I’ll be teaching a text-movement workshop, “The Thinking Body, the Dancing Word,” at the American College Dance Association Mid-Atlantic.

The Thinking Body, the Dancing Word: text-movement improvisation in Simone Forti’s Logomotion and kathak abhinaya

What are the myriad ways that language and dance can interact in the improvisational “now”? This workshop intersects the text-movement improvisational practices of Logomotion, developed by seminal American postmodern improviser Simone Forti, and abhinaya as rooted in the North Indian classical dance form of kathak. Logomotion explores the improvisational art of speaking and moving at the same time, while abhinaya typically consists of a dancer using gestures and facial expression to improvise multiple emotional variations on a poetic song text.  In the class, we will improvise talking dances, sensorial writings, and gestural translations of text that engage with the following questions: How do you move differently when you are actively thinking at the same time? What bodily memories are embedded in our bones, tissue, and sinew? How does the meaning of text shift as we transform its emotional colors, shape-shift narrative, and add layers of subtext? What non-linear leaps of faith, imagistic fragments, sonic-driven logics, and full-fledged narrative worlds emerge from the thinking-dancing body?

March 19, 9:30-11 am
The Great Hall @ MEC
West Virginia University
School of Theatre & Dance
Creative Arts Center
1 Fine Arts Drive
Morgantown, West Virginia 26506-6111
Conference Website: https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/default.aspx?EventID=1734682