modern dance monday with kt niehoff

Lingo Productions 
     The project of KT Niehoff.  It is the container for her creative works in all forms: performance, commissions, writing, film, teaching and research.  Lingo expands and contracts in numbers depending on the demands of the work, yet is centered around a reoccurring cast of characters who have been instrumental in the creation of Lingo's vision.
     In the last three years (2009-present), these bravehearts, lunatics, magicians, actors and yes, dancers, include: Bianca Cabrera, Shaun Kardinal, Aiko Kinoshita, Jody Kuehner, Ricki Mason, Michael Rioux, Kelly Sullivan, Ivory Smith, Aaron Swartzman, Evan Ritter, Scott Colburn, Markeith Wiley, Ben Delacreme, Joanne Whitzkowski, Alex Martin and others.
     Lingo Productions has been presented internationally in Canada (Dancing on the Edge Festival, Vancouver BC), Japan (Alti Buyoh festival, Kyoto / Tori Hall, Osaka), Ecuador (Alas de la Danza, Quito - with support from Arts International), Germany (as one of four companies chosen to represent the U.S. at the 2004 Tanzmesse, Düsseldorf) and Cuba (Cuidad en Movimento, Havana). Nationally, the company has been presented by venues including On the Boards, Seattle, The Joyce SoHo, NYC, SUSHI, San Diego, Alverno Presents, Milwaukee, Jacob's Pillow Inside/Out Festival, The Southern Theater, Minneapolis (through an NEA funded touring initiative Niehoff created called SCUBA), The Oregon Britt Festival and Vanderbilt University, Nashville, as well as many colleges and universities throughout the U.S.
      Lingo's artistic integrity has been recognized by such institutions as The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Dance Project, The National Performance Network, Meet the Composer, Seattle, Washington and King County Arts Commissions, Arts International, The Bossak/Heilbron Foundation and the Jack Straw Foundation.

     Just as I found this womyn.. there was a moment of clarity in the future for her work.
    

     The finale of Lingo Productions has happened, April 2013.  A step that Niehoff says has been a long time coming, this entails “the simple act of disbanding the company itself.  And all that goes along with the assumption, and the responsibility that a company model requires.”  In no way, however, is this a finale for Niehoff’s art-making ambitions.  Almost running parallel to her theories on movement, it seems that Niehoff’s thoughts on art are experiencing an “unhinging,” and a delving further into a new branch of creativity.  Collision Theory and her other works on a variety of platforms have given Niehoff a new kind of fulfillment, and she plans to continue experimenting even further in that direction.  “My sensibility, or my ideas of what an active art is, has really started to change and shift over the last six years, and its gotten pretty abstract,” she says.

     Niehoff’s presence as a dance maker and teacher in the community will be mutually missed. “I love the dance community here so much.” she says. “But I want to develop a new relationship with the art world and also the dance world here. I want to mentor and be present and somehow be in it, but I need to do it in a different way now.” If anyone is capable of doing things a different way, surely Niehoff is.
excerpt written by Mariko Nagashima for Seattle Dances

modern dance monday with niddy impekoven

excerpt taken from Empire of Ecstasy

     Probably no other dancer of the era more strongly evoked an aura of feminine innocence and geniality than Niddy Impekoven, yet she spent much of her career struggling against efforts to mold her body according to an image that conflicted with her desires.  She was born in Berlin in 1904; her father was a prominent actor, and her family contained many members involved in one way or another with the arts.  The great moment in her education came when her father permitted her to study for six weeks at the Loheland school in summer of 1918; there she experienced a freedom and awareness of bodily expression that decisively confirmed her desire to dance. 

     In 1918, Niddy created her curious series of doll dances, which in addition to the "rococo" doll and the Munchener Kaffeewarmer included miniatures inspired by the wax or porcelain figurines created by Lotte Pritzel, Erna Pinner, and Kathe Kruse.  The Erna Pinner doll dance appeared in the film Wege zu Kraft und Schonheit (1925), with Niddy wearing a delightful polka dot clown costume with black stockings and gloves.  She slumbered in an armchair until the twitching of her sleep and dreams propelled her into whirling, jerky, puppetlike movements that quickly exhausted her and caused her to fling herself back into slumber on the chair.

