Dance Techniques 2010

Lance Gries — Release and Alignment Oriented Techniques
269
So we began to get a new generation of dancers doing
this evolving style of movement—both in and around
Trisha’s company—who needed different training. I think
this is when we really find people taking from the
historical body of research already loosely defined as
Release Technique and putting it into a more pedagogical
form. I had an Alexander teacher, June Ekman, who
tried very hard to transcribe some of those principles onto
the dancer’s body, giving the pelvis a lot more strength
and the body a lot more depth and opposition. She tried
to make her ideas useful and practical for the dancer,
which is what I tried to do when I started teaching. I
started teaching pretty early, on the first or second tour.
We would go to one place to perform and they would
ask for a master class, so I tried my best: I did a few basic
exercises and some repertory. At that time, this was a
big influence on how other choreographers and dancers
started to research their own movement freedom.
What do you mean by ‘movement freedom’?
That vocabulary can be anything. Trisha’s identity as a
movement researcher was her way of looking at
movement, of exploring qualities and structure. So I was
put into situations where I didn’t really know what I
was doing. But slowly I was able to create—first of all
for myself, which I think is really important to say about
this work in general—and my colleagues and I, we
all worked on developing a very, very rigorous personal
practice. We were working separately, but we would
ex-change some ideas. We prepared privately and
arrived at the rehearsal studio together, ready to do the
work for the day. And so did Trisha. It is important
to note that it was a period when people assumed the discipline
to create a personal practice. When a dancer
assumes that responsibility—How can I prepare? What
do I need to study? How do I solve this problem?
How do I learn more about my leg joints? and so on—
it becomes a very good way to teach oneself how to
teach. You, the dancer, are creating the system, and you
are articulating your thought processes.
And what helped you on this way? My Alexander
teacher was extremely helpful for understanding basic
functioning: How does the elbow joint feel and function?
How can you think about it in relationship to the
spine? So the anatomical functioning is from my Alexander
teacher, re-interpreted by my experience and then reinterpreted
again by exploring how I can best deliver it to
a group. My teaching started from studying, receiving
the practical information and the sensations into my body,
and from direct experience through expert hands and
guidance. From there, I took a lot of private time to digest
the information and apply it to my body, to personalize
and integrate it, and finally I applied it to my way of
dancing the repertory. Then I found a way, a form, simply
by working with others in teaching situations, to give
the information to a group of dancers in a class.
It changed a lot when I decided I had to somehow share
or transmit that kind of internal information to a
group, as this type of information is often transmitted
just between two people with the hands. One part of
my class uses my way of interactive touching so people
can experience specific sensations—at the spine or at
the pelvis or in the legs—there are experiences for each
part of the body. That is one part of transcribing a
personal experience into a form that works in a larger
group.
So your teaching was intertwined with your
dancing practice? I danced with Trisha from 1985
to the beginning of the 1990s. By the end of that
period we were doing some larger residencies. Maybe I
was interested or maybe I was chosen, I don’t know
exactly, to lead two or three weeks of a workshop in a
university when the company was rehearsing. So I
was able to start thinking about creating three weeks of
information that could really bring these technical
ideas together in a much broader way and the nice thing,
of course, apply them to the repertory. Because my
teaching, or my emphasis, is different than that of others
in the company, or the starting point is different, I
never heard the word like ‘Trisha Brown Technique’. Even
two people who studied with the same teacher adapted
the base information into a personal point of view
that would then serve the repertory or one’s own research.
That means it is highly individualized work?
As I went further and started to teach more in institutions
and in Europe, I was continually starting over
with new groups in different places. One is always confronted
with groups of people in which some have
a lot of experience and ideas, and others do not. So how
could one best formulate an introductory experience
about this kind of work on many levels? This is a question
about trying to go beyond the personalization,
about trying to find a way that certain principles of usage
of the body can be experienced by as wide a range of
people as possible, including non-dancers. I always work
with the point of view that what I am offering is, like
any kind of movement researcher of this period, something
that hopefully fits into a student’s development—
but for sure it is not the only story.
How did the name ‘Release Technique’
come about? At the end of the 1990s, two issues of the
Movement Research Performance Journal—a journal
published once or twice a year with news of the research
that was happening—were devoted solely to the question
of Release Technique. We had this big questioning:
What is this? We were confronted with this classification
out there, and what did it mean to the individual
artists who actually worked with it. There was a