Performance
Planning where each foot goes blocks the kind of movement that touches people. The dancer throws out mental pictures and ideas and follows impulses as they come. The aim is movement that springs from a source no one can explain.
No explanation can tell a body how to move. In the end the instruction is simply to do it. Teaching by description gives way to direct, spontaneous doing.
There is no need to memorise gestures, because they will be forgotten anyway. Repeated practice still leaves its result in the body and mind. You keep absorbing what you worked at even when you cannot recall it.
The best response to a performance is that someone cried while watching. Understanding what the performer is doing is not important, and it may be better if the audience does not understand at all. What counts is a direct response to the movement.
This form of dance is defined as meandering, moving in twists and turns between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Movement is not a straight line toward a goal. It drifts back and forth across the border between presence and loss.
A body in decline can still perform with strength, directness and clarity. Age does not cancel what a performance can carry. If anything it makes the work more plainly human.
Face, mouth, voice, eyes, ear, hand and back each carry their own expression. Basic acts like falling, standing, meeting a wall and flowing make up a vocabulary for performance. Building a performance means working through these parts and acts one at a time.
Photo records are more than a memory of finished performances. They can be fed back into the process of making a dance. Looking at images of past movement becomes part of creating new movement.
Material for dance comes from ordinary struggles and from a performer's bond with flowers, insects and animals. These sources sit alongside the performer's duties on stage. Art is fed by close attention to everyday and living things.