Using the Language of Dance® Movement Alphabet to Facilitate the Creative Process

Using the Language of Dance® Movement Alphabet to Facilitate the Creative Process
Submitted by Susan Gingrasso - November 30, 2009

This PDF takes the viewers through how I used the Language of Dance Movement Alphabet and Motif Notation to jump-start and manage the choreographic process for a 6 minute work, Breath Child, which I performed for the installation of Atmosphere, by Joyce Crain, a Tucson, AZ based fiber-artist. This public art work commissioned by the Utah Arts Council for the Health Science Library at the College of Eastern Utah, San Juan Campus in Blanding, UT is created from 6,000 squares of dichroic acrylic in a rainbow of shimmering colors that reflect and refract sunlight. It was inspired by an atmospheric phenomenon, virga, rain that evaporates in the dry desert air prior to reaching the earth.

I presented this material as a workshop for the 2009 International Council of Kinetography Laban (Bangkok) to demonstrate how using selected Movement Alphabet ideas to generate movement phrases, which I Motif Notated, quite literally as I created them, allowed me to generate and easily manipulate rich, metaphoric material in an extremely condensed period of time. I easily selected and ordered the Motif Notated movement phrases into a whole dance, which made the rehearsal and embodiment process quite efficient and very effective.

Missing from the PDF are the video clips of the Motif Notated phrases on pages 12-19 as well as the video of the entire dance, which can be seen (quicktime movie) on Crain's website.

For information about the Language of Dance go to www.lodc.org or contact Susan Gingrasso at susanlodc@yahoo.com.