on teaching improvisational practice: dispatch from August 2022
By Bhumi B Patel
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.”- bell hooks
In June 2022, I taught a series of classes as part of the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center's Forms+Play teaching series that I called “Returning to the Body: A Liberatory Improvisation Class.” Each class had a provocation that shaped how the class unfolded: “Meeting Us,” “How Do We Become?” and “Disappearing Places.” We repeated some things, deepened others, experimented, but more than anything, we shared a container in which we could simply be with one another. I wanted to make an offering to share how I am working through my own practice to cultivate and nourish finding bell hooks’ concept of “homeplace” in the body as a means to be and embody my own values. hooks has written prolifically about how she defines and seeks this as both an idea and a lived reality.
This concept became central to my movement practice when I found myself looking for the humanity in the process of making movement-based art. I found my way to hooks’ concept (or maybe she found her way to me) and immediately felt something settle inside. hooks writes, homeplace “[is] the one site where one [can] freely confront the issue of humanization, where one [can] resist.” For hooks, “when we renew our concern with homeplace, we can address political issues that affect our daily lives” and each class offering for me is an opportunity to renew and refresh our concern with homeplace. Like hooks, I have drawn on Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing as a guidepost in the darkness of understanding my body and making an internal and external space in which my body can exist as a home. In “How to Love,” Thay reminds us that “if you can accept your body, then you have a chance to see your body as your home. You can rest in your body, settle in, relax, and feel joy and ease.”
My teaching draws on the many experiences I’ve had in modern dance, post-modern dance, and globally diverse forms of improvisational practice that engage with imagery, sensation, nature, land, and medicine for the body. My teaching also relies upon the idea of “regenerative refusal,” something that I only recently named having found what Maile Arvin writes about in Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania. This refusal comes in response to the ways that whiteness promotes possession and ownership, and Arvin defines it as “actions that seek to restore balance” by divesting “from racialized and gendered hierarchies” as an “ongoing reckoning with settler colonialism.” This sets the tone for regenerative refusals to generate “future-oriented acts aiming to realize a different way of being in and relating to the world.” For me, this often means a regenerative refusal of the structures of power and ownership that exist in development movement forms and existing in lineages that have histories of stealing from Black and Brown communities and then repackaging them as innovative ways of moving. I work to both name my teachers and lineages, and honor the moments when I don’t know where things originated. This also acts as a way to engage with the future possibilities of how we relate to one another, the spaces we occupy, and the world.
I begin class with curiosity. I offer the prompt for participants to share what they are calling into the space or what their intention is for the day. This feels like a meaningful way to draw in what each person hopes to reap from the class. Often, this informs how I frame practices and what I offer as guidance.
In our first class, “Meeting Us,” I set out with the intention of starting to know each of the individuals in the room. Who are they and where did they come from. I offered prompts for writing and discussing that included “tell us about your family, biological or chosen” and “tell us about the place you grew up.” In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks, she emphasizes that homeplace is where we “can regain lost perspective” and “give life new meaning.” She reminds us that “we can make homeplace that space where we return for renewal and self-recovery, where we can heal our wounds and become whole” and in this very first class, remembering where we came from can be a site from which we can heal our wounds. From this moment of writing and dialoguing with others in the class, we moved into movement practice. Our first practice went through listening, envisioning the body as home, opening our voices, tapping into small (and big) joys that we were able to find, and letting go. For this class, we ended with a joyful dance party to exit the space and close our practice.
In the next class, “How Do We Become?”, I was interested in creating a space where we could deepen those initial inquiries into home. For folks who returned to the class, we took what we had written and thought about in relationship to family and home to begin thinking about what home means to you so that we might begin to construct what we need to maintain that home within our own bodies. I was interested in offering movement space as a way to return home and embody our values, and as a way to create community. We engaged with movement practice through creating a duet practice with another person in the room whether or not they knew about it. I also offered that one might choose something in space like furniture, an object, or even the light, if they wanted an alternative to connecting person-to-person. This seed of connection planted the opportunity to see one another in our humanity as we improvised and created connection.
My framework for the final week, “Disappearing Places,” was to think and move through the following question: Can we think of home as a space that is continuously disappearing and reforming? I continued the line of inquiry in identifying where individuals found themselves drawn toward in becoming their own homeplace in the body. As a warm up movement practice, I offered an improvisation that I’ve been relishing in within my own movement journey to become bodies of bodies at many scales. I offered that we could expand and contract the water in our own bodies to become many forms. When I think of disappearing places, I often think of bodies of water, so this felt like an effective way to begin our exploration. In the act of disappearing places, I invited thinking about bodies of water, but also thinking about other spaces that have disappeared: neighborhoods, buildings, or even the felt-sense of disappearing places, like the first time you return to your childhood home and it no longer feels like home. This practice of feeling and sensing the place and allowing it to disappear from us reinforces how hooks views homplace as “fragile and transitional” but something that contributes to “a meaningful community of resistance.”
When I teach, I shift between participating in and observing movement practices by trusting my intuition to witness what the group needs. When I observe, I am better able to hold and shape the container in which we are exploring our vulnerabilities; when I actively participate, I can be inside the practice that we are creating and respond from that position. I often try to have a balance of both of these modes throughout a class as a whole so that I can show up fully as a facilitator and integrate into the space we co-create. It is imperfect and emerging, but I trust in this process.
The experience of teaching these workshops revealed to me how much spaces like this are needed. Spaces where we can develop a sense of self, guided by our own desires, and unpack how we want to show up for freedom-seeking and home-seeking. For me, there is something beautiful and life-giving about coming to movement practice from a place of our own histories and lineages, and the writing and theories of feminist of color thinkers, so that we might enact and embody ideas that might guide us toward a future in which we might all experience and support liberation.
Bhumi B Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist, choreographer, dance writer/scholar, and director of pateldanceworks (she/they). In its purest form, her performance work is a love letter to her ancestors. Patel pursues liberation through dancing, choreographing, curating, educating, and writing/scholarship. Patel aims to support marginalized and oppressed voices through performance and movement education. She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. Bhumi is currently a doctoral student at The Ohio State University. She is a member of Dancing Around Race, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications.She has presented her research at the Dance Studies Association Annual conference and the Popular Culture Association Annual conference as well as having been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and In Dance.
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