The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making, by Andrea Olsen with Caryn McHose, Wesleyan U. Press 2014
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Writing Dancing
By Andrea Olsen, MFA University of Utah 1972
When dancing, I love mixing things up: words and movement, science and art, you and I.
I write to learn, I move to know.
When finishing a book, I make a dance to see if what I said was true.
To accompany The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making, I began a two-year research and performance project called Dancing in Wild Places: Seaweed and Ocean Health. It brought me to seven seaweed sites internationally, in Europe, Iceland, Canada, and the United States. It’s essential to have capacious projects that draw me into the world; humans don’t create movement, we participate in a moving universe. Body is earth: our bones, blood, and breath are the minerals, water and air inside us, not separate but same.
Writing is a daily endeavor, just like dancing. It takes me ten years to complete a book. There’s the book I first imagine, the one that I write, and the edited and designed version that has its own life in the world—in someone’s hands, on someone’s shelf. Books travel to places you can’t go yourself—there’s a larger reach than performing. I’ve received emails from dancing colleagues in Russia, South Africa, Ecuador. And there’s a process of letting go after writing. This year I’ve burned four decades of writing journals—they were tucked in every corner and closet. How to make space for the new?
I began writing seriously at the University of Utah in 1970, mentored by Dr. John M. Wilson. His doctoral thesis inspired by Margaret H’Doubler at the U. of Wisconsin was a model for how one might articulate and evoke the complexities and profundities of movement in written word and diagrams. In 1978 I wrote twenty-one chapters of a manuscript called Dance Choreography: Notes of A Student while working with Dr. Wilson at the U. of Arizona with our young repertory company, Dance Gallery. The impulse was to write while I was still inspired from graduate school and inexperienced enough to capture the process of discovery; I thought I had a lot to say. I still have the typewritten (mimeographed) copy. Then I got to chapter twenty-two, “Movement,” and realized I had nothing to say. How do we source movement?
That’s when I left teaching at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, turning over a tenure track position to return to professional dancing and dance making at Thornes Market in Northampton, MA. The next two decades were a process of deepening my somatic investigation. Performing was accompanied by collaborating with three colleagues who were developing their work in the Northampton area: Janet Adler in the discipline of Authentic Movement, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and the School for Body-Mind Centering, and Nancy Stark Smith with contact improvisation and her inquiries as co-editor of Contact Quarterly. (See “An Unintentional Convergence,” Currents, Winter 2015.)
The journey resulted in two other books: Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy (focusing on the intelligence of the body) and Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide (detailing the interconnectedness of body systems and earth systems). Finally The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making returned me full circle. I found the original manuscript (from l978) in my desk drawer at Middlebury College when I was moving out of my office for sabbatical. I didn’t look at it during the writing process, but many of the themes and “insights” were identical.
There’s humility in writing. You think you’re doing one thing, and there’s an undercurrent that’s moving you along at an unconscious level. That river has been in me since childhood. I remember standing at my childhood desk at age six, before entering first grade, and promising myself I’d write a book some day and not forget everything I knew by starting school.
I’ve always believed in dance. It’s a natural expression of being human, like eating and walking. Both parents were artists, and we lived on a farm in central Illinois. I thought everyone grew their own food and made things. In some ways, I danced so I could know what I thought without anyone criticizing me or shutting down my voice. When my father, a watercolor painter, died and we emptied his desk, we found a paper he’d written in high school detailing his father’s desertion of their family when he was sixteen. The paper had a large red F at the top, and was marked throughout with red lines and circles noting punctuation and spelling errors. He had saved it all those years. And his paintings said what words could not. Even though he was a “realistic” watercolorist, a plein air painter, there was an element of mystery in each work. You can look at his paintings year after year; each one leads you into a place in your own imagination. That’s my goal with both dancing and writing—inspiring the memories and creative imagination of others.
Photo by Scotty Hardwig
Some say that artistic work is egotistical, selfish, and without purpose. I’ve faced these comments during environmental projects, and at college-wide faculty meetings, and we see them acted out in cutting the arts from schools. One summer we had six interns on a significant conservation project in Maine. I’d secured various grant funding for all of them for a ten-week span, with the idea that they would spend half their time each day focused on biological inventories and half the day creating art work about their experience with the project. It was easier to justify the hours spent collecting dragonflies, tree core sampling, and counting loons than those spent in the studio facing an empty canvas, standing with a camera waiting for the perfect light, or hoping for an inspired word.
The board of directors complained that the interns should punch time cards daily, because they were just sitting around—not working hard enough. BUT, the photographs were used on all the full-color brochures and published in significant wildlife magazines, the creative writing underpinned the project’s loon report that received millions of dollars in funding, and the paintings helped local residents see their landscape from an aesthetic perspective—not just logging. And the dances brought audiences to conservation events that they would not normally attend, making statistics palatable. What’s most useful? How do science and art collaborate to inspire?
Words are tricky. When helping to edit two “Place” issues for Contact Quarterly, I was coached in writing from the body rather than about the body. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen describes the process as creating a new language. In the to do sections of my books, I invite participation. The words aren’t commands, they are invocations. Writing for the web is a new experience. Space. Brevity. And so much less crediting of sources. Everyone’s an authority.
This summer I’m completing a new web-based film project to accompany The Place of Dance, with filmmaker Scotty Hardwig and colleague Caryn McHose. You’ll find the seven experiential films, Somatic Excursions, at body-earth.org in September. I like the intersection of book and media, the touch and feel of each. It’s a new way to explore the body’s involvement in the process of creating and the act of receiving.
Uncertainty is fundamental. If you aren’t open to being changed by making a work, why begin? If I already know what I’m going to find when I start a project, there’s no creative edge. My goal is to enter the mystery, to cultivate the gap between knowing and not knowing—the ecotone of uncertainty that allows untold stories to emerge.
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Andrea Olsen is Professor of Dance at Middlebury College, teaching courses for Middlebury programs in both Vermont and Monterey, California. She is the author of a triad of books: The Place of Dance, Body and Earth, and Bodystories in collaboration with Caryn McHose. Andrea performs and teaches internationally and offers annual Body and Earth Training Programs in the US and abroad. She is currently engaged in a two-year performance project: Dancing in Wild Places, Seaweed and Ocean Health. http://andrea-olsen.com
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