Life at BDF has been full of new ideas, new mentors, new friends, and a re-imagining of everything we thought that we knew. As professors, we rarely get the chance to be students. These two weeks have been a reminder that there is always a different way to look at an old idea and new ideas are just around the corner from where you’re at.

These are some of the things that we’ve learned and/or have been reminded of:

Meaning making through movement is hard and it needs time and attention to blossom.

I will forever be a mover and learner.

Live accompaniment (especially at this beyond unbelievable level of expertise) is a blessing and one that should not be taken for granted.

The floor is my friend even though at times it can feel like my enemy.

“Failing successfully” (thanks Nancy) involves disrupting the binary between failure and success.

The body is a full system not just pieces and parts.

Everyone is dancing all the time.

Be open and responsive, aware and curious.

Be generous without expectation of response.

The thinking body is as or more intelligent than the thinking mind.

The first site of democracy can always begin with class.

Physical listening is a political act.

The studio can be the site where your hope for the world can manifest in performance.

What is beyond the steps? That is where the art and heart lies.

How does virtuosity manifest through skills taught in dance class?

We are just humans who’ve decided to build a life around moving.

You must take responsibility for your own learning.

I actually think that I’m getting better with age.

You’ll never know everything. That’s why you keep dancing.

Thank you Laura Faure for making this experience possible!

Bliss Kohlmyer & Kara Davis are visiting artists who will be presenting their work at Different Voices on August 6th and 7th at Bates Dance Festival. 

Photo Credit: Andy Mogg

We saw these guest artists improvise together in the “Moving in the Moment” performance on July 29th. This was the first time the BDF participants saw these visitors move outside of the classroom setting. It was a fascinating introduction to see the visiting artists, faculty and staff  in this raw way as dancers and creators.

This year, one of those artists is Finnish choreographer, Ima Iduozee. During “Moving in the Moment,” we were introduced to his mythic, yet approachable presence. Long-limbed, towering over many in the room, he danced with an organic balance of power and grace. I was struck by his openness to drastic and dramatic emotional shifts as well as his availability to play with more subtle movement qualities.

At the “Different Voices” performances on August 6th and 7th, Ima will be presenting an excerpt from his solo work, This is the title, which he has been touring since 2012. In July of this year, he received the annual honorary prize of the Finnish Critics’ Association, Critics’ Spurs, an “acknowledgment of the best artistic breakthrough for a young artist during the year.”

I sat down with Ima for lunch last week to talk about his background, creative process, and experiences at BDF.

“I’m from Helsinki, the capital city of Finland, that’s where I’m based. I started dancing when I was ten years old, breaking, break-dancing. I was fascinated by the whole culture and scene inspired by some of those early New York b-boys back then. I was very intensely involved with the b-boy community and breaking, we traveled across Europe doing exhibition battles, competitions and shows.”

“At some point, I felt like there was more out there as far as physical expression, and movement in general, so I stumbled upon contemporary dance, modern dance, and started working in musicals. So I was put into a position where I had to learn other ways of expressing through movement, not only through breaking.”

Iduozee studied contemporary dance at the University of the Arts Helsinki where they integrated many different techniques for him to put in his toolbox, including somatics, composition, and voice coaching. “After 2009, I started working for a few different directors and contemporary choreographers in Helsinki, doing physical theater, contemporary dance and modern dance.” He has worked with choreographers Arja Tiili, Sebastien Ramirez, Sonya Lindfors, and Tero Saarinen, to name a few. “I’ve been working as a freelancer, both as a choreographer and as a performer.”

I wondered if his transition from the break dance/street dance world to musicals and contemporary dance was a natural progression. He told me that the shift was “very organic… It was actually a soft landing, already I saw myself going a different path.”

Those influences have carried into his work now, however, he is hyper-aware of the cultural context of these styles of movement. He is mindful of how people label recognizable styles of dance, and does not want those labels to be a defining factor of how he creates. “I am interested in the human body, the corpse, and all that information that we carry with us in our DNA from long ago, from our ancestors. I use the tools that I have. I’m not interested in any certain style or genre of dance, I’m interested in movement and physical expression – physical gestures and that age of wisdom that we have with us in our bodies. So I will use and study whatever other style or convention is necessary. And I use all of that, I don’t separate or segregate them from each other.”

