Form & Practice: a workshop for emerging choreographers

Art making is hard because the object created must take on a life of its own and needs to exist independently of the artist. Thus the process of making choreography is doubly difficult, because the dancer and the dance are often thought of as fused in the body.

Form & Practice, an experimental dance composition workshop, offers the makers of contemporary performance an alternative.  Consisting of strategies both physical and intellectual the workshop attempts to separate the artist from the art work. In so doing, it establishes a rigorous environment of great creative challenge that questions and illuminates the participants choreographic preconceptions.

Originally conceived by Dean Moss in 2002. It has been developed in conjunction with Yasuko Yokoshi and Levi Gonzalez. This intensive experimental dance workshop was presented from 2005 to 2007 at The Kitchen.  It seeks committed performance artists who are ready to surrender themselves and a small excerpt of their work to be objectified, shared, reconfigured, and destroyed. Through rapid-fire showings and discussion, the participants sharpen their ability to verbalize their aesthetic interests and mine the gap between their own discourse and how that discourse is activated into practice. Simultaneously the participants explore technical and practical issues including, authorship, theatrical presence, styles of performance, the use of sound and visual media, theatrical formatting, the role and usage of the dramaturge/director from a dance perspective, and the ability of the artist to shape the larger frame in which their work is seen.  At every step of the process the participants will question each other and the work, and in the end, through constant showings and questioning, exercise a contemporary dialogue between intention, practice, performance and the world. 

“Participation in the Form + Practice workshop was a tremendous opportunity to disrupt and destabilize my own creative process. Trading work with other participants gave me a chance to inhabit not only the choreography but also the process of another dance-maker, and the spirit of risk-taking helped me to find personal power in the performance of other people's work.  As a solo performer, I had never experienced another person's work from the inside, and I left at the end of the workshop with a much clearer idea of my performance choices.  In some ways it turned me away from what I was doing and toward something I never considered doing -- because, in the structure of this workshop, there is a lot of choice and, simultaneously, no choice.  The real skill that Levi Gonzales and Dean Moss have in facilitating this workshop is to present this paradoxical structure in a way that may cause a profound confrontation with the self, both emotionally (disconcertingly, joyously) and intellectually (confusingly, clearly).

The structure of Form + Practice is intentionally disguised, and it gradually reveals itself as a systematic, psychological deprogramming tool that quickly tears down and just as quickly builds up the process of creating performative work.  The workshop method forces participants to engage critically and to verbally process visual and visceral information, and it forces quick decisions, which made me feel safer in taking risks and less attached to outcome.  It softened the blow of failure

and made the experience of failure exactly what it should be: a process, rich in information. 

Finally, participation in the workshop strengthened my interest in the communal and social potential of artmaking.  I keep in touch with several other participants and feel grateful to have connected intellectually with people whose work is different from mine; their development informs my development and keeps me stimulated.  I have rejected for the present the method of working in isolation and have connected and collaborated with people in dance and other disciplines.  Form + Practice made me a "joiner."