     Her father, however, felt the Loheland approach lacked rigor, so she took some lessons from perhaps the most prominent ballet master in Germany, Heinrich Kroller, who appreciated the uniqueness of her talent.  From then until 1923 she created a new program of dances every year, and these made her an object of enormous adulation throughout Germany.  Her exquisite, nubile embodiment of fairytale feminine innocence often provoked dark, possessive impulses in her male worshippers, and she became eerily conscious of the power of her seemingly harmless art to produce pathological consequences—or rather, to reveal secret conditions of illness, remoteness from innocence, in others.

     Most curious in this respect was a book about her, Briefe an eine Tanzerin (1922), written by Fred Hildenbrandt, feuilleton editor for the Berliner Tageblatt.  The dances of Niddy Impekoven awakened in Hildenbrandt a rapturous, unbridled, incoherent, even fanatical language of glorification:

She dances the breath of rapid-breathing anticipation, the play of a thousand things gleaming in the daylight, she dances the storm of tenderness, the weariness of all meanings, the blessed languor of the heart, she dances the sun, which creeps through the morning window, and she dances the early footsteps on the street which press in on her in her sleep.  So she spreads in her arms, her hands, her lips and eyes the shimmering mosaic of love and no one is there who can destroy it with naked eyes.  Her body is the chosen instrument of dance, the chosen instrument of love.

     In 1926, John Schikowski observed that, despite their evolution toward an 'adult' phase, Impekoven's dances were "still always the dances of a child" and disclosed "a world of naive feelings": "This world is small, but it is full of beauty and fairy-tale radiance.  This child gazes with large, teary, strangely shiny eyes, an aching smile on the lips.  A sick child.  Even over manic exuberance a little, melancholy cloud hovers.  Poignant the droll exaltation, the grimacing gestures.  Touching the little desires which strive toward heaven, without soaring, but rather helplessly seek their chains.  Tensions and releases of a gentle, sweet softness which appears vacuous when it does not assume a child-like style.  A perfectly polished body" 

     In 1955 she published her brief and poignant autobiography, Die Geschichte eines Wunderkinds, which examined her life only up to the age of fourteen and suggested that the image of childhood innocence pervasively defining public perception of her concealed a measure of suffering, self-sacrifice, and anxiety that one could never really transcend and that in any case hardly affirmed the innocence of her audience.   

     "My aim is constantly to distance myself from 'intellectual' dance. . . . The purest, most natural dance is for me the unreflective surrender to music"

-Niddy Impekoven

modern dance monday with velocity dance center seattle

     Since moving to Seattle, Under The Root and myself, the main course of action is to return to the modern dance, body movement, and the art of dance.  The Spring classes begin today and so this journal entry is to focus on the place of my new classes, Velocity Dance Center.  Seattle is swarming with many concepts of dance, dance cinema, dance festivals, and body movement workshops.
   
     “It’ll be cool to see what these dancers . . . accomplish in the coming year under the guidance and protection of Velocity, an organization that is less a dance company and more like a hotbed of creativity that nurtures and supports dancers as they explore performing art to sometimes extraordinary limits.”
— Melody Datz, The Stranger Slog
      “How did [Velocity] and its support of local dancers contribute to your career?
In every way possible.”
— Corrie Befort of Salt Horse, Seattle Dance Examiner
      “Again and again, Velocity proves itself as both supporter and tastemaker for dance in Seattle. . .”
— SeattleDances

      "Mayor’s Arts Award and Genius Award winner Velocity Dance Center is Seattle’s premier art center dedicated to contemporary dance and performance.  A recognized leader as an artist-driven, community-centered dance incubator, Velocity fosters the creative explorations of artists and adventurous audiences through an invested commitment to education, creation, performance, inquiry, community participation, and inter/national exchange.  Velocity fulfills an unduplicated role as the epicenter for contemporary dance in the Pacific Northwest operating three studios, a dance resource room, an online journal and the only theater in the region especially developed for dance performances.  The primary art center supporting contemporary dance in Seattle since 1996, Velocity is instrumental in making Seattle a destination city with one of the most active dance communities in the nation.  In 2012 alone, Velocity served nearly 18,000 individuals; offered 2,000+ dance classes; provided low cost space to over 450 artists; activated a growing audience of thousands of dance enthusiasts; commissioned and developed 27 new works, and introduced more than 89 works of performance, film, installation and hybrid forms into the local and national dance ecology."

