Dancers Maggie Bennett and Deborah Black, photo by Karl Cronin

I am an artist who creates movement art based on encounters with different environments. While expressive and poetic, my movement practice is driven in large part by functionality. I find myself digging into movement practices and traditions, hoping to find and apply useful tools for exploring how we relate to particular environments. I recently found one such tool – a net. 

Over the past year, I have been developing a series of rituals that can be used as kinetic anchors for specific sensory experiences. These simple movement phrases are a net in which the richly complex experience of being in a particular environment can get “caught”. The experience of existing in that space can stick to these phrases precisely because they are simple, which means the movement patterns themselves place minimal cognitive demands on the dancer. Nearly all attention can thus be paid to the messy, layered, nuanced experience of being, which can rest upon the crude architecture of the movement.

To explain the mechanisms for HOW my sensory experiences are mapped onto these movement patterns would require a more extensive motor memory and perception literature review than I currently have done (although I am compiling a reference list for this topic). However, having performed these rituals in and out of context several times now, I am encouraged to continue developing this practice as a means for informing the creation of environment-sourced movement art.