the
learning, not as en end–product with its own value.
Pedagogical Methods
Lesson structure: The class might begin with a group discussion,
as such, an ‘arriving activity’, ‘taking the temperature’,
garnering overnight reflections and folding them
back into the accumulating group experience, hearing
‘news reports’ of how yesterday’s work and theme might
have filtered through subsequent activity, sharing and
discussing questions that might have arisen, welcoming
a wider contextual frame of reference and drawing from
Gill Clarke’s library of textual and visual materials when
appropriate.
Another way to begin might be to pick up on the focused
attention in the studio, of individuals engaged in
their own ‘arriving activities’. They are guided to notice
what they are engrossed in, to continue in their current
activity, or move on as they choose. A particular focus
of attention might be suggested within the body, to draw
memory back to the previous day’s theme and might then
shift to introduce the day’s new topic. This provides another
way in which to reinforce the accumulation of information
in the perceiving body, with the knowledge that
this will be a nonlinear process with a different route and
timing for each person.
In a teaching encounter that is a course of learning
rather than, for example, an open professional class, a
rigorous, structured, developmental journey through the
body is followed. A specific focus is given to each day’s
work, introducing one new element at a time so as to better
hone attention and avoid too much neural ‘noise’. The
level of anatomical detail will be determined by the overall
timeframe.
The ‘theme of the day’ will be most frequently introduced
using anatomical pictures and metaphorical images,
often accompanied by found photographs from magazines,
or simple toys, made or found. 20 Specific attention
is given at this stage (and in preparing the class), to clarity
and simplicity of language, to the ordering of information