SOLO/DUO DANCING PROJECT
Solo/Duo Dancing Project is a mentoring program that focuses on creating the conditions for catching creativity. Facilitated by Bebe Miller with guests including Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones, it gathers a group of dance-makers who are invested in their ongoing explorations and have recognized the direction of their individual investigation.
We are always moving; we are always in relationship. As dancers, we engage with our environment as well as our memory, in motion. We track our interest, mining the details and contexts that emerge, and note the form we create.
Improvising and choreographing, we’ll craft sequences in time and space, noting emergent constructs, the dancing we engage with. The content comes out of my own practice, though is fully dependent on you. We’ll work between what we feel, what we intend and what is legible. We’ll practice our frames of reference, claim our choices and continue on.
—Bebe Miller
Workshop—Solo/Duo Dancing: A Choreographic Practice
May 14-15, 2022, 10am-2pm
Flux + Flow Dance & Movement Center, 200 Crestview Rd, Columbus, OH
Limited to 22 participants
Sliding scale: $200–250
At the heart of our dance-making are moment-by-moment considerations of movement, relationship and profound play. Crafting solo and duet dances calls for a particular regard for these elements.
Further your own practice under the direction of Bebe Miller and Angie Hauser, who have been collaborative dance makers for over 20 years. We’ll explore how our dancing is amplified in both solo and duet work, developing choreographic specificity through a range of compositional strategies. We’re particularly interested in the investigation of movement details and dynamics, the choreographic range of relationship, and how content speaks to context.Our working day begins with a somatics-based warm-up and continues with creative process sessions. Throughout the workshop we’ll seed our explorations with information garnered from the group’s exchange.
IMPORTANT: For everyone’s health and safety, all participants must be fully vaccinated and do rapid testing both mornings of the workshop; then we’ll all be able to dance unmasked.
Bebe Miller formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985. She has collaborated with a variety of artists along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she’s learned what dancing can reveal. Her choreography has garnered four “Bessie” Awards and been performed in the US, Europe, South America and Africa. A Professor in Dance at Ohio State University from 2000 to 2016, she is a United States Artists Ford Fellow, a Doris Duke Foundation Artist, and was honored by the Kennedy Center as one of the Masters of African American Choreography. Her latest ebook, How Dancing Is Built: The Making of In A Rhythm, is available online.
Angie Hauser is a Bessie Award–winning choreographer and performer. Her work is grounded in improvisation and collaboration. She is a principal collaborator with Bebe Miller Company contributing to the work as a dancer, performer, and writer for 20 years. She also creates performance work with long-time collaborator Chris Aiken. She has taught dance technique, choreography, contact improvisation and improvisation throughout North America and in Europe and Asia. She received her MFA from Ohio State University and is currently an associate professor of dance at Smith College in Northampton, MA.
Solo/Duo Dancing Project springs from the embodied creative practices and physical vocabularies that Bebe Miller Company has developed over three decades of collaborative processes; the transmission of their practices will serve as intergenerational mentorship in action. The experiment of this mentoring is not aesthetically or stylistically driven—it’s more about honing each individual’s investigation as we grapple with telling our stories physically.
Sessions include movement development and analysis, thematic inquiry, and other activities that facilitate the creative and mentoring processes. For us, relationship is at the core of the choreographic process, and even in ensemble work, the solo/duo relationship shows up over and over. Thus our sessions will be centered on the solo/duo practices and relational structures that have been pivotal to our work. Everyone will be making dances, although not necessarily solos/duets.
We explore:
- How do you recognize when a structure is arising?
- Facilitating bonding/friction in relationship.
- Form as an evolution, rather than a decision.
- Working with physicality, rather than theme; what we hone is the body in motion and in relationship, tracking emergent perspectives, engaging with the tenor of the times.
- What is in our catalog of questions, what is in our lexicon; how do we interrogate what is emerging?
We’ll talk, show, and move.
The first Solo/Duo Dancing Project sessions occurred in Spring 2021. Contact us for info about upcoming sessions, and/or to bring the Solo/Duo Dancing Project to your community.
Solo/Duo Dancing Project is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and Greater Columbus Arts Council.
