Transcript

I Think Therefore I Dance | Claire Wijnands | TEDxYouth@Bologna

[Music] as a dancer I know what it is like to be on a stage but I've never been on the stage before where I actually talk about dance when you think about dance it's not something that is talked about at all but practiced on a physical level and to tell you the truth the closest I've come to talking about dance is with choreography planning a choreography teaching a choreography and directing a choreography so for me to stand here in front of you today and simply take the time to talk about dance is extremely worthwhile for me to me it still seems dance has no definite description next to its name it's viewed as an art form as a sport but I want people to try and regard it as something completely new as a form of knowledge well we don't think about our bodies a lot what dance allows for is kinesthetic awareness and you might ask yourself what is that well kinesthetic awareness is first of all one of the domains of human intelligence but it is linking us to our own sense of being existing on a bodily level what many of us have in us is this intrinsic knowledge of moving our bodies across the space and we do this for practical reasons like stepping aside when someone opens a door for us but think about the time you are listening to a song that has an upbeat rhythm to it don't you feel your body moving and adjusting to the rhythm and it moves more quickly to the song you were listening to the same applies to a dancer a dancer has knowledge of their body in time and in space but what a dancer also does is make you the audience aware of what he or she knows as they are dancing they will take experiences they have had with their own body and translate that for you and how they translate this is simply through an emotion the beauty of all of this is that there is no written word involved not at all why this is important in our learning is because all human emotions can be derived from a hidden kinetic experience think about the emotions you are experiencing when you are reading a book often the reader feels touched they feel gripped by what they are reading they feel scared they feel saddened and what all of these emotions have in common is that they are kinesthetic in nature so they need the body to be experienced but when you finish reading a chapter it's it's your mind that is experiencing these emotions and not your body there's this coming back to dance first of all a choreography can do the same it takes these experiences from the body from a dancer's body and it translates that into basic emotions an audience like you is able to understand there's a dance exercise that I often do in one of my dance classes and it's all about how I as a dancer reacts to different music styles so the teacher can start off playing a song that has a jazzy melody and a slow tempo now when I hear something like this I tend to move some of the smaller joints in my body like even just curling my fingers or having my movements start from my shoulders which will be playing a dominant role in my movements when the teacher plays a song that has a heavier melody and a fast tempo I feel myself transforming and I explore different body parts I can explore the way my neck and spine lower part of my spine are related and what is important to consider in dance is when you have these two amount with these two body parts the connection between them can be very different you can do a movement that is very fluid like this if I start from my neck I can go like that which is very fluid but if I do a more static one like this the audience gets a different impression of it now when I take part in dance exercise like this I notice how I never repeat the same movement twice I'm always eager to explore different body parts and if I'm not exploring different body parts I'm exploring the same body part but moving that in different more unusual ways than before now with torso movements I find there are already endless ways I can move across the space just by moving that part of my body and to show you this I'm gonna do a quick demonstration by playing two different songs the two different genres I've talked about jazzy versus a heavy melody and see how my body just right here reacts to it so let's try first how I see on the jazzy melody one [Music] so I just tried right now reacting with it with my body and seeing what I come up with so let's do the same thing now and let's listen to the song that has a heavier melody and what I want you to do for a second is think about well the song you've just heard and this song and which one would you personally move more fast to or which one has place it has a bigger emotion when you're listening to it so let's distance in another one [Music] so I tried to do the same for that and I felt myself moving quite differently than I did on the other song now I want to you know why the reason why I've shared this exercise with you is to show you that through the simple demonstration I have already gained knowledge about how my body moves to these different music styles and what I then tried to do was communicate an emotion to you that you you could or did not understand and what I'm going to do now is give you another example by talking to you about the most famous smart dance company in the world my favorite nail salons theater or the NDT and for the past few years they've completely preoccupied my mind and I try not to miss out on any of their performances but this became very hard and difficult when I moved to Italy until I found out they were coming to Italy and not far from here actually in LA via media I watched not only 3 amazing performances by them but I was actually able to meet their artistic director and the actual dancers who were dancing that night in person so you'd imagine how well I slept that night now when I think back to specific performances I've seen by them and that's difficult at first because I've seen a lot of performances by them but one of them still stands out in particular and