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.

Amidst all of the hubbub, I managed to sit down with Delfos’ co-artistic director, Claudia Lavista, for a moment to speak with her about her experiences here at Bates Dance Festival. I was curious about why she and her husband, Omar Carrum, have returned to BDF year after year to teach and share their work during the Professional Training Program and why they specifically chose to perform Cuando los Disfraces se Cuelgan at the festival this year.

I first asked her about what initially brought she and her husband to BDF.

“In 2007, I was able to come to Bates. It was my 10 year anniversary with my husband. We were supposed to have a big celebration and Laura [Faure] suggested, Why don’t both of you come?” She thought this would be “super cool,” so we came.

“We were very fortunate to come to the artist roundtable talks.” These are weekly meetings throughout the festival where the faculty and visiting artists sit together to discuss topics relating to the global dance community. After engaging in that dialogue and finding connection within the festival community, they “fell in love with BDF.”

“For the company and the school too, this has been a very important place to find ideas, different ways to see things, to find a lot of colleagues who are very interesting.” Lavista and Carrum co-founded the Mazatlán Professional School of Dance (EPDM) when the company relocated from Mexico City to Mazatlán. Lavista’s husband, Omar Carrum, is the Academic Director of the BFA program at EPDM.

Their program has become a place of intersecting ideas, movements, and questions. “We are questioning ourselves all the time,” she said during the Show and Tell. For them, this program has become an integrative way for a dedicated faculty of working artists to cultivate the next generation of colleagues. She explained how Bates offers opportunities for community building outside the festival.

“Whenever we meet someone that we really like, as a human being, and we like the project, we look for ways to expand the relationship. It’s not just us going there to make work, it’s about bringing them back to Mazatlán as well. This is how we want to work all of the time. . . We have been bringing people back to Mazatlán from BDF, like Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser. Kathleen Hermesdorf and Albert Mathias, Shamou, and Laura Faure too!”

“We want to feed this connection, to feed this friendship more and more. We want to build a strong bridge between Mazatlán and BDF.”

“Little by little we’ve become very close friends” with the BDF community. “I feel now that this is my family. Every time I come here, I feel that I’ve come home with my friends. This is a paradise. . . We are in love with this community, so we’ll always want to come back.”

During the Show and Tell talk Claudia explained, “to create a piece is a way to understand the world. That’s pretty much what we are trying to do every time we create. It’s not that we want to do pretty things, it’s just that we really want to know more about the world, and I think one way to learn more about the world is to learn more about yourself. Every time you do research,  you are now discovering the world, and you are discovering yourself in it, and that’s wonderful. This piece helped us to learn new things.”  I believe these thoughts reflect on the Festival as a whole. By supporting artists who create in this way, BDF cultivates an environment where new research and expansive dialogue can take place.

When I spoke to her at lunch, I wondered why they chose this piece specifically to perform at BDF this year.

“This is a piece that we really love, and is a piece that has a lot of meaning to us. It’s easy to travel, because the other pieces have a lot of production and other things. This piece seems like it has a lot of production, but it doesn’t. We travel with two suitcases. Although, there is a lot of multimedia involved, and we wanted to share what we are doing with multimedia, the piece is layered in many different ways.”

“But also it speaks about us in a very deep way. It allows you to see many different faces of the company. This piece is shaped in a way that allows us to share who we are, and also our culture, Mexican culture. It’s a very personal piece. We want to share that.”

I wanted to know more about how the company works in relation to their cultural heritage. During the Show and Tell, in one particular section of the piece that they shared, I was struck by the specificity of hand gestures in relation to one reactive dancer. To me their movements seemed to reflect their cultural heritage, by creating living, breathing alebrijes. Lavista explained further in the talk that they pulled inspiration from visual artists such as surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo as well as magical realism author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“It’s hard because when you are born in a certain culture, you are brought up with certain things in your subconscious. It just came out.”  In response to my comment about the alebrijes, she said, “we didn’t create that piece specifically about those, but you’re right, they are totally connected. The color of the piece is very related and connected to our culture, but in a more global way.”

“We come from a culture that is very rich in the past, and has many centuries of history, but it is also rich in the present. Contemporary art in Mexico is very strong. It is actually stronger than our ancient culture. It’s hard to travel as a Mexican company because when you say you are Mexican, everyone expects you to be a folkloric company. There is not much information about contemporary art in Mexico in most of the world. But we are very connected with the world, and we are very connected to contemporary thinking.”

This conversation was enlightening on many levels. As a dancer in the US, I desire to expose myself to a more global understanding of the world of contemporary dance. Claudia is one of many of this summer’s BDF faculty who comes from abroad, have a wide breadth of experience, and are very much connected to that global conversation. Speaking with her reminded me that through dance we always have the opportunity to express and share on a universal human level while thoroughly embracing our cultural lense. Her insights, both spoken and danced with the company, exude this passionately.

One of the last comments she made at the Show and Tell, I feel speaks directly to the depth, connection, and collective urgency of creating work in this art form at this time:

“At the end of the piece, we realized that the whole process led us to embrace the idea that what is really important is to live with integrity. Without false disguises. Valuing who you are, valuing others and nature, and celebrating life.”

Photo Credits: Arthur Fink Photography

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