Creative Practice forum

What is technique?

This week I will participate in the “Performance as Research” working group at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference in Puerto Rico. The paper I have been developing for this working group turns on the notion of TECHNIQUE, which I now realize is probably going to be central to my dissertation as well. So my big theoretical project right now is the development of these twin concepts: technique and practice, practice and technique.

I define practice as anything that people do in repetition. (This is just my current working definition, of course – neither commonly accepted nor even fully satisfactory to me.) I would also add that “embodied” practice implies repetition through the body. Technique, for me, is the thing that is repeated.

I am trying to get away from the notion of brand-name “Techniques” (with a capital T): Stanislavski technique, Meisner technique, Viewpoints, Contact Improvisation, Aikido… It’s not that I don’t believe these things exist in a meaningful way – they obviously do, some more than others. But I don’t want to call them techniques (or, even worse, methods) because that suggests to me that they are static and codified, when in fact they are constantly changing both in passing from one person to another and also within the practice of an individual.

What is really clear for me is the idea of a single element of technique – sort of like an “atom” of technique. Read more

The ‘How’, the ‘Why’ and the ‘Actual’ Potential of Language

For a long time, the gap between my living experience as a performer and my ability to fully and accurately articulate the elements of performance has bothered me. Subsequent to my last post, a very interesting dialogue occurred between noform and myself, and it got me thinking (again) about how to better articulate my own set of ideas. Particularly I felt challenged (and I mean that in the most useful sense of the word) by noform’s prioritization of what he called ‘the actual’. This prioritization challenges me because the line between what is ‘actual’ in performance does not always equate with what is ‘articulable’. In this post I will not take the space to address the precise location of that threshold in my own experience, but I will try to lay the groundwork for such an act of triangulation in the future.

Collective Arts Think Tank

I have sometimes been heard to complain that the artistic production culture in New York City is excessively product-oriented, to the extreme detriment of the quality of this work. I now realize that an element of this issue, which I’ve never consciously thought of before, has been the lack of a strong, principled stand on the part of producing venues in the city.

During my time in Poland, I became familiar with the activities of the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, which over the past decade has become a truly impressive and unique site for the cultivation of working processes and public performances. And I have sorely missed the presence of any such place in New York City.

But perhaps that is going to change – or perhaps it has already changed without my noticing. In any case, a collective including representatives from several key performance venues and administrative organizations recently put for a “First Letter to the Field: What’s working, what’s not working, recommendations.” It speaks to artists and funders with a specific focus on how to shift the emphasis in our field away from quantity and towards quality.

Everyone, please read this. It gives me so much hope.

The Cut and the Flow

Two rhythms.

The first is unbroken, like a river.
I know this as the rhythm of musicality – of song.
The river of song.

It is not less precise, but its precision is less conscious.
“I” do not control it.
“I” surrender to it.
Let it guide me.
I do not know what will happen in the next moment.
It takes me and pulls me along, like a river.
I cannot control it. I cannot really even craft it.
How can I call it art?
It is the rhythm of play.

Five Pillars: A Vision of Ideal Practice

Occurring daily, it begins in stillness and silence, the body seated on a smooth, steady ground. Only breathing, and that, fully, one with the blood that circulates within oneself, the doer’s mind at rest, intent only on the experience to breathe – The Breath, the first pillar of practice. Each breath in, each breath out, breathed with the quality of water, flowing into the body and back out again without effort or obstruction, its pacing and its rhythm a reflection of the tide within oneself. Read more

on practice

Practice

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what practice means- the act of revisiting/ deepening/ working inward. Implicitly that there is something to be honed/ kept in shape/ kept alive and fertile. The practice of a performer without a school or performance attached has always left me feeling ill-equipped. I have often wondered how we can create a sustainable practice for itself- for the work- without these conventional containers. I have come to the realization that for me, presently, practice relies on an individual journey held by or within a collective or community. Because creative acts are shared, a dialogue with the immediate space if nothing else, and if we live in cities, if we exist in the world of people and wish to, then these acts will not just be for us.

