performing is not about what you do —
— it’s how you do it.
creating captivating and engaging performance starts with learning how to be authentically present in your own body.
giving yourself the space to explore your body’s unique desire for expression will not only expand your comfort level with performance — it will draw the audience deeper in to your internal experience.
the audience wants to escape with you — invite them in to the soft, or the weird, the obscene, or the melancholy by exploring ways to embody those characteristics with movement.
own it
Movement improvisation can be hard and scary — both physically and mentally! Over the years I’ve collected many tools for approaching this kind of work in a meaningful and useful way. I use a variety of exercises with manageable parameters to encourage exploration, without leaving the improvisation part too open ended.
This work tends to explore ideas of shape, tempo, momentum, stillness, eye/head position, movement initiation, breath, level changes, and texture to help students find the type of movement quality they are seeking.
The juxtaposition of qualities like expansion vs contraction, moving fast vs slow, creating sharp lines vs broken, dynamicism vs stillness, and long vs short sentence phrases are qualities I often discuss during creative movement lessons. These are also great qualities and questions to explore during the choreographic or act creation process.
As students get more comfortable with moving outside the construct of “tricks,” I provide more open-structured exercises to help them discover the movement voice that is most authentic to themselves. This is truly one of the most inspiring subjects I teach, and I adore helping students discover broader and deeper ways of creative expression with their aerial art.