Tag Archives: contemporary dance

What do YOU think?

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*a quick reminder to subsribe to our weekly vlog project, too

Hello folks,

idioSomatics, our free weekly contemporary dance class for professionals, is back and is now happening at the Community Education Center (3500 Lancaster Avenue) in West Philly.  Fridays from 10am to noon!!!  This time around, we are trying something a little different.  Every three or four weeks, we begin a new session in which the focus will be more specific than it has been in the past.  For example, we might have idioSomatics: Light as a Feather in which, for three weeks, we focus on movement and performance qualities that have a weightless, fleeting nature.  Or, we might have idioSomatics: Break That Back for four weeks in which we focus on bombastic, isolated movement qualities that that draw relationships to club culture.  You can keep track of the series by adding idioSomatics into your Google Calendar (click here).

For the next three weeks, Shannon Murphy is teaching idioSomatics and we are testing our a new name: idioSomatics: POST-JAZZ

Our question to you – What do you think you would find in a POST-JAZZ class?


Our Swarthmore Project

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Since October 2011, idiosynCrazy productions has been involved in a partnership with Swarthmore College’s dance program, sponsored in part by a grant from the NEA Arts in Education program.  Four idiosynCrazy performers are involved as mentors of nine Swarthmore dance students.  The Swarthmore dance students, in turn, are mentors to several middle school students from the Chester Children’s Chorus.  This week, Shavon Norris shares some feelings about being involved with the project as a supervisor – negotiating communications among the several sets of bodies involved.

 

Swarthmore Project
– Shavon Norris

 

idiosynCrazy productions
a company of three heads and many bodies
a company of art, relationships and somatics

the me in the 3
to mind and mine the relationships
to remember that we are parts of small and large communities
the me in the 3
to remind that we want to see others while we are being seen

the Swarthmore Project
4 idiosynCrazy members, 9 Swarthmore students, middle school girls, John Cage and me
a collaboration
me the organizer
idiosynCrazies the mentors
Swarthmore students the mentees
John Cage the score

a collision of minds, aesthetics, bodies, wills
a building of movement, language, knowledge, relationships
juggling responsibilities, work, time and priorities

a collaboration
of playing with ideas and concepts
a collaboration
of challenging comfort and exploring new
a collaboration
of how to make a dance

in rehearsals there is laughter
there is frustration, adjustments, sweat and care
there is pushing and pulling
there is try it again
there is smashing of movement, adding, subtracting and connecting
there is individual and collective anxiety
there is mentorship and ownership
there is peeking into the life of professionals and remembering the needs of the student
there is teacher as student and student as teacher
in rehearsals there is reciprocity and seeing

in April there will be a dance
a sharing of what the rehearsals made
a sharing of the smashing, laughter and learning

in April we will know how to do this again in September


Founding idiosynCrazy

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Founding idiosynCrazy

-Jumatatu Poe

idiosynCrazy productions’ Artistic Director, Jumatatu Poe, reflects on some of the impulses that drove him to found idiosynCrazy productions, and what keeps it feeling relevant for him. Take a look at some of the ideas at work, behind-the-scenes.

*also, check out our One-Year Vlog Project

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I am incredibly inspired and driven forward by an amazing workshop experience I had in New York during Winter MELT at Movement Research.  The late afternoon workshops were led by dance artist Trajal Harrell, and were centered around choreographic and compositional choices, and what the social/political/economic inspirations for and impacts of these choices can be.  In my estimations, we addressed being clear about the audiences for whom we were making work.  We talked about the daunting challenge of addressing complicated ideas/themes/images/constructs/concepts within a work, and the (necessary) distance between (artist) intention and (audience) interpretation.  We talked about being clear, for ourselves, and making choices about how clear we wanted to be perceived by others.  Lately, as I question the choreographic work that I make and the (necessary) stakes of making that work for distribution within the world, these things were exactly where I needed to guide my thoughts.  Thank you, to Trajal and other participants of the class, for facilitating this direction!

***

After the workshop, I consumed myself with ideas: about my choreographic work, about idiosynCrazy productions, about the way that I represent my body and allow/invite bodies to be represented.  About a lot of things.  But, what I am most drawn to today is the idea of idiosynCrazy productions – the idea of it today, my original ideas of it, and our (the company’s) ideas about what it could/will be… and what will be the impact for/on us.

When I left grad school and entered, more steadily, into Philly’s professional dance world, I knew that I wanted to make work: I wanted to be a choreographer/director of dance work.  And my desires were somewhat specific… I wanted to have a place to be able to explore really athletic (sometimes), pop-culture-and-urban-lifestyle-influenced (whatever that means), part narrative-abstract-experiential, messy (because, look at this city… it’s unavoidable), modular (being able to be performed in a vast variety of locations, in interaction with different folks) dance work.  I wanted to develop processes that would incorporate discussion of contemporary social phenomena.  I wanted an environment supportive of folks from all backgrounds interested in partaking in this contemporary, experimental dance world (frequently stigmatized as a world exclusively dedicated to White cultural expression).  And I felt like there were folks around me who wanted to do that, too, and that I really wanted to work with.

Having a company namesake was not, and still is not, my interest.  However, it seemed convenient to have some organizational body designed to produce the type of work that, then and now, I need to be making, whether I am directing it or not.  So, I founded idiosynCrazy productions…  Heh, that ellipsis seems appropriate.  Hesitation about the unknown was a significant part of my first interactions with the idea of idiosynCrazy productions.  When I graduated from college, I was one of the founding members of Green Chair Dance Company, a collaborative dance company also based in Philadelphia.  From then, I knew that the collaborative dance-making process (with multiple directors) was not for me.  Not at that time.  Since my last year in college, I had been dancing in Kariamu Welsh’s company (Kariamu & Company: Traditions), and felt fairly certain that the company-namesake model was also not up my alley.  But, I did want to choreograph.  And I also wanted to dance in works directed by others, who had interests in a similar world of ideas as mine.

With idiosynCrazy productions, I always knew that I wanted to have multiple directors of the company.  Growing up with parents who identified (especially in my youth) as socialist and Pan-Africanist, communal decision-making is a part of my developmental-DNA.  I also knew very early that I wanted to build this company with Shannon and Shavon; I have immense respect for both of them as artists and as visionaries.  Right now, the only choreographic work that idiosynCrazy productions has made was directed by either me or Shannon Murphy.  We have discussed soon having other directorial voices enter into the mix, and I am excited about this.  The traditional idea of the “dance company” is becoming largely outdated (especially in the contemporary, experimental dance field), but I am driven to keep working toward the future of idiosynCrazy productions – a future that faces today’s national economy realistically… AND revolutionarily.  There is a place for this work, particularly in conversation with Philadelphia’s communities, and I am excited to help make more of it happen.

***

When I was 17, it occurred to me that I would always, with each new year, look back upon my past ages, tickled, while murmuring, “Wow, I really didn’t know much back then.”  It doesn’t serve me to presume that what I know right now is “much.”  Or that what I know ten years from now will be.  I am looking forward to a time when my current artistic interests and desires are laid to rest, or mutated enough that their resemblance to the past seems coincidental.  The works that I make now with idiosynCrazy productions will one day be less relevant for me, in my future present-tense.  And, if I am paying attention to myself, I feel like this is the only way (I say that now, so authoritatively… while not knowing much).  For right now, though, I am happy to be making work within idiosynCrazy productions.  The work feels like something that I need to be figuring out – and I still have so many questions about it.  Thank you, idiosynCrazy productions, for providing me the space to explore these things that feel so relevant.