Last Workshop with lolly b: Collaborating Presences

Last Workshop with lolly b: Collaborating Presences
lolly b and Renée Poisson dancing • Video stills: Geneviève Johnson

Collaboration

After a year of working alone,
collaborations like these 4 one-on-one workshops
that I just finished facilitating
are like a very welcomed and much needed fresh breeze.

As the participants added their piece to the kimono
I felt they were giving it a second life, reanimating it.
And I felt more alive myself:
wanting to add to the kimono
part of my last year journey – memories and traumas.

I started to create a knitted scar and a short poem in motion
stringing together pieces of my year long movement explorations
and object findings with the participants’…

kimono with added pieces crafted by Samantha Letourneau, Nicola Jackson, Renée Poisson and lolly b • Photo montage by Geneviève Johnson

Words and Images

As I stringed a film from participants movements,
created through their encounter with me,
I weaved their words together as well.
At first, words from their answers to the application questionnaire;
then words triggered by our dancing together with images.

For me words are images;
not intellectual entities.
They trigger my senses.
I consider “images” what can make sensations arise within me…
An image for me is not only visual
But

  • olfactive
  • kinesthetic
  • auditive
  • can be related to taste, touch, balance, pain…

Words contain worlds of qualities
that can affect my movement,
give it different colours and efforts,
change my way of moving,
surprise my dancing to leap into new directions…

Imaginary Conversation

R: Even in stillness,
L: to have connected and left a part of me in
R: how water falls into rivers
S: there is an ongoing flow
L: emotional and satisfying
N: intrintinc, passionate, cathartic.

(Renée, lolly b, Samanthat, Nicola)

lolly b and Samantha Letourneau dancing • Video stills by Geneviève Johnson

Dancing their Words

As participants were exploring physically
with images and objects
they were asked to write words and impressions.

They might not have notice it at first,
but these written words
carried their newly embodied experiences of

  • Movement
  • Space
  • Place
  • Object
  • Other…

encountered during the workshop.

lolly b and Nicola Jackson dancing • Video stills by Geneviève Johnson

For the last moving exploration
participants were asked to chose 7 words they put on paper during the workshop.
As I was reading them aloud, looping them over and over,
participants danced their own words/images:
letting these images surprise them, move them;
reminiscing their experience of the day;
creating new ones…

Letting collaboration between
words, images, body, memories, sensations, movements
arise.

Poem separator

offer search
surrender to spirit and grief
move to joy
I honor your journey
and share your pain

lolly b

Poem separator

Soundscape and Music

Another collaboration I experienced this year
and particularly with this film project, is music.

Last year Sofina, the youngest of my twins,
created and performed the music for my solo Nested: Lean and Rise.
I love collaboration with family;
it seems to arise so naturally from synchronicity…

This year my nephew, Guillaume Nagy,
started to explore and create electronic music;
sending me, week after week, all his different creations.

I was so fascinated by Guillaume’s compositions
that I used them (with his permission)
in my movement and film explorations through out the year,
live and on my blog.

lolly b dancing • Video stills by Geneviève Johnson

This collaboration flourished into
Guillaume creating the music for my film-installation
for this years InFrinGinG Festival:
Threading Side by Side/ Together Apart

I edited the soundscape with his composition at its core
integrating through it:

  • field ambience,
  • body in motion sounds,
  • and words from the participants’ expectations and experience of their one-on-one workshop with me…
lolly b and Nicola Jackson dancing • Video stills by Geneviève Johnson

All these collaborating presences
are going to come alive
July 10th at 10pm
at the German Hall in Nanaimo.

I hope you will be able to attend.

CrimsonCoastDance.com

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