Intensive with Charlie Morrissey (UK)
A workshop in which movement is seen as a phenomenon of inter-relationship; Movement is perceived to happen through a series of relationships. Humans perceive movement through sensory and cognitive means, and so the experience is subjective. Each person participates in the projection of their own experience in relation to, and often in reflection of, numerous other elements. For the purposes of this workshop, I’m interested in framing that experience as a supernatural.
Why? Because I struggle with terms like natural and unnatural because they all too often becomes aligned with traditional and normative ideas of a harmonious world of heteronormative peace and balance, and I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with.
I see nature as essentially queer – complex and unfixable – arbitrary even – a complex inter-relationship of volatile elements. So I’m curious about notions of the super-natural – that which is unexplained or beyond the realm of explanation; a space in which the things we may perceive which don’t fit into easy categorisation exist – perhaps they ask for a space in which questions can remain suspended so that the different layers of subjective experiences of movement can be included in an accumulating understanding of what movement is.
I wonder if this is where dance exists – it moves ahead of the explanation of it – and there is something wonderful about attempting to describe it because it keeps running ahead of its own description, and that movement into a space of continual searching and curiosity; desire and appetite are things that keep me chasing after it, and riding along with it.
I see this approach as a means of including many perspectives at once without having to arrive at a single definition of what’s happening.
But what will we actually do in the workshop?
It will be a combination of physical explorations and scores – These will include anatomical studies which started their life in Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine, perceptual experiments which are extrapolations of Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores, and physical patterns that allow our perception to take a ride through the opportunities and implications of mass and gravity.
(Oh, and Supernature is also the title of Cerrone’s seminal 1978 disco track – check it out)