CHOREOGRAPHER’S STATEMENT-  

NITA LITTLE

Through the making of dance film, dance theatre, and as dance performed research, I explore the conditions of presence in the experience of being human. By moving this noun presence from where it passively rests as a“state” or “fact of being” into an active verb, presencing, dance as an ecological engagement with the world emerges. Presencing moves somatic awareness beyond the skin into a larger field of practice. As a movement dynamic, it articulates physical attention, the meeting of mind and body. As an artistic practice, it invites the inclusion of the multiple levels of experience, body boundaries that breathe, self-sense that moves past notions of lack to those that recognize absence as revelation, complexity as potential, and difference as a creative blessing. Through working with attention as physical material, I explore the details of a moment by making the movement of the mind visually available, and yet the work goes beyond the purely visual into felt sense and multiple synesthetic layers. While anchored in the physicality of physics, the movement details the finer tonalities of each event. I choreograph works for dancers who are choreographers, and for audiences to see and feel with their whole body.

The training that goes into making a piece calls upon articulate bodies to invest in articulate minds. Fundamentally, I form my dancers’ materials by directing attention, the action of embodiment by which I am able to activate webs of concordance that emerge within ensembles, between individuals and throughout spaces which I build using theatrical elements. I make works with greater and lesser degrees of set material and structure, determined by my purpose, although all works have improvisation as a critical component. Their compositional complexity can include elements such as aerial dance, acting, and other performance modalities, including a broad range of materials, film and technological tools. I compose with the idea ‘everything dances.’

I find the pathways by which dancers’ communicate to one another and to audiences can be discovered by tracking their ‘need to know’ the present moment and its expression. Engaged in “Performance as Research”, in The Geometry of Attention, I have flipped the tables on dance as an art of expression and am studying it as an art of inquiry. Here two people explore how they inform themselves and their partner, moment by moment, by clarifying the levels of their environmental awareness, their awareness of the other, through the lens of geometry: points, pathways, surfaces, and volumes. This work reveals the visual movement of the mind that is embodied. Although my work is currently process and research oriented ( VisibleUnseen: a field guide to felt presence,of which the previous work is a part), I have spent years making dance theatre in which states of consciousness were at root. I was interested in how the mental/physical tools of Contact Improvisation meeting contemporary dance practice would resolve in interpersonal dynamics that create affective movement (Peril of Angels),and with the inclusion of imagined but also actual genetic resonance between humans and other genera ( Entering Arthropoda - a dance theatre comedy ,and Emissary,also dance theater ).

In a 2008 interview, Meg Stuart said, “The first statement I make when I teach a class is, ‘your body is not yours’” [1]. I could concur and yet I think this is only a partial picture; it is limited to the fact of the performance of culture within the space of our ‘selves’. The post-modern performance of culture is a critical area of research, and yet, I need to add to her statement, “Nothing exists without you.” This is not a limiting notion. By this, I imply responsibility for the multiplicities of inclusion, turning the partialities of experience into new wholes. Moving past a post-modern disillusionment, my work asks us to find the “more” we are, not by fragmentation and invasion, not through sublimation or elision of lived realities and cultural impact, but rather by provoking a bounded body to activate its boundless potential. It asks for a reinvestment in the imagination and its part in our lived experience, not through fantasy, but through recognizing its part in our making of one another. My work appreciates the indeterminate moment as an experience of the bodybeing’s ever unfolding immersion through states and terms. In this, it works against distortions and perfections, neither denying them nor aggrandizing them. But rather, through dance it accepts the partiality of perspective along with the uncertainties that being human necessitates. It researches/creates/composes dances that explore the potentials those limitations invoke as a means to interpersonal and intrapersonal meetings, self and/as environment. It closes the gap between things by redefining “in-between”.

[1] [1] http://www.sawtoothdancers.com/2010/11/09/sawtooth-hearts-choreographer-meg-stuart/