WHILE THE DANCE IS OURS Andrea Ríos
While the Air is Ours
I breathe
And the air in my lungs
Is knowledge now, and love, and joy,
An embodied joy
That reveals itself to me
Only as a cleaving
— So elemental
That it never breaks off—
To the great succession of instants
In which I continue to breathe,
Embracing a part
Of the enormous airy clarity.
To live, to live, to seize from the rhythm of life
All this world that the air displays
And—God knows how—that pre-existing
Beyond
Which raises its gifts to the plateau of the ages
For me because I breathe,
I breathe from moment to moment,
In perfect contact
With that reality which sustains me,
Lifts me up
And through stupendous equilibria
Leaves me overcome, astonished, obedient.
Jorge Guillén
Translated by Reginald Gibbons
“Are we human or are we dancer?”
We have all heard this provocative phrase by Brandon Flowers, singer, and songwriter of the group The Killers, who composed the song “Human” in 2008.The phrase is made on purpose with a grammatical error because instead of saying “we dancers” says “we dancer”.
Regardless of what the author meant, because in the same way that he gives himself the freedom to have grammatical errors, we have interpretative freedom, this phrase invites us to reflect on what it is to be human and what it is to be a dancer. By dancing consciously, we can feel like we are something else, which perhaps can only be described as “dancer” in its singular form.
We all have the right to be a dancer, we just need to own it. Dance is ours in the same way that our breathing body and therefore, I encourage myself and others to learn skills of owning it, reclaim it as our source, recognize its gifts, and actively seek the ways in which it can enhance the scope of our experience of life and our expression wherever we are on our way.
My intention in accepting the invitation to Tiactro, this online platform for the performing arts directed by Genta Retkoceri, is to be able to help more people in the world develop this curiosity. For this endeavour, I invoke all my teachers, all those who have inspired me to cultivate my exploration in this field.
Marta Graham was the center of my training, but I also had experienced in techniques such as Ballet, Jazz, Flying Low, Contact Improvisation, Solo improvisation, Cunningham Technique, Limón Technique, Butoh (which really moved me), a little Belly Dance, Tango and of course, being Mexican, the social dance of Salsa, Bachata and Cha Cha Cha.
Choreographic work is like making a collection of poems or a musical album, only with different tools. The creation of choreography has captured me since early adolescence because the challenge of dance making always creates an invitation to immerse myself, read, study, draw, design, play, dance, write, creating a deeper dialogue with myself and with the world. Always dancing between the world of ideas and the materialization of them.
I am interested in how dance relates to philosophy, psychology, history, theatre, performance, visual arts, installation, yoga, kinesiology, and somatic techniques.
Inspired by the Theory of Reception, I develop new ideas of how to do dance projects where the dance receptors can become the dance makers as well. In this first course that I will give inside the platform of Tiactro I plan to propose a way of finding out What is dance? What is choreography?
Could there be dance without a body?By entering the body. We will travel through a meditation based on a visualization of a body that precedes us, where we will constantly be observing how each change in
our breathing, our state of mind or emotion, changes the space and our perception of things, facial gestures will be welcomed. And then we will silence everything observed to enter our bodies and dedicate time to read what we sense, our pulsations, our impulses.
Motion can be done from the inside out or vice versa, and the surface, such as the face or the fascia, are very interesting areas that also generate movement.
But the most important thing is the sacredness we give to this time, the commitment to our actions, and the permission we give to our desired explorations.
Stay tuned for more classes regarding:
• the human body in dance
• space in dance
• the movement in dance
• the impulse of the movement in dance
• time in dance
• the light-dark relationship in dance
• the shape or appearance in dance
• the spectator-participant relationship in dance
• dance and video relationship
• visual arts and dance relationship
• relationships between literature and dance
• relationships psychology and dance
