back to basics


We are starting off with the first daily research session today.


I am watching Kenzo move while thinking and changing my viewing positions... Watching the space filled with a solo movement, I’m lying on the floor, trying to see a difference by experiencing a different viewing position... Lying is quite cool the whole verticality of dance gets spread out in a horizontal stretches between the floor and the ceiling. The floor and the ceiling are now the walls...


Question: What are Kenzo's expectations about the research as you think about it today at the very outset of it?

(Kenzo)
Kenzo would like to get back to simply enjoying movement - since he has been busy with choreographic work a lot lately; it overtook all his time for personal development as a dancer.
This starting off activity, an improvised warm up in the studio brought him back to his real self, to the origins of the dance he makes; it feels like coming home to him. The very enjoyment of the origins of his own movement that come from him as a dancer, and which precedes being a choreographer, is the very purpose here. He feels free from the need to be effective, or delivering a product.

Back to basics.

Kenzo feels it is very important for him to get back to the basics of his own movement, to look at his own work from the very basic level and with it, from the core again; without choreographing anything. It is relaxing and exploratory at the same time.

Being watched by me, makes a change to his dance exploration too.

He says that while he is moving he doesn’t want to frame it as a warm up at the same time… it makes the moment lose the ambition... he just becomes the person who is warming up, he loses his power...
He would like to sustain the fluidity of such activity in the studio, and keep up dancing at a spontaneous level...
He is describing that level… he mentions: relax and relief, joyfulness and revelation, positive stimulation...

He would like to keep the performative parts of the research fluid, with no framing of 'now we move', 'now we talk' schedule…

(...)

He likes a more organized agenda in the studio as well though..., so the natural combination of the two could be cool… The balance could depend on the state of being/feeling/mode that we have on the day itself.