In the first decades of the 20th century, the pioneers of modern dance rejected the long-standing convention of dance-making, in which a male ballet master choreographed onto a female ballerina.  Isadora Duncan,  Mary Wigman, and Martha Graham are three notable detractors who blazed the trail, and in each of these pioneer’s oeuvres are solos that the artist herself choreographed and performed.  Their sources were varied, but the artists pursued a common goal: to express personal experiences and perspectives in order to communicate with an audience something larger than themselves.

About a century later,  Iowa-based Amanda Hamp humbly sets out to do this five times, in her evening length work Loss, the Great Escape and Other Memories.  Comprised of five separate solos,  Hamp originally choreographed the work to be performed by five different dancers. Now she challenges herself to perform them all.  She writes:

“I’ve been feeling and thinking of performance differently this past year.  More and more, it’s about the exchange between the performer/performance and the audience.  Or, between the people in the room and the universe.  It’s less about the choreography or the dancing, and more about what flows back and forth through those mediums.  It’s about what experiences, meanings, associations, inspirations, reminders and possibilities flow between audience and performer through the vehicle of performance.  

I work to soften myself so that something larger than myself can happen.“

Hamp will perform 2 of the solos, “The Rest of Alice” and “Dwelling” at Cultivate, and will also facilitate a session of work that serves as the foundation of her physical and creative practice: Open Source Forms, or OSF.

OSF is an expansion of its predecessor, Skinner Releasing Technique, and has been developed by Stephanie Skura based on her years as a teacher, improviser, choreographer, performer and SRT core faculty member. In this session, Hamp will guide movement studies, imagery-based experiences, and brief partner exchanges for conveying kinesthetic information. Wherever the participant is in their own process, OSF facilitates softening and letting go of tensions, holdings and habitual patterns so that other possibilities can emerge.

class:    Open Source Forms
time:     Friday, 2-4pm
place:    Great Hall, WMS
cost:      $25 (or, included in any Fest Pass)
for:        Anyone, regardless of prior experience, wanting to let go of unnecessary     movement tensions, habits and patterns.
more:   visit Cultivate on Eventbrite to reserve your spot!