Guest Post: First Week Reflection

by Kassandra Prus

So it’s the end of a completely exhausting, utterly inspiring and wonderfully emotional week for me. My first week at EDAP started with a bit of trepidation (I’m never very good at new social situations) but a surprisingly effective name game on the first day, as well as an immediate focus on feeling, watching, and sharing with the group made me feel at ease with 16 other wonderful dancers.

Darryl Tracy’s conditioning at the beginning of the day made me find muscles I forgot I had (though I still can’t figure out how to do baby finger ‘push-ups’), and I was so happy to see Michael and Jacob right there with us.
Bonnie Kim’s technique classes were incredibly inspiring and made me feel alive right from the beginning of class. Her impetus for us to open our eyes and just dance our barre with the same personal interpretation and energy as combinations across the floor permanently changed the way I see class.
The idea of Jerome Bobb’s hip-hop classes terrified me from the beginning but I surprised myself with my ability to (eventually) pick up the entirely foreign to me, yet strangely empowering movement style. I’m very thankful that there are no mirrors in the theatre space though…

The afternoons with Michael and Jacob were brilliant. Part of my recently completed undergrad thesis detailed my opinion about the importance of using the distinctive qualities of your fine art medium to unconsciously affect your audience—to put your audience in a specific space (literally and figuratively) that affects them in a certain way because of how they must approach and experience the medium. This belief made me wonder why I was moving, what turned inspiration into choreographed movement, what the distinctive qualities of dance were, and what forced me to take that first step in an improv. These questions were confronted in our first afternoon together and I was ecstatic!

Other than articulating concepts to myself, I found a few ideas presented resonated powerfully and changed how I saw performance and movement; the search into knowing when to hold onto an idea tightly and when to let go lightly; how our awareness in a task can change our behaviour (amazing to feel in your body); to really notice our own personal habits and comfort zones, as well as our western society’s comfort zones of 3-6 (in distance between people, time spent doing tasks, effort required to do said tasks, etc) and to try to break out of them; to not think ahead and really trust other people and your own gut reactions; seeing how dramatically music, entrances, exits, stillness, and Ann Bogart’s ‘Viewpoints’ affected our movement and ‘groupness’; the idea of looking at world as most beautiful piece of choreography ever and seeing how that changes how we see movement.

These ideas and more, as well as the readings, make me so incredibly thankful of having this opportunity. Can’t wait until next week to start working on choreography!