Lindsay Hopkins – Week 3 – born from the now
Jun 26, 2023
We began this past week by inviting Zurich-based dancer Angela Stöcklin into our work for two days with scores and prompts for movement and music making. We had our 3rd and final performance for the month on Thursday night, 22 June. The evening ended with a walk up the mountain towards the end of a thunderstorm because we didn’t make it back in time for the last bus back up to Sasso. We reflected on the many things artists are willing to do in order to make work, which for us includes a 25 minute hike uphill in the rain, carrying and caring for instruments and equipment. Thankfully Mother Nature was with us and the rain subsided as we hiked. On Sunday we filmed a handful of pieces around Casa Sasso, which we’re excited to turn into a series of short movement and sound films (images of this scattered around this blog post).
Why improv?
To orient towards these blog posts alongside our work, we’ve been asking: Why Improvisation? Why create art with (essentially / or seemingly) no plan? It’s risky…. and it asks a lot from the audience to trust us to create meaningful compositions.
For helpful reference here is a definition of improvisation: something that is improvised, in particular a piece of music, drama, etc. is created spontaneously or without preparation.
As Keefe wrote: “Improvisation is nothing new of course. As a method it has existed since the beginning of art, maybe even since the beginning of the universe.” At its root everything is in some way an improvisation.
Improvisation is born from the NOW. It happens only in the present and is not meant to be pre-planned OR re-created. If you’re an artist with an improvisational practice you’re always (inherently) asking: is it possible to create interesting and watchable compositions in the moment with no script or musical score?
In improvisation we go into the seemingly impossible liminal space of deep listening within each other’s energy fields and create moments by listening to our own and each other’s instincts and aesthetic interests. In the work that I do I believe that the body is the best tool to lead us to a kind of listening that happens from the energetic field—which leads us out into our awareness of space, which leads us to each other and ultimately to the power of the production of sound, gesture, voice and movement. We’re always listening to energy even if we don’t cognitively know that we are. Our energy fields reach others and the material reality around us. Creating from this field is a practice to which I apprentice, and an approach I brought into our time at Sasso.
This kind of approach is truly a practice in being present and finding trust. Alongside what Keefe mentioned in our last post, I see how our culture, our training, the instruments, held stories in the body, and habits all can apply limitations to the creative process of improvising and can make trusting the embodiment of our instincts difficult. Breaking ‘free’ of all these things requires time and exploration. It asks for slowness and subtlety and is not something learned over night.
As I also come from a healing background and work with artists (and all kinds of people!) with trauma healing I know how trapped emotion and the energy from chronic stress and held memory of overwhelming life experiences can shut us off from a deeper wisdom and presence we all hold within. In my own journey, setting free a deeper well of creativity trapped within me was my biggest motivator to heal from trauma and chronic stress.
Even with trauma symptoms I could still access parts of my creativity, but I knew there was more wanting to move through me and into my work but couldn’t. It couldn’t find a channel to move through because contracted energy held in the body kept me trapped in my tissue. I didn’t have the capacity to express all my intuitive artistic instincts. One tool that has helped me to unlock the body and find more range of motion and movement has been breathwork, which has been part of our rehearsal process here. Many creative ideas have come out of my breathwork practice, it allows one to tune in to deeper energetic currents. During one particular breathwork session while here, I began to tune into the whole house and imagine movement and sound emerging in different corners of the house. Out of this came the idea to film a series of scores as we let the space inform our creative choices by tuning in and listening to the house.
