a container for making connections

I’m on the plane back home. Yesterday when the last workshop of the week ended, I realized how lucky I had been once again. Each workshop closed with a bang and interestingly complemented the others as if a dialogue had been going on all through the week and through all the workshops.

To begin with I was aware of the differences between each workshop much more than any similarities. And yet at the end of the week all three had touched upon each other and on some important themes of dance-living and dance-making. One of these themes is how dances are framed to be shared as communicative compositions with an audience. How to build a container for the creative process and how that process can produce a perhaps different container for the finished work.

In the embryonic approach of Body Mind Centering which RoseAnne Spradlin taught, we looked at the very early stages of development of the fertilized egg. Inside the raspberry-like egg, a tiny streak forms that hangs like a hammock horizontally from one side to the other. This streak is the beginning of the formation of the body. The rest, large in comparison, is the container, the house the body needs in order to grow and become.

RoseAnne offered this image with its surprising size ratio between the budding body and its supportive environment as a metaphor for what it takes to make a dance. Before the creative process gets started, a container is crucial for that process’ healthy development. Collaborators, financial support, rehearsal and presenting spaces, structured and scheduled times, institutions and other relationships often make up that container. But just as often we don’t realize how important the container is, or alternatively resent its existence as something extraneous to our creative endeavor. Looking at our embryonic beginnings turned those assumptions around. And that was a heartening, down-to-earth moment in an otherwise deliciously open-ended, exploratory examination of our beginnings.