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Listening to your listening - exploring the musicality of movements and dancing musical gestures

Pol Pi

Comments

I was surrounded by music long before I engaged with dance as a privileged language for connection. Between the ages of 6 and 31, I learned from practicing the flute recorder, solfeggio, rhythmics, harmony, choir singing, violin, viola, rabeca and Brazilian guitar, I learned from opera, baroque, classical, romantic and contemporary music, from Brazilian folk and traditional music too. And yet, it was only when I encountered physical theater, butoh and later so-called contemporary dance that everything really made sense. As a sort of revelation, one day I had the feeling that I could make better music with my movements than with my instruments. Over the years, I've learned that my relationship with movement is above all a musical one: what moves me is a taste for a playful relationship with time that is always being reinvented. How can we listen to and compose with the intensities, speeds, articulations, suspensions and rhythms that inhabit our movements? I'd like to continue to explore this question with the students, sharing tools and practices that have accompanied me for a long time or that we will invent together. I wish to explore possible translations for musical notions such as rhythm, tempo, nuance, timbre, articulation and ornament through individual and group movement research, but also invest the idea of listening as a practice of connecting to intuition. I have been working with non-ordinary states of consciousness for some years, a practice called Self-induced Cognitive Trance that could also be described as learning to listen to intuition. I don’t distinguish working with listening to our musicality from intuitive listening, they are for me both part of an ethics of always working from and with what is already there. Thus, both approaches to the act of listening will be intertwined during the semester. This shared research is an invitation to listen to what irresistibly calls us to movement – to learn collectively to give space and visibility to the musicality that is already in us, in our personal ways of engaging with movement, and to nurture and unfold them further. close