Skytime 2014 - a first reflection (anticipating Winter ...)

(screenshot on a computer in Berlin, showing the two livestreams next to each other)
it’s been a week since the successful performance of #Skytime2014 #Moonbow / #MoonRainbows in New York City, and Schiedam, in the Netherlands. summer has clearly ended, fall is now, time to start preparing for winter. (reflection, clarifying, growing directions)

i am clear that a long phase of investigating that started in 2013 about where I want to grow to as a choreographer can start to articulate itself and be formulated this coming winter/period. #directness of #sensorial #experience is becoming one keyphrase, #re-balancing #oppression, and #decolonization another. 

kinetic awareness

as i prepared for the concert, i was working with the equality of all body parts when it comes to bearing weight. my body was mostly horizontal, verticality happened as a result of local contraction of body parts. 

the decision to listen to the parts bearing most weight when it comes to the next move, and to have any body part “on top” remain flexible and able to contract in order to take its weight off from carrying parts, became important technical discoveries, that greatly helped the ‘flying’ and lifting bits.

i also greatly value this understanding, in terms of working on emancipation.
translated into decolonization, for example, this contracting and taking weight off would be people from a privileged and dominant culture making space by themselves for people from a less dominant culture and enabling a healthy move all over, unlike fixations.

(or the same could be done on the level of individuals, obviously)

visceral / imaginary / livestream

re-balancing dreaming (which I so far always chose not to influence by my consciousness to let it do its own thing) with waking and dancing, was another major theme. my performance-mode clearly is not used to be open to dreaming while dancing ...

in a sense, to work with people via livestream in more or less real-time, across time-zones, and across vast planetary distances on something that usually is rather immediate and visceral as improvisation of a dance as a performance, was a special experience in itself.
there were times when the streaming would be interrupted or repeating, so at some moments I no longer knew what was going on in New York, nor could I see the totality of the environment, the night-sky, or all related works of all contributors. added that whatever came was at least 20 -40 seconds after it had happened. and the same with what came back from our side. what was real? what was imagined? did it matter? it was a good challenge to always be completely thrown back to oneself, and face the chance to trust one's own impulses and ebb and flow of energy ...

something new
finally, I realized that there was great value for me in the fact that both sides of the concert happened in venues that are related but not an integral part of lage-scale / institutionally funded circuits. i believe this gave a lot of freedom about what was possible, with fewer expectations to conform to already existing formula.
and I very much like the understanding of do-it-yourself, even when it is done on a professional level. i also always love how very successful this approach is when I work with 'amateur' dancers and in a direct legacy from the works of Elaine Summers, Anna Halprin, or Rudolf von Laban.'Invitation to Secret Dancers' continues to challenge me as to allowing fun and that 'it's just dance' (like John Cage liked his music to be described as 'it's just sound' ... and laugh)

great thanks to everyone who has been involved!
the sky's (not) the limit ☺

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for more information about skytime, please visit www.skytime.org
for my own contributions from the Netherlands, in Dutch and English, welcome to http://hemellopers.blogspot.nl