He took a breath and continued, “I have to emphasize that in order for one to fuse different styles or genres together, one must first learn the tradition and the history. It’s an ethical responsibility. You can’t just copy and paste without actually paying respect to the tradition of each genre. I just wanted to say that… I think it’s important. It’s a responsibility for artists to do so.”

We then moved on to his introduction to Bates Dance Festival, and how he came to Maine after only having visited the US one other time.

“I’ve been touring my debut solo around Europe for a few years, since 2012, and Laura [Faure] saw my piece at the Nordic Platform: ICE HOT  Festival  in Oslo, Norway last December. It was a contemporary dance festival, where they invited international curators, buyers, and organizers from all over the world to see what is happening in the Nordic contemporary dance scene.  Laura saw my work there, This is the title…” He chuckled, “that is the title of my work.” He could sense that I had missed that indication in the flow of the conversation. “Yeah, and she invited me here to perform an excerpt from that piece, to participate in some workshops if I wanted to, and to concentrate on my artistic work in residency.”

“So I’ve been working on my next creation here, doing some research and trying to gather some material.” His next production is a commissioned work from the Stockholm City Theater, it will premier on October 31st. “I have three incredible performers dancing for me in that piece, so I’m moving to Stockholm next month to start working and start rehearsals. This is preparation, preliminary research, generating some material and ideas.”

“I’ve been working on the opening scene or last scene, but I’m not sure yet. I’m trying to figure out some movement motifs that I can then recycle, reconstruct, play around with, and later compose something concrete when I start working with the dancers in the studio.”

Before the showing, he shared with me about the genesis of that material. “I’ll be showing a short, very raw sequence I have gathered.” One of the scores in his new piece, Purple Nights, is “a metamorphosis from contemporary man, to neanderthal, to ape, to fish, to the single cell and maybe a reverse evolution.” He has been exploring the essence of the primal man from pre-verbal conditions, as impetus for the material he shared with the BDF community on Sunday.

The title, Purple Nights is a provocative image, a dreamy landscape. “It was from Herman Hesse, his novel called ystävykset… [translation: Pictor’s metamorphoses and other fantasies] is about a student who studies poetic literature. The name of one of the books he was reading was Purple Nights. I was trying to figure out what that would actually be. For me, it’s a surrealistic landscape, a poetic state of mind, which I was very fascinated by. And I thought that it suits the work I will be presenting in Stockholm.”

On August 2nd, there was an informal showing for the visiting artists to share what they have been working on while at the Festival.  At the showing, Ima shared what he had developed so far for this project, as a work in progress. Even in this preliminary draft form, his porous state of being and creature-like physicality was mesmerizing, mysterious, and utterly captivating.

“I have to say that I feel quite fortunate to be here,” he said on his experience here at BDF. “To get the chance to work in residency without in residency without having to come up with any specific product at the end of the three weeks. I can work as much or as little as I want to, I’m only responsible to myself and that gives me a lot of free creative space to work with.”

“I also have the chance to participate in other workshops with incredible teachers who are here.” Ima emphasized on the importance of  having discussions with the other choreographers and artists in residency, “I get to feed my own thoughts as well. For me, that’s what residency is all about. It’s about you diving in to the choreographic practice with a bunch of people who are interested in creating work and proposing something worth while.”

“And also the weather’s been great, the food is great, I can’t complain, I’ve had a blast!”

In addition to Ima Iduozee there is a diverse and exciting group of guest artists who are in residency at BDF this summer who will be performing in the concert “Different Voices” August 6th and 7th.

All of these artists have been teaching, taking class,  exchanging thoughts, creating new work, and are woven into the fabric of the festival. This creates a diverse environment of creators, students, and practitioners alike, all of whom exemplify BDF’s cooperative and supportive environment.

Photo Credit from “This is the title”: Lorenzo Passoni

This post was written by Meghan Carmichael.  Meghan is the BDF Social Media Intern for the 2015 summer.

