Into the Weirdness

Miguel Gutierrez and Ishmael Houston-Jones

We’ll spend the week hybridizing our individual approaches to writing, music, improvisation and composition. One line of practice will focus on a variety of body-based somatic and sensory approaches to access self-awareness. Other directions will be more attuned to movement improvisation with questions such as: What is your first impulse? Can you trust it? What happens when the judge falls asleep? Can sight be a handicap? Can you know too much? Can you shift immediately into other choices? Through sensory explorations, we tap into “uncanny” relationships of self to other and space, welcoming strangeness. We will also explore authentic movement, partnering rooted in complex ideas about what relationships can be, “releasing” to access imagination and possibility, and scores to create useful, conceptual frameworks for performance. 

We each use text in different ways to articulate content that is immediate, topical, political and absurd. We will use different exercises to break down artificial disciplinary divisions to allow for a free flow of immediate, spontaneous dancing, writing, and speaking. We will also explore ways of generating complex, live sound scores using basic technology. 

All of this will be used to construct impromptu group pieces as well as a means toward broadening self-expression in solo work. We welcome “the weirdness” as a way of showing how dance and performance create possibilities for meaning-making outside of conventional and predictable modes of communication. We think of the context of “the workshop” as an ongoing experiment of what a society can be. Ultimately, these exercises serve as practices to negotiate what it is to be in a room of individuals together – or as Jean Luc Nancy famously put it – “the singular plural.”