Dance Archives - Page 4 of 6

29 Mar, 2011

Showings, Feedback and Protecting Clarity

2016-03-18T22:16:59-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater, Video|Tags: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dance, dandelion, dandelion dancetheater, Eric Kupers, Performance, sharon mussen, Video|

The showings that Dandelion has been doing as part of our residency at CounterPULSE have taught me a lot. Here's an incomplete list of insights, reminders, clarifying moments that I've gathered so far from the three monthly public showings of our Friend project: 1. Public showings are crucial to the development of the kind of experimental performance we create. They force us to get things together on a deadline, to try them out and then to retreat and re-tool. There

25 Mar, 2011

Falling Apart / Piecing Myself Together

2016-03-18T22:17:21-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater|Tags: Artists in Residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dancetheater, dandelion, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, residency, sharon mussen, showing, theater|

It's been longer than I would have liked since my last post. I'm in the final stages of "birthing" our Friend project, and these past few weeks have felt like the major hump to get over. As I catch up with myself and the work, I'll be posting some eclectic reflections from the adrenaline-fueled final phase of this particular creation process. Here is a post I started two weeks ago, when I felt right in the middle of the fire,

10 Mar, 2011

Artist Interview: Eric Kupers of Dandelion Dancetheater

2011-03-10T17:45:34-08:00By Shamsher|Categories: Archive, Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater, Video|Tags: Artists in Residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dancetheater, dandelion, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, residency, sharon mussen, theater|

PART 1 PART 2

8 Mar, 2011

Brass band to the Mardi Gras Eat-In

2016-03-18T22:38:44-07:00By Shamsher|Categories: Amara Tabor Smith, Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE|Tags: amara, Amara Tabor-Smith, bryant terry, Dance, day, deep, International, mardi gras, mj's brass boppers, novella carpenter, tabor smith, theater, theatre, waters, women's|

3 Mar, 2011

Surprise Gifts

2016-03-18T22:17:32-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Archive, Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater, Video|Tags: Artists in Residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dancetheater, dandelion, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, residency, sharon mussen, theater|

There always seems to be surprise gifts that come from creating a performance work--things that enhance my life and/or art making that I didn't expect to receive from the project. With the Friend project, a major gift has been a reminder about the joy of making stuff. By stuff I mean visual art (sculpture, collage, installation, etc.) This gift has come at me from two sources. My friend Sharon was a visual artist at heart, always making sculptures of various

14 Feb, 2011

Investigating Mysteries

2016-03-18T22:18:11-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater|Tags: Artists in Residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dancetheater, dandelion, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, residency, sharon mussen, showing, theater|

I love mysteries. I love mystery novels and movies, and mysterious stories and myths. I love when spiritual teachers refer to the divine as the "Great Mystery." More and more these days I'm seeing my performance work as a series of mysteries I'm immersed in. Each new performance project at times seems like something I've conjured up with my collaborators, and at other times like something much bigger and mysterious that we are entering into. I much prefer the latter

13 Feb, 2011

2nd Work in Progress Showing

2016-03-18T22:18:25-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater, Video|Tags: Artists in Residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dancetheater, dandelion, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, residency, sharon mussen, showing, theater|

I was reminded yesterday of how helpful work in progress showings are. I often forget that this is an experimental form we're working in, and that experimental forms need actual experiments. While performances are experiments, they are high-pressure ones, and I learn as much, if not more from showings along the way. Here's some excerpts from ours yesterday:

13 Feb, 2011

This One’s For Friendship

2016-03-18T22:18:42-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater|Tags: Artists in Residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dancetheater, dandelion, Eric Kupers, friend, kegan marling, Performance, residency, sharon mussen, theater|

One of the things that is shifting in me in response to the recent death of my friend Sharon Mussen is a re-prioritizing of friendship. I had a professor in grad school tell me once that I should never direct my friends in my projects--that the roles become too confusing. Even though I respect this professor very much, that advice somehow confirmed for me how much I operate from exactly the opposite view. I love creating experimental performance precisely because

12 Feb, 2011

Conditioning

2016-03-18T22:18:54-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater|Tags: artist in residence, CounterPULSE, Dance, dandelion dancetheater, Eric Kupers, friend, theater|

I'm humbled to see how deep so much of my conditioning runs. I've been learning about and experimenting with inclusive dance techniques for almost a decade now. I'm continually looking for ways to make the ways I perform, think about, create and teach dance/theater inclusive of people with diverse mobilities. And still my conditioning asserts itself over and over. I fall back on how I learned to dance. Sometimes this is wonderful and provides a storehouse of movement approaches and

12 Feb, 2011

Birthing Pains

2016-03-18T22:19:07-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater|Tags: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dance, dandelion, dandelion dancetheater, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, sharon mussen, theater|

I see the creation of each art work as a kind of birth. There's both great connection and great pain in this process, and I often forget that the magnitude of how connecting a piece is directly relates to how painful its birth can be. Last week we tried out a structure for performing a lot of the most salient material we've been developing in our Friend project. It's a difficult feat to imagine how to collage together all the

18 Jan, 2011

Injury as Teacher

2016-03-18T22:19:18-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater, Video|Tags: artist in residence, choreography, CounterPULSE, Dance, dandelion, dandelion dancetheater, Eric Kupers, friend, music, Performance, theater|

I'm often able to tell other people when they are injured how much every injury can be a teacher. When it's not me having to hold back from moving with physical abandon, I see the benefit of learning about our limitations and our vulnerability through our injuries. When I have an injury, my vision is a lot murkier and I have to wade through a lot of resistance before I come to some kind of acceptance of what happened and

12 Jan, 2011

Public Showings

2016-03-18T22:19:33-07:00By Eric Kupers|Categories: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dandelion Dancetheater|Tags: Artists in Residence, CounterPULSE, Dance, dandelion, dandelion dancetheater, Eric Kupers, friend, Performance, sharon mussen, theater|

We have our first work-in-progress showing for my CounterPULSE residency this coming Saturday, Jan. 15th. Even though we're still at the beginnings of our creation process, I'm very glad we have this showing to work towards. There are many reasons that I find public showings of performance works in progress useful. These include: --forcing us as artists to make some decisions about what we want to show --giving a deadline to a particular segment of our creation process --encouraging everyone

Showings, Feedback and Protecting Clarity

Falling Apart / Piecing Myself Together

Artist Interview: Eric Kupers of Dandelion Dancetheater

Brass band to the Mardi Gras Eat-In

Surprise Gifts

Investigating Mysteries

2nd Work in Progress Showing

This One’s For Friendship

Conditioning

Birthing Pains

Injury as Teacher

Public Showings

EVENTS

Beyond Gravity

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