Expanded Blurb with Comments from Julia, Becky and Ben.

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From August 2020, in the midst of social and professional restrictions, Ale, Becky, Ben, Bun, Julia and Sophie began to meet in various London parks, to dance and chat, and chat within dancing and dance within chatting.

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(Ben: Chatting – that vital warm-up and cool-down activity found in dance classes, rehearsals, auditions and workshops: checking-in, catching up, getting to know, planning, sharing, complaining and complimenting, getting into the mood to dance, or exiting from it).

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Amongst our various roles and identities we are all dancers, and an initial thought was what it might mean to salvage our dancing: our skills, practices, hopes, our professional and social relationships – and to develop new practices within the ongoing formal restrictions, as well as each of our personal experiences throughout.

 

Our aim was not necessarily to rescue, preserve, conserve, adapt, reframe… but to pick up the pieces of cancelled, postponed, missed, disrupted and unavailable dancing, and see what we might do with what remained. To embrace any states or feelings of getting rusty, out of practice, stuck in a rut, at a loss, or whatever else that moment brought, and to dance from that place.

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(Becky: Salvaging our dancing together. The activity of training - in all its forms. With colleagues but also friends, dancers and teachers. To offer thoughts and feelings, to be witnessed as a performer and witness others dancing, to listen, suggest, teach and learn – sharing what we can. There is depth of experience and plenty to be shared).

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We developed a series of scores – sometimes phrases brought to the sessions, but more often words or phrases that emerged while dancing – comments, reflections, reminders, jokes. We practised some, but not others. The necessity and nature of practice, repetition and improvement was questioned.

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Alongside the physical and relational experiences we also took photographs and footage, made drawings and wrote texts.

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(Julia: chatting - I now see clearly in Dec 2021 that Savage was/has been a pack of survival meetings to keep going in LONDON through a safe space to let the body speak. This space was researched and opened by Ben's proposal during CASCADES, and its reverberation was a shared space where quickly we connected through other layers of awareness and danced it out. Sometimes, this space of attention/presence transitioned to an usual-pedestrian-awareness in order to know each other more. I believe we found ways to navigate through the practice of this quality of presence, and it would be lovely to keep practising)