dancing still

Finally I have access! I've been having trouble with my internet connection lately, I apologize. I know you're all out there waiting impatiently to hear me drag on about my experiences. This week we are doing yet another Institute, this time "Dancing Still: An Institute for Dancers over 50." What fun! Not that it wouldn't be otherwise, but it is very inspiring to share a creative space with people who have a life time of experience beyond my own. I think perhaps that some of the ladies must think that it might be uninteresting for me to explore movement creation with them, when in fact it's quite the opposite. Being a witness to how they approach the creative tasks and embody them is really an honor. If only I could figure out how to capture some of their movement experience in my own body, how fortunate I might be. I've also been noticing that they are much quicker to move to a creatively interesting place within their material - particularly with the telling of stories. For me, I feel the editing process would require more time, but somehow they just arrive there as if the creative editing was instantaneous.
In this institute we've been exploring the theme of knots. We began with the seemingly complicated task of creating from maps. We each drew visual maps (with picture, or stick figures in my case - reference points) of our creative path, aging path, family, and current events mapping of experience. We then used these to create solos based on objects, windows, interesting spatial pathways, and points of intersection or collision found within the maps.
Later we learned a duet that had been created based on the images of Celtic knots, playing with with idea of clasping and wrapping to create our own duets. We wrote postcards (to self, to someone we connected with, someone we are disconnected from) and over layered the text with the Celtic knot duet. Today we looked at images of knotted rope and used these to create spatial pathways and layered on movement "shopped" from others or movement created from direct equivalents of written descriptions of different kinds of knots (double loop, wrap around, intertwine...). We also used stories, times where we felt connected or disconnected, and layered movement with text in trios, the knotted pathway dance layered with a connected/disconnected personal story, over a narrative description of tying a knot.
Whew! And that's just two days work. (DE "tools" are in bold.)