Too many effects can make the focus absorbed by them, and we loose the sensations that we are trying to bring out. But finding the edge is interesting. Finding the point “in between”, the point of balance. In between the concrete world and the abstract world. In between the familiar and the unfamiliar. In between a clearly identified object and something that forces the imagination and the sensations to open up, when the brain can’t possibily recognize everything.

In this sense, altering an image can create something new and interesting.
I am wondering, while altering a dance image, what are we still trying to recognize. It shifts the focus which is not anymore on the movements, it creates new shapes, new sensations.

Altering, in a way, is not removing anything, but it is revealing something new to see. Something is revealed to us through what doesn’t appear anymore. Removing something doesn’t make it less visible, but it opens a door to the absence of what has been altered and was then familiar. This absence stimulates the imagination and sensations, through the endless possibilities of what could have been there before.

From a month ago, movement research on restricted space, restricted position.
Note to self : restriction allows to find new ways and enable creativity.

In the train. Feeling like dancing. I left home twice. Wether going to France or going to Berlin, it’s always “going home”. Simultaneous feelings of leaving home and going home, whichever way my travel goes.

I thought I had had enough of Berlin. But leaving precipitately made me realize, I’m not done yet with this city. I’m coming back and will probably stay a little while more.

Next Friday, my father would have celebrated his 75th birthday with his whole family, and the next day, would have jumped on his bike for a long-planned 8 weeks solo trip through Europe, from Nantes (France) where one of my sisters lives, to Budapest where one of my brothers lives.
For this, is no online alternative possible.

Topic inspired by Helías

On one hand, I believe in the importance of having a panel of movement tools that we’ve learned or researched, in order to be able to express ourselves with our dance. But I’m also critical or skeptical about how dancers express emotions. How much of sincerity there is in a movement that we pretend to be expressing a certain emotion. Instead, aren’t we just repeating movements we’ve learned, adapting them into a way of moving that we think will transcript the emotion we want to express.

I have the biggest problem when I am asked to work based on an emotion. I think, from the moment the emotion is named, we start to think about how this emotion can be displayed, influenced by the collective subconscious of how this emotion is recognizable by others. We are then more in the brain than in the body, more in the thoughts than in the real emotion. Studies show that overthinking can cut us completely from what our body knows and feels and make us loose the wisdom of our emotional response.

Rolf Dobelli wrote, based on the scientific researches he read:
“Essentially, if you think too much, you cut off your mind from the wisdom of your feelings. Emotions, just as thoughts, form on the brain. They are merely a different form of information processing. Sometimes they provide a wiser counsel” *

The link between the brain and the emotions is very interesting, as emotions are formed in the brain, that gives signals to the body which provokes a physiological reaction.
But the thoughts and the emotions are two different things, and working with one or the other will give different outcomes. That’s why I believe that from the moment we name an emotion, we might start working with it intellectually and not emotionally, which makes me question the genuineness of the response we’ll give. We can trick ourselves and others, in “representing” an emotion rather than really feeling it. Like an actor, who knows exactly how to behave and how he must transform his face in order to make us believe in the emotion. He has to tap into what he knows from the emotion, he has to remember feeling it in particular circumstances and reenact this feeling. He is performing an emotion.

So when dancing, where is the line between feeling the emotion and performing the emotion? Where does the movement really come from, how honest can we be in our intention and our movement response?

I believe in working intuitively. I believe that if I don’t choose actively to display an emotion but start working with sensibility and intuition, stronger emotions will emanate from my dance. But working on a topic or a concept, I start thinking about the topic, dancing on a different level of connection with myself. Struggling, wondering if I am being honest with the topic, or if I am just trying to depict it through movement. Or, starting with an emotion that I may genuinely feel, how do I keep the link to its feeling while dancing, without being carried away by the movement itself, the music, the thoughts coming…

*In The Art of Thinking Clearly, chapter Overthinking, p.275