     

A core mission and value to the art of our bodies.  From hosting Next Fest NW to daily classes, workshops to performance venues and speakeasy.  There is a universe open enough to share.

Green Chair Dance Group image Adam Sekuler

Fire and Ice image Michelle Smith-Lewis

The Pendleton House image Tim Summers

Alana O Rogers image Tim Summers

Paige Barnes image Laurent Ziegler

modern dance monday with feldenkrais

The slow, gentle, and graceful movements comprise the Feldenkrais Method.  Moshe Feldenkrais’ ties to dance date back to the 1940s in Israel when modern dancer and movement notator Noah Eshkol took an interest in his work.  Eshkol recorded Feldenkrais’ innovative Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons using Eshkol Wachman notation.  You can read more on his full biography here.

Awareness Through Movement is a component of the Feldenkrais Method, which is a mode of somatic education.  During each class, students engage in structured movement explorations that involve thinking, sensing, moving, and imagining.  Many lessons are based on developmental movements and ordinary functional activities.  Some are based on more abstract explorations of joint, muscle, and postural relationships.  The lessons consist of comfortable, easy movements that gradually evolve into movements of greater range and complexity.  Lessons attempt to make one aware of one's habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities and to expand options for new ways of moving.

“What I’m after isn’t flexible bodies, but flexible brains.  What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity. ”

“I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality.  They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning.  A brain without a body could not think.”

“Find your true weakness and surrender to it.  Therein lies the path to genius.  Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses.  Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare.  In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation. ”


“The aim [of the Feldenkrais Method] is a person that is organized to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength, but through increased consciousness of how movement works.”

“No matter how closely we look, it is difficult to find a mental act that can take place without the support of some physical function."

“Movement is life.  Life is a process.  Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.”
 
-Moshe Feldenkrais

modern dance monday with sidi larbi cherkaoui

Valtari

Valtari

Apocrifu

Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in Zero Degrees

Rein

Rein

The found images above are a tiny selection from various works of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.  After delving into the facts circling a background of this Moroccan Flemish choreographer, there appears to be no stopping this incredibly endearing hearth of body movement.  The production site is swarming with magik unleashed on our universe in performance.  

Faun

Puz/zle

Puz/zle

An informative biography from the debut of his choreography and works throughout the continuing years, plus some media interviews, they all offer a peek into the person behind the work.  The work is extraordinary, bodies as liquid and seamless as our dreamworlds.  He has connected the invisible cord between cultures with performance, shined a moon on gender integrity, and sweeping the cobwebs out of our past.. all for the sake of evolution into our next steps.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Kazutomi Kozuki

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui by Koenbroos

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui by Damian Siqueiros

modern dance monday with zoe/juniper

A Crack in Everything

photo Yi Chun Wu

A Crack in Everything

A Crack in Everything

zoe/juniper is a duo team of Juniper Shuey and Zoe Scofield.  My sights have been on their work.  Their resonance into our performance atmosphere is electric.  I have posted what they say about the collaboration:
"Our company is driven by the idea of mythologizing the experience of our senses; creating performances and visual art that challenge the viewer's perception of time and perspective as well as allowing our work's intention to be spacious enough for empathetic experiences to emerge.  Our work realizes and exists in the state of liminality- the sense of being 'in-between'.  By working across different disciplines, we filter our sensual experiences into the mediums that best embodies a facet of the myth our overall concept is based on.  Our current project A Crack in Everything (ACIE) is a meditation on the moments that divide people's lives into before and after.  This project spans dance performance, photography and sculptural video and performance installation.  Within these, we are designing experiences that all maintain the idea of liminality; the thresholds of conscious/unconscious, action/reaction, before/after and cause/effect.  While this idea of mythologizing serves as the trajectory of our work, our concerns are with relaying non-linear "story-ness", originating and distilling significance from rigorous physicality, calibrating the dialogue between the mediums in which we work and literally creating tangible artifacts from the performance within the installation and calcified memories within the photography."

Dance must be seen for words are merely an alphabet for our eyes.  I encourage you to keep your ears to the ground for this march of the hares.  They recently had a residency with On The Boards which landed BeginAgain.

Juniper Shuey and Zoe Scofield

Zoe Scofield

BeginAgain

BeginAgain