A reflection after teaching a week-long Gender&CI workshop at the Tanzfabrik Sommer Tanz festival (assisted by Diana Thielen).
At the end of the Sommer Tanz festival, I find myself incredibly grateful for the opportunity Tanzfabrik provided to move deeper into my current research. This was the third time in the two year life of this project that I’ve had a week with a committed group of dancers to dig deeply into embodied exploration of Gender in CI. While some questions remain central to the work — for example, how do the things we’ve internalized about gender over our lifetimes fundamentally shape how we organize our bodies and move in space? and how do we reproduce heteronormative gendered modes of interacting in our CI dances? — each group also opens new areas of exploration, as their needs, desires, and questions shape the trajectory of the research. In this way, the teaching and the research feed one another. It is a tremendous gift to have the space and the trust to teach from the edge of discovery.
In the week at Tanzfabrik, we ended up spending much of our time looking at how our gender education and socialization prepared us each differently to take on the skills central to the practice of CI. For example, for those of us who were feminine-educated/socialized, we may have had much training in listening, compromising, following, and being light, but less in supporting weight, initiating action, or mobilizing the power of our bodies efficiently. Depending on the specifics of our gender education (and the gender identity we’ve developed as an adult), we have more work to do to learn certain CI skills than others. Each of us have our own skill gaps to fill in developing our CI technique. Noticing the way the skills of CI are gendered in our cultures, allows us both to appreciate the way CI gives us space outside of binary gender roles and to identify specific skills we wish to develop to improve our CI technique. Towards the end of the week, we focused on creating strategies to open up new capacities in our own dancing (transcending limits posed by our gender educations and gender identities) and on creating strategies to shift gendered patterns of interaction that can emerge in CI duets. The focus on the intersection of gender-coded behaviors and CI technique was a new development in this research…as was the realization that CI as a technique is rather queer (that is to say it disrupts binary, heteronormative notions of gender by requiring all dancers to embody a range of skills that go beyond any one gender category.)
Looking forward to see where the next group will go with this work! Big thanks to Tanzfabrik for supporting this research process.