Artists Alex Ketley (left) and Jeanine Durning; photo courtesy of Salt Dance Fest

Hot Mess 

My body is tired but my brain keeps telling me to go forward. People are giving their best. I'm being pushed even into the second week. I keep thinking that eventually I won't be able to learn from a process. Maybe I will get bored with the exploration or the prompt like I have in other classes. I keep expecting to predict the class and slowly work less mentally even though physically I'm being asked a lot. None of it is true. Every class that has Hot Mess as the title is a new day on learning how to deconstruct an action and more importantly a state of mind. 

The last class was a different energy than others before. Our class of eight gathered and was given a piece of paper and was told to write 20 things that were similar to previous prompts we had been given throughout the last week. Without much warning we all switched papers and began developing a world to live inside for 10 minutes. My solo world revolved around the 20 commands/ideas that another had written down for herself, and now I was trying to understand it. With an overwhelming list I was challenged to multitask my mind and body. 

An example of one of the prompts on my paper was "your blood is memory foam." My blood is memory foam! 

A direct idea. I wasn't confused by it. My mind found this prompt to be concrete, but my body's physical impulse was to run into a field of abstraction. A field where blood equals weighted tiny marshmallows that were trailing across the outside of my body's skeleton. My "memory foam" body became an isolated robot of one position that was held and compressed until the blood was exploding with the marshmallows onto the floor. This then lead me into my next prompt, where my feet were instructed to talk. I then relentlessly tried to imagine what myself at six years old would do if she put on a puppet show with her feet. Each foot represented two gentlemen who were in a disagreement about which coffee roast to buy. This world was amazing! I could keep exploring it without getting bored. Each time I repeated an idea, my body had a different understanding than the last time. The more often I danced the more it became something else. The more it became something else, the more I was finding different ways to move and think while dancing. 

As a dancer, how can I keep pressing into an uncomfortable state that allows my body to find a new patterning and understanding within future movement exploration? 

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Quote for Today: From Andrea Olsen

The "365 Dance" Project

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