Solo Practice The Solo Practice is a dynamic process of exploring movement as a way to build a kinetic philosophy and technical base unique to the individual. It is an open-ended practice of discovery and investigation that is “of the moment.” It focuses on developing a vocabulary that offers a wide range of movement choices to draw upon for expression. The ongoing development of a solo vocabulary allows the dancer to integrate new information and material and continually expand his or her range of possibilities. The emergent context developed by the Solo Practice is a microcosm of building on organic structuring principles with an ensemble.
Solo Practice is a nonlinear, non-hierarchical process involving four experiences:
Embodiment, Discovery of Movement Vocabulary, Attention to Spatial Environment, and Focus on the Particular.
An Example of Phrasing - Video by Colin Brant
Embodiment: Sensory Work
Embodiment in EI is a practice of attention that centers you in the present moment of your own physical and sensory reality. The process involves attuning oneself to the innate intelligence and felt experiences of the body through moving from breath, focus, still- ness, silence, and subtle movement or sound. We’ve adapted these practices from sources throughout the dance and body-work lexicon, such as Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Score with the senses, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body/Mind Centering principles, and texts such as Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body, Deane Juhan’s Job’s Body, and Andrea Olsen’s BodyStories.
How do I feel in my body? How can I let go of my judgments about how I look? How can I stop thinking about whether a movement is good or bad, and accept that this is just how I feel like moving today? How do I give myself permission to feel pleasure in my movements?
Embodiment practices facilitate remaining present and responsive to the environment in one’s choice-making. Dancers cultivate and maintain an awareness of what is emerging at any given moment. In the ensemble practice this includes recognizing how one’s individual choices affect how the whole composition unfolds. This is fundamental to the experience of agency or individual choice within an ensemble.
The following are processes we have identified as helpful in achieving an embodied solo vocabulary. The intention is to become aware or “wake up” the vitality of the whole body before beginning a more directed or mapped accumulation of gestures and phrases of movement.
Body Scan: A body scan can be done lying on the floor or standing. Beginning with attention to breath, one notices sensation within the body parts—skeleton, muscle, and organs.
Body Mapping: This is a process of touch and focused attention. The intention is to feel and become aware of the volume, depth and length of body parts through self-massage or the touch of a partner, giving a felt sense of one’s own personal geometry.
Proprioception: Building on the body scan and body mapping, proprioception explores the body’s sense of balance and move- ment through space. One develops an anatomical knowledge through felt experience of one’s structural alignment, vision, weight, spatial location, and perception of one’s physical kine- sphere from where one can extend further into space. The feelings of how much effort it takes to shift one’s weight into a new position, how it feels to turn, and how the body rights itself after a fall are aspects of proprioception.
Tuning: This term comes directly from Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Score practices that approach studying composition and communication from the felt organization of the body within its environment, developing connections of awareness, attention, and action.
Discovery of Movement Vocabulary
Discovery begins with exploring one’s own movement choices through sensory awareness and memory, noting recurring patterns and sponta- neous impulses. You allow your history of all of your training and dancing experiences to be continually rediscovered, reshuffled, and recombined. This endless creative process of discovery infuses the practice of EI.
The investigative process includes:
- 1. Attention to the issues of physical technique: balance, extension, vibration, gesture
- (turns, falls, jumps), textures, and simple to complex phrasing.
- Expanding range of articulation and expression through the practice of: initiating
- impulses from different body parts; rhythmic patterns; musicality—phrasing and timing; deconstruction of phrasing— performing the same phrase with changes of level, focus, speed, texture, repetition, and retrograde; body geography—re-shaping the body as a sculptural, three-dimensional form; internal imagery.
- 3. Exploring energy states affecting dynamic levels of intensity while moving.
4. Exploring the anatomical system of the body fluids that affect the range of qualities - or textures in one’s movement as set forth in the work of Body-Mind Centering. E.g., the grounded quality of moving from cerebro- spinal fluid, the high energy aerobic quality of moving from the arterial blood.
Attention to Spatial Environment
Broadening attention from a focus on my internal compositional relation- ships to include an external awareness of self within the environment brings an awareness of location. What kind of space am I in? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it do to my focus? Can I see far out a window, or observe the patterns on the wall with my touch? I sense other people in the space, and how far or near they are to me. A multidimensional attention brings both an internal and external sense of time and space.
This attention includes: spatial orientation, boundaries, architecture, sound, light, temperature and energy.
Focus on the Particular
The narrowing and selection of particularities of movement for com- positional development is an ongoing refining process. It is an exploration of dimensions and scale, edges and range, and depth and scope through various dynamics. A particular choice can lead to various kinds of development, e.g., an exploration of repetition, phrasing, or assembling patterns. It might involve attending to beginnings and endings of phrase material, exploring narratives and images, or referencing previously articulated gestures or movements. Focusing on the particular helps one be specific and selective in the development of one’s movement vocabulary and way of structuring movement patterns.
