Today San Diego-based artist Jess Humphrey shares about her studio practice. Please also check out Jess's artist profile on the blog from 2017 here.
What’s your studio practice?
I aim for an average of three studio sessions a week. One is LIVE practice, a time-based, ensemble improvisation session that’s been my standing Thursday morning commitment since 2008. The other two are usually connected to whatever I’m working on with Eric Geiger, and often, Leslie Seiters. If I count teaching and studying, it’s more like six to eight sessions.
Is your studio practice intertwined with an actual production on the books?
LIVE was initiated by folks who wanted a space to practice dancing without a direct or explicit connection to a specific project or production on the books. It’s still that way, and it’s a great thing.
When I’m working on a piece, there is typically a premiere on the books. Sometimes there are work-in-progress showings of varying degrees of formality.
When do you have time for noodling around, improvising, and playing without product? Is this with other dancers, or mainly yourself?
LIVE practice. Definitely with others. Noodling and improvisation count as “products." We point to their functions often in LIVE, and I’m forever studying how the many ways they serve and sometimes actually are the “real” work.
The fine line - and intersections - between self-care and creative work, exertion and recuperation, training and art-making…
...is very fine indeed. Often my dancing happens right on that line. When I’m dancing a complex and ♾demanding section of a piece, I sometimes choose to presume that every cell in my body is served by the dance (or any one of Deborah Hay’s koan-like questions), apply a particular somatic lens (thank you BMC, LMA/Bartenieff, Feldenkrais, Alexander…), dance it as a meditation (identify with the vast, open, spaciousness in which the dance, me, my thoughts and fears, and those I’m dancing with are all arising, or let the the dance dance me instead of me dancing the dance…).
Sometimes it’s more of a throughline than a dividing one. Or a dynamic shape rather than a line. I’m thinking of the infinity symbol or lemniscate that Peggy Hackney uses to house the polarities in the Integrated Movement Studies Program (Laban/Bartenieff Certification) and in Making Connections, her book on Bartenieff Fundamentals. Colleen Wahl calls them “organizing themes” in her new book, Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies: Contemporary Applications (I love both the book and the author...she and I were part of the same IMS cohort.) Hackney puts a polarity in each side of the symbol, signifying what she calls a “lively interplay” between them. And since typing the lemniscate kinda kills it (exertion ♾recuperation) and doesn’t really capture the symbol’s power to expand binaries into continua, I now use something I learned in Nina Martin’s dissertation, Emergent choreography: Spontaneous ensemble dance composition in improvised performance. She writes about a “continuum of deliberation” as an alternative to the traditional binary of “set” and “improvised” material within dance. This “continuum…situates more or less repeatable choreographic works on one end of [a] continuum and more or less improvisational works, without so much as a plan or score, on the other end of [a] continuum," and she uses a tilde to signify this transcending of either/or. Set~Improvised. Self-Care~Creative Work. Exertion~Recuperation. Training~Art-Making. And I’ll add Teaching~Learning because the students at SDSU are brave and trusting. They stay with me when I push them (even when I do so from my own learning edge), and I’m often flooded with gratitude after classes.
Martin wrote a piece for Contact Quarterly called, “Ensemble Thinking: Compositional Strategies for Group Improvisation” in 2007 when I was in graduate school doing my thesis on contact improvisation and creative process. In it, she wrote, “I like to think that I choreograph my improvisations and I improvise my choreography” and this quote has been a huge part of my dancemaking (and life) ever since. I also like to think that I choreograph my improvisations and I improvise my choreography. And I like to think that my self-care is a creative process and that making creative work is a form of self-care, that it’s possible for recuperation to be built into studio practice so that the exertion that dances sometimes require isn’t so draining (and that both can look like the other, depending upon what’s come before or what’s needed), and that, when I’m making art, it teaches me so much...including how to make better art.
I don’t know how often I succeed at this “lively interplay," but working in this way is central to how I set up my dancing life. Eric and I are constantly studying our states of body~mind in these different modes by making works that include dances all along the continuum of deliberation, and I’m so grateful for his and Leslie’s thoughtfulness, reflections, and devotion to keeping us all in the studio so we can keep letting the dancing work its magic.
Do you consider being in class part of your practice? Teaching as part of your practice? Basically...what falls under the category of “studio practice?"
Anything connected to my research in dancemaking that requires space for moving falls under the category of “studio practice." When Eric, Leslie Seiters, and I were making pause, with Deborah Hay, we practiced the piece in the studio together once or twice a week between intensives with her. She wanted us to practice every day, so we started a text chain and whenever one of us began our daily practice, we wrote, “going in” just before we started. This went on for some years, and one of us will still “go in” occasionally.
I think that most of the studio classes I teach count as studio practices, but only if they are directly informed by studio practices where teaching is not the focus. Devotion to studio time outside of teaching is essential for me...without it, my teaching is less alive. I am less alive.
When I’m a student in a studio class, I definitely count that as studio time. I’m so teacher-ly...it comes naturally to me, so it balances my soma when I practice the surrender that’s possible when studying with others. Right now, I’m working on finding that sense of surrender while I’m teaching, while still tracking the dynamics in the room.
And, does the topic of studio space play into this? Do you have regular access to a space (free or for a fee)?
I’m incredibly lucky and grateful to have regular access to the most beautiful dance studio I’ve ever been in (see photo in this post). I don’t pay a fee, but it’s definitely not free! I’m part of a very small dance department at SDSU where full-time faculty must do a ton of service since there are so few of us. It’s all worth it every time I get to dance in this room...it’s called the ENS 200 Studio Theater, but I call it the Magic Room.
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