I usually prepare my body with a Vinyasa Yoga: it creates the condition for my body stability, it warms it up in a delicate way, it fosters the mind-body-breath connection and it creates the space in the body for welcoming movement and to be physically ready to embrace creation.
Enabling intuition in my studio practice
“There’s this energy coming in and out, producing flowers and trees”
Mathilde referring to our process
Movement session
I start a movement session inspired by Somatic & Gaga technique, that I have personalized with the qualities I am interested in. Curve expanding through the body, frictions disturbing the curves, thik and grabbing hands defining and drawing the space, shaking and earthquakes. I end with a completely free and crazy dance that includes jumps.
Remove the cobwebs
I start with preparing the availability of articulations in all my body starting from hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, chest, neck, face, hair, then the torso, the pelvis, the ischium, the knees, the ankles and the foot. At this stage I think about bones simply focusing on their articulation and a light mobilization to create availability. This process give me time to enter in the body and listen to its daily humour, I wake it up gently and then I go back to the hands.
Dig into movement engines
When my body is ready, I start the investigation on my engines, through a movement session inspired by Somatic & Gaga technique, that I have personalized with the qualities I am interested in. At this level muscles and fascia are activated. My starting points are the hands, a special part of my body, I focus on their sensitivity and materiality, their ability to draw ans to feel. I explore their connection with elbows and shoulder, the neck and the chest, navigating through waves that I catch with attention on the small glimpses crossing my body. I focus on the pelvis and the ischium, letting the torso unscrew from it, like a genie in the lamp.
How the ischium can open towards the outside generating an instability in the legs and and a closure across the bottom of my body followed by the top? How does the pelvis induce waves and deviations and how i connects with the core creating an internal rythm conducting the peripheries with small frictions? How can I surf this energies with my pelvis without forgetting the rest?
Then I go to the feet, how can I challenge my usual foothold, leeting all the parts of the feet being responsible for the wait of this transforming body in motion?
I walk on an unusual surface, with the side of the foot or the tips of the toes. And how does this change have an impact in the shape of my body?
I play contantly with flow and frictions finding different ways to produce them.
After this phase of focused exploration that often needs stops not to loose the focus, or needs rallenties when I cannot control anymore the acceleration of what is happening, I let the body be free in this contrainst, through the explorantion of different qualities and textures.
Creation moment
Images as mental states
I use a notebook where I write dreams, sentences, inspiring material and a box with miniatures of myself together with pieces of paper and other material that I use to make collage. Through the research I have discovered how my collages, which were more a reflection tool, can become also a starting point for creation, establishing a creative generative loop.
I create sequences of images that I transfer in the body connecting with them as a body state, a moving situation that I can reconnect to. I try to think about the situation that the image inspires in my body.
When I have finished the journey, I took a moment where I freely travel between these worlds, immersing myself into the dialogue I am producing and in the magic environments appearing around me. Through this exercise I reach what I consider the ideal environment for intuitions to pop up and to be literally inside an intuitive body.
-Walk out of a picture, long and neverending, waving.
-There is something hidden in your hands, you show-unshow.
-You want to say something, you don’t want to say it.
-You have a double you starting from your feet, a baloonis lifting one side, the other, ispointed by a pin.
The phrase
When I finish, I focus on the discoveries I made during the warmup and eventually I start practicing a phrase that I try to remember. Since I have always experienced difficulties in remembering sequences of choreographic material both as a dancer and as a choreographer, I am constantly finding solutions to overcome this limit.
-I rewrite stories based on what I produce through improvisation, creating a loop of movement and writing, towards a fixed sequence that I repeat (than it becomes fixed in the mental meaning but not so fixed in the shapes).
-I have recently introduced also simple sentences related to the material I am creating, and I play assigning one word to each movement. I repeat the sequence by talking and I challenge my body-brain connection by changing the words’ order, the “moving word” opens up new narratives, new sounds and new meanings.
-I have noticed I tend to make sounds while creating, moving or choreographing on other bodies. They are sounds that help me in indicating the quality without having to rely on "counts" and they also support my memory.
The blurry image
Take a minute to enter in a state of mind reconnected to the suggestions that I gave through the images I gave before.
Do your phrase connected to that state of mind, like a blurry shape not having longer the contours.