For 9 months, I have been going weekly to a two-hour slow yoga class on 6th st and Avenue C. In 2 hours we do 10 poses. The same 10 every time. It’s the closest thing I have had to a deep physical practice in years. Because there is no destination but deepening, because it is a room full of people doing the same forms yet in their own work, I am allowed to be both solitary and supported. When I walk into the room I know what the next two hours will be composed of- I come without commentary, I come with a mat and week’s worth of the city locked in my spine. Sometimes the two hours fly by, sometimes they pull like taffy- but each time, when I leave the class, I feel that I have just done something necessary. That this practice is essential and not arbitrary. Each week after class I go to a nearby busy Japanese restaurant and sit at the counter and get broiled fish with grated daikon and eat slowly and drink tea. This is the act of practice. It is repeated but never rote. It is sacred but not precious. It is the act of and not the arrival. It is from here I look towards creativity and its action, as a life in itself, as a practice.

2009: 09/25
POSTED BY: Dhira Rauch
CATEGORY: Embodied Practices
3 comments

The Studio

Studio 3 at DNA Dance (NYC)

For me, what holds it together is a certain kind of space. I call it “the studio.”

I like studios with wooden floors and big windows. I also like studios with no windows, where the floors are made of earth. Industrial studios with floors of cement. Church basements with checkered linoleum floors and pillars. Outdoor studios with floors of grass and stone.

What is the nature of studio space?

The Moreno Suicides

From The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy, by Robert J. Landy:

The most notable moment in the early discovery of psychodrama came out of Moreno’s work with the Stegreiftheater. As reported in detail, this discovery occurred as Moreno was working with one of his cast members, Barbara. Barbara most often was cast in ingénue roles. During this time, Barbara became romantically involved with George, a young playwright who attended all of Barbara’s performances. Shortly after their marriage, George approached Moreno and exclaimed that the woman he first admired in the theatrical role of sweet ingénue was, in fact, a shrew at home. George begged Moreno to help him find a way to live with the distress of his abusive wife.

Read more

Grotowski and Judson Church

I know I’m not the first person to ask about historical, technical, and ontological links between Jerzy Grotowski’s work and the postmodern dance movement in the United States. I don’t think this topic has ever been fully investigated, probably because there are very few real historical leads to go on. From a scholarly perspective, there may not be much to say except that both movements took place in relation to the zeitgeist of the 1960s and ’70s.

What interests me is not so much the historical connections between Grotowski and the Judson Church artists (if there were any) but contemporary parallels between the legacy of each. This is why I have created link and post categories on this forum for both “Legacy of Grotowski” and “Legacy of Judson Church.” The word “legacy” is a bit strange and perhaps even suspect, but it points to the influences of different projects and the ways in which they branch out over time and may become increasingly intertwined.

Starting points

The notion of creative practice can be approached from many angles. I hope that as this discussion forum grows, the concept of creative practice will be elaborated in different ways. To begin with, however, I want to pose a series of questions as “starting points” for a consideration of creative practice. These are simply the questions that preoccupy me. Some of them have to do with the content of practices themselves. Others are logistical and administrative. Still others come out of my scholarly work and may appear eventually in my dissertation and/or articles.

Many of these may later become full posts. But I hope that others will also find some of these questions provocative, and will take them up in their own ways.

ART / PRACTICE: Am I right in suggesting that “art” and “practice” are two sides of the same coin? Is it accurate to say that we are in a historical moment right now in which embodied practices have been split apart from the performing arts? Is this a rift that can be healed, or is it a necessary principle for secular democracy?
RESEARCH / EPISTEMOLOGY: What constitutes “research” in the sense of embodied rather than discursive knowledge? When is creative practice a form of research? Is it important to establish rigorous standards for this? What types of knowledge are learned through creative practice, and how is it learned? Are embodied practices “created” or “discovered”? Read more

On the art of practice and the practice of art