Heartland Collective. Molly Heller, center. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

 

FINDING (HEART): Practices in Improvisation (& Practices in Improvisational Writing)

By Molly Heller

 

(watching) Self: Sometimes improvisation is an opener, and often it requires that I push back.

It is a way of life. No fixed point or arrival, always FINDING. Offering permission (s) within its limitations. This provides me with freedom and sometimes it suffocates. It is the whole universe within my body. Swell, surge, purge. I intend, attend, and decide. Improvisation is choice, and another choice, followed (sometimes) by another…it is the acceptance of wanting. Desire.

It is (and has always been) where I locate myself and find others.

 

(with) People: They show up, and I invite them in. They invite me in.

Doing it TOGETHER.

        

(alongside) Heartland: Locating FINDING…a series of practices

…FINDING is a moveable exchange where creative autonomy is distributed in making/performing/being together. Leaning into:

Impossibilities: Paradox in the body and within space (such as: precariousness and stability, buoyancy and density, ease and resistance, containment and expansion)

Expressivity: Capacity for the whole body to animate, punctuate, and communicate

 

The idioms, sensations, and physical spaces of the heart

Cultivating connection

Magnification, bursting BIGness

 

…curating our beginnings

beginnings that curate…

 

Imagination. Wonder. Potential.

 

(through) Teaching: Facilitation. Mutable Molly. (way) FINDING.   

 

(witnessed within) Performance:

Bouncing between knowing and (un) doing. Riding the edges of making visible and retreating. Confronting closure, closing the need for resolution.

Puff to create space within my body (and distance from this very body)

Surrounded. 

 

(realizations of personal) Inspiration:

Resistance (the way in)

Resistance (the way out)

Keep on keepin’ on (the way towards)

  People are (the way through)

  

(current) Times: In this together. Moving (through) with…

Compassion

Care

Gratitude

Acknowledging…

Grief

Impermanence

Magnitude

To maybe (sometimes) find…that…

It just is.

Photo by Tori Duhaime.

About: Sometimes a writer, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a director, sometimes a performer, sometimes a maker. Always an improvisor.

Details: Molly is an Assistant Professor in the School of Dance at the University of Utah, and the director of the Heartland Collective. Molly currently dances with Katie Faulkner, Arletta Anderson, and Joanna Kotze.   mollyheller.com