ImpulsTanz; Workshop 3

When: 25-29th July 2011

The teacher: Isabel Lewis

Isabel Lewis is a Brooklyn and Berlin-based dance artist, curator, and writer from the Dominican Republic. Lewis studied Dance/Choreography and Literary Criticism at Hollins University before forming the Labor Union, a dance collective, in NYC and presenting dance works at several venues and galleries in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

Isabel has had the honor of being a Movement Research (MR) Artist in Residence and a Fresh Tracks Residency Recipient in 2005-2006 and has also received support from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, New Museum, Harlem Stage, MAP Fund, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

She has worked as an editor and writer for the Movement Research Performance Journal and was the curator for the performance series, Body Blend, at Dixon Place from 2005-2008. As a curator Isabel has also worked on the MR Festival 2004: “Improvisation is Hard” and the MR Festival 2007: “Reverence (Irreverence)” as well as “Re-Imagining Utopia: Austrian/NYC Dialogue” in partnership with MR, the Austrian Cultural Forum (NYC), and Tanzquartier Wien.

As a performer Isabel has had the pleasure of working with Miguel Gutierrez and Ann Liv Young as well as many other NYC-based performance makers.

Recent projects include producing “For the time bring”, an independent artist organised mini-festival of performance, discourse, and party (Berlin); presenting her new solo performance work in progress “Strange Action” (Florida) at the Performance Mix Festival (NYC); collaborating in “Casino”, a creative lab curated by Stefanie Wenner at the HAU (Berlin), and directing her first feature-length film, “Lewis Forever’s Guide to Kinship” and “Maybe Magic” made in collaboration with filmmaker Anthony Rocco, visual artist Josep Maynou, and “Lewis Forever”, a performance collective comprised herself and her three siblings Sarah Lewis, Ligia Lewis, and George Lewis Jr. of Twinshadow.

The workshop: Ballistic Body

A ballistic body is a body which is free to move, behave, and be modified in appearance, contour, or texture by ambient conditions, substances, or forces.

This workshop strives to find a new mode of performative expression which is not clearly derivative of performance art, nor of theatre, nor of contemporary dance while perhaps touching aspects of all of these modes of performance. Ballistic Body is an intervention in a space with people and ideas. This workshop is concerned with training the senses in a way that the body can be responsive in a performative situation. I try my best to steer away from proposing an aesthetic or physical ideal and try, rather, to emphasise attention to each individuals physical history with all of its influences: cultural, learned, accidental, or otherwise.

The body is central to this work as the interface for the clashing or synthesis of ideas and concepts. Characters are suggested but not fully formed. They are developed through costuming, speech, and movement in order to provide a level of fictive distance from notions of identity. This semi-characterisation is a strategy I use to facilitate the use of the body in a way that is not locked to static notions of gender or race. This also allows an immersion into the content of the work that facilitates new approaches and a playful circumvention of irony or cynicism.

Language in this work is used not to convey a storyline or reveal a character but to give voice to a process of thought unfolding in real time. Additionally, text can proposition an event into space. It is used to create relationships between subjects and interweave the fictional with what is assumed to be real. Content is collaged and drawn largely from the internet, pulling from numerous sources (news, popular culture, art, the everyday, etc.) and connecting ideas that seem unrelated in order to find new connections amongst them.

My verdict: I loved the concept of this workshop. Creating a class environment that is forward thinking, adapting to the nature of contemporary dance is something innovative and informative. The tasks that Lewis set were compelling: timed writing from various angles, learning and mimicking from YouTube videos – often playing simultaneously from different genres. The idea that we are constantly stimulated, playing up to our split concentration spans… that contemporary dance is eclectic in nature.

These classes were largely improvised, and depended on what input each member of the class had. Sometimes we would improvise in pairs: one person improvising, the other watching and visa versa; we would then describe what we saw and would improvise again on what had been spoken. These sort of tasks were accumulative, and informative about changing perspectives and the effect of input.

I would have liked a little more structure in this workshop, a bit of more coherence of development – but I guess that would defeat the purpose, eh? This workshop inspires the idea that inspiration, not only to create work, but to condition yourself and shake yourself up abounds everywhere. Modern technology may have a lot of inconveniences when it comes to art, but when it is used productively, can be quite liberating.