this show was called school of thought and why I remember this so clearly was I remember making my way onto the actual stage of the theater and this was where the whole audience would be seated so I was standing on the stage and looking across from me at the sheer size of the theater seating across from me and I felt wow this is something completely different the dancers are actually dancing on a stage and it was a very small stage I was incredibly close to the dancers I could hear their breathing their panting or the sound of their touch and I even saw sweat starting to gather on their foreheads and drop to the ground as they were turning now I want to but is still questioned a lot in dance is how our dancer is able to come up with a choreography in the first place and how are they able to move with such ease when they're on a stage and the question has a difficult answer not a correct answer but what many of you think is that dancers work for memory but this is absolutely not the case what dancer is one thing dancers do is they work with this idea called mental architecture and to show this I would like you all to think of an object which I'm gonna give to you it's it's a ball think of a rubber ball you decide on the size you decide on the color and what I want you to do is just take your hand and trace in in air as if the object is in front of you just trace the surface of the ball and the shape so do that now all right so immediately what I'm seeing is all of you doing the same kind of movement which would be this I see a lot of you doing this and this is an example of how people react to dance they all think it's about the same movement and performing in a beautiful way or by a big group of dancers and but they're all doing the same movement but this is not what dance is about at least not for me it's all about doing different unique movements and putting this together in a unique whole so what I want you to do now is think of a different object your own object and give it dimensionality as if you're seeing it in front of you and it as if it's in the real world place it in the real world so you're thinking of your object but not only that you're thinking of the shape your object has you're thinking of the color your object has what does the color do to your body think about the material it has now play around with your object a bit make it very very big I'll make it very very small so what I want you to do now is still have your object in mind and think really specifically where is your body positioned by your object where are your elbows in relation to the object where are your knees where's your head so all of these questions can arise in a dancers mind causing them to explore with their bodies not only their movements but their their speed their tempo their direction and to show this I want to work with this idea of a ball and I want to try and show you the ball that I have but not just doing this or this I want to show you that you can use different parts in your body but still show that you know it's a circular ball so the first thing I can do is something like this to show how round it is but even if you're thinking of the material for instance if I have a rubber ball and you know when you you know you drop something if I drop the rubber ball in water what happens it gets really slippery right so if I want to show that with my body I can instead of doing this I can explore with speed so I can do something like like that to show it's a slippery ball and dancers just ask these questions to themselves and they put it all together and that that's how a choreography forms so this so this is what I wanted to share with you with this idea of mental architecture which is extremely extremely important in dance and basically relating this back to why dance can be a form of knowledge is this idea of mental architecture enables dancers to make choices for themselves about what to create because if you're all doing it from memory or if you're just sticking to steps and then it dance becomes boring for me so you can judge the performance by only its choreography but then you're missing half the essence of the dance it's about this transition that dancers make from being able to analyze ways they can move their body and I've shared this with two ways with you either reacting to different music types or using this idea of mental architecture but that's step one step two is then trying to communicate an emotion to your audience so this is an extremely creative but difficult process for dancers I want all of you to keep learning can aesthetically and especially through dance because it develops your creativity to a whole new level and it encourages a diversity of ways of knowing the world around us and experiencing it but what it also does is it encourages choreographers to experiment within dance and this gives an audience unusual performances in return and coming back to new yells don't stay after I've seen performers dancers on rotating platforms which you're not seeing right now but a rotating platform it's actually rotating it was amazing to see and I've seen them on fields of chalk as well just dust just chalk so when they when they move through it you see the chalk rising to the in the air that the dust and last I've also seen an entire choreography on just treadmills I don't know how they thought of it but it was amazing so I want to leave you all with the notion of dance being something called embodied knowledge it's the transition of X analyzing our dancer analyzes their body and then trying to communicate communicate an emotion out of it I've really enjoyed this opportunity of standing in front of all of you and talking about something that I really really love and I hope when I leave the stage I want some of you to start dancing yourself I'm not asking all of you to immediately start dancing at least watch some more dance performances it's very enriching it's it's great and also at least to start think about dance in this unusual way thank you [Applause] you