The experience

I’ve been writing so much about what I’ve been doing when I’m not dancing that I haven’t really updated you much on what I’m actually doing here, and that is dancing! As you know, I’m here for a month long dance intensive called Prodanza Italia. It’s not through Denison or any other university- it’s an independent program that brings in teachers of different styles from all over to teach two or four weeks (some teachers have split their time). Many people found it via teachers/professors who knew the program or had taught here previously. I might be the only one who found it independently—I saw a flyer at the dance building at Denison. Thank goodness for that flyer.

It’s been a very challenging few weeks, both physically and mentally. I’m learning a lot about myself as a dancer, exploring and making lots of discoveries, and starting to get a sort of sense of my strengths, weaknesses, preferences, etc. We are continuing to get all twisted up in Amy’s technique class, which is very different than what I’m used to, but I’m finally getting my head and body wrapped around it. The duets for her composition class are coming together really well, we’ve set them to a set of Dusty Springfield songs. African with Nicole and Papi the drummer is a blast! It’s exhausting, first of all, and it takes a lot of letting go of many ways in which my body has been trained (placing things, holding yourself a certain way), but I am having a ton of fun. However, the African style is very high-impact with fast and rhythmic stamping and jumping, so my ankle has unfortunately acted up again a bit. I try to have self-discipline to resist the urge to go full out and take it easy a bit. But the drum and movement really gets me going sometimes, so it’s been hard to have to remove myself from that. I’ve had to sit out a couple times so I don’t hurt myself =(. In Nicole’s composition class we’re continuing to experiment with dance-making tools and putting them to use. Since Bob has left us, we are now having many, many classes and rehearsals with Momo. Hip hop, and mostly popping and locking. It is soo difficult! I’m having fun learning the technique, but it’s frustrating because he’s trying to put together quite a long piece for our performance while we are still all beginners, so we’re trying to master the technique and learn the very fast and complicated (for us) choreography. I wish had more time to practice. We only have a week, so it’s overwhelming. We’ll see … it might be a bit embarrassing. That’s pretty much it for classes. There are also two pieces for the student choreography workshop. My roommate Chrissy’s piece is beautiful in it’s simplicity—it is very much based on gestures, and has a very light yet fascinating quality. I really enjoy it. The other piece (Rodney) Brown is choreographing, is like the complete opposite of Chrissy’s, and it’s just, ahhhhhhhh!!! Everything—the music, the concept, the choreography, the spacing, the dynamics, all SO interesting, very physically challenging, and engaging. It’s brilliant. I’m kiiiiind of obsessed with it (just for a preview, if you care, one of the songs he uses is “Bird Flu” by M.I.A. You’ll hear what I mean. Go look it up!). It def goes to or near the top of my list of favorite pieces I’ve danced in. And yes, I will do whatever I can to get a video of our performance!

In the meantime, my roommate Summer and fellow tapper I have been wanting to put together a tap piece for the performance (and Pola keeps bugging us about it), but we have been so busy that we haven’t found time, so I don’t know if that’s going to happen at all.

As I am reaching the end of my time here (eek!), I’m still not exactly sure what my feelings are about the program as a whole. So far, as a personal experience, it’s been great. I’ve made some milestone discoveries, gained self confidence, all while growing close with the fantastic people here. I’ve also very much enjoyed my free time. As an overall program, I do hope that some organizational changes are made for the future. I should write a handbook for future Prodanza-ers just warning them what to expect, because we had no sense of what was going to be going on before we came. Some logistics and things like that could use some tweaking, and even just that would make it 10 times better.

And, as far as how I’m feeling about coming home, I don’t really want to talk about it.