Scotty: We’ve begun to find a flow with the piece now, where a lot of the technological elements we’re working with in the Blackbox are aligning in a way that’s starting to facilitate a tone, a mood, and everything’s starting to synthesize with the bodies in space. There are a lot of moving parts in this installation: four projectors, two computers, a soundscore, two bodies in space being tracked by two Kinect cameras… there’s just a lot.

Keanu: And also the ideas we’re working with in the movement are fairly complex as well – this deep kind of vessel breathing that creates this strange kind of slow improvisational vocabulary, and an ongoing awareness of touch between us, a lot of sensation. And underneath all of that is this focus on the digestive tract, the complete tract from end to end – there’s really a lot of complex movement ideas going into this process.

Scotty: Absolutely! But those are also in a way really basic ideas, right? Like, there’s nothing more simple than the respiratory system and the alimentary canal, right? Which are  systems that informed the digital projection designs. So, here’s the thing, people are always like “oh, you know, tech, artwork and digital arts, it’s so new wave, alternative, and cutting edge… but I always feel when I do this kind of work like I’m grappling with the primal forces of nature. Things like light, eclipse, shadow, statistical formulas that mirror patterns found in nature, the subtle systems of our world broken down into numbers, and these cyber elements actually help to reveal something more primal than I can feel when I’m dancing in the studio. And when those two things come together, it’s like a cyber primal.

Keanu : A cyber primal! Totally…

Scotty: I don’t know how else to describe it.

Keanu: Yeah, I have no words — I’m still digesting what just happened in there. It’s amazing the conversation that the technology and the movement have together; what combining those two things unlocks and where it will take you. It’s the lighting design, there’s something about how the light reveals the body, or the body reveals the light. And having the light reveal the body and erase the body, and in the darkness the body reconfigures and has found a new shape, and the light has found a new random direction – it’s like, what is happening!

Scotty: It’s weird, it’s like a responsive light source with the Kinect cameras — they are tracking our movement, and responding to our movement using infrared sensors, which then is translated by the software in the computer and projected back onto our body, revealing our bodies, which then inform the light; it’s all very cyclical. It’s phototropic. And what’s interesting about that is that you feel that kind of primitive texture, a primal texture of light and growth response.

Keanu: It informs the movement, I feel like I’m no longer being inside of it trying to situate this thing, but I’ve found the place in which there’s no more thought, it’s not run by the brain, or just by the body, or just by our relationship to the light, but all of those things tied together to become a cohesive whole.

Scotty: That’s why I say, whenever I’m building a new piece I feel like I’m building a Zen garden – in this case it’s a highly corrupted garden. It’s very cracked and imperfect in the design of the projections, that sort of coral shape which is the white, and the blood vessel design in red. I feel like through the projections that we create with the movement I’m seeing synapses, and internal processes of the body made external, and that those internal processes of the body are being made external in a way that reveals the body. In that way it’s kind of an inside out feeling and it’s very… weird… I don’t know how to describe it really.

Keanu: Indescribable?

Scotty: Haha, yeah, it’s tapping into something… we just had a very rich rehearsal by the way, we reoriented the projections. Again. And it’s going much better now, everything is falling into place, and now all four of the projectors are aimed in the same location on our bodies where the duet is happening. What we’re working on now is the movement vocabulary and how this duet is taking shape within this swirling world of light designs painting our bodies, and how that’s going to translate with two bodies together instead of one.

Keanu: But that’s all in the improvisation of it – we work, and test, and experiment, see what’s feeling right and what isn’t feeling right, and how we’re both constantly reacting to one another and to the space around us. It’s like life in a way.

Scotty: Definitely, and as we go into this week of shows for the Different Voices concert and for the Bates Dance Festival community, we’ll have to try to maintain that sensitive space where the whole organism is still in a state of organic experimentation — it’s a hard thing to maintain going into performance.

Keanu: Performance! It’s coming so soon!

Scotty: Yep, and in the meanwhile, folks can check out the promo video which will be online soon up on Vimeo! Stay posted!

Check out the promo video here.