A recent conversation with a theater colleague inspired this series of questions and posts. Please join us!

Questions and wonderings include:

• What is your studio practice?
• Is your studio practice tied up/intertwined with an actual production on the books?
• When do you have time for noodling around, improvising, and playing without product? Is this with other dancers, or mainly yourself?
• The fine line – and intersections – between self-care and creative work, exertion and recuperation, training and art making
• Do you consider being in class part of your practice? Teaching as part of your practice? Basically….what falls under the category of “studio practice?”
• If your answer is NO at the moment to a studio practice, what do you aspire to create or make happen in your artistic life in the near future?
• And, does the topic of studio space play into this? Do you have regular access to a space (free or for a fee)?

Plus,

• What does my body need today?
• Where does my creative spirit + curiosity take me today?

 

 

For me, studio practice is a container that can hold practices that further a dancer's way of knowing and that cultivate knowledge and habits of being in the world that directly stem from being a dancer.  Here, I take ownership of the title of dancer as a way of being in the world that has many more expressions than performer and which is a specific way of entering roles that might be primary for other people, such as choreographer, administrator, or teacher.  Studio time is the time I use to allow my dancer self to emerge and practice her ways of being.  This does not include the kind of formal upkeep known as training, nor does it include time to complete work that’s required of me, such as preparing for classes.  It is not rehearsal.  Studio practice is the time I use to further my understanding of dance’s power, and to enact it and allow it to take hold of me.  It is a form of open-ended to focused research.  It might reveal something that moves into a creative process and ultimately becomes a piece.  Then I’d say that studio practice diminishes to allow time and energy for a creative process, and the research and inquiry of studio practice continues in a more abbreviated format that supports the creative work at hand.  Differentiating these terms might seem like splitting hairs, but I find that doing so honors the different ways I use my body, time, and space.  

 

I am fortunate to be a faculty member at a college, which allows me to have access to space for no additional charge.  I do not know what I would do if I had to pay for space, not only because of the cost, but what the expenditure often prompts in me: the need or expectation to not waste time or to be productive in each session.  Often, studio practice doesn’t yield anything immediate and sometimes feels frustratingly unproductive, its fruits being felt much later down the line in un/expected ways.

 

Studio practice is essential for me.  For many years, I did not prioritize it, letting semester after semester go by without engaging in it.  Looking back on that time, my spirit really suffered, and I grew hard.  I lost connection to ways of knowing that I valued and to a whole self—my dancer self.  Dancing as a way of being in the world must be kept present through dedicated time devoted to it on a regular basis.  Studio practice is my time to do that life work.

—-

Related posts:

 

—————-