January has always been a month where I surrender to Mother nature and like the trees and plants, I hibernate. It’s a time for me to go within, to rest, to be fully grounded in my home place, where my roots are planted. Its my time to imagine, reflect and prepare for the year ahead. January is a good month for me to focus on the Earth element. The earth is our mother, the womb from which all things grow. We live on the earth, our feet and homes planted in the soil and we grow our food in the earth.
As a percussive dancer, the earth is an essential element for me to express myself. I have to connect with earth to create art, I make music with my feet as I connect with the earth. I am always searching for and experimenting with ways of making different sounds with my feet and developing new ways to create new sounds. I play the space. And the space I dance in has a huge influence on the sounds and steps that I create.
This month, I explored the different sounds I can make in and around my home, my little patch of earth on this planet. How many different sounds can I make from just walking to the garden, I dance on soil, tiles, grass, muck, gravel, sticks and concrete. I’ve always been interested in exploring ways to create sounds with different woods, so for this month I delved into the sound of my home place and how many different sounds I could find under my feet.
What I love most about percussive dance is the always changing sound response to the space where I am dancing. This can also be the most frustrating part of percussive dance, there is nothing worse than dancing on a shit floor. Whenever I am performing and it’s a new floor, I like to take some time to “get to know the space”. I find where the dead spots are on the floor to avoid, where can I find a nice base sound and clear treble sound. I always look down first whenever I walk into a room, checking out the potential dance floor. Percussive dancers play the space. The sound that I create has a huge influence on the musicality of my dance and enjoyment of my performance . I respond not only to the music, but also to the sound of the floor and space. A good sound helps me to fully integrate and internalise the piece of music I’m dancing to and enables me to feel free enough to let go and surrender to the space and music. In this letting go of my conscious mind and allowing my unconscious mind the freedom to act, the more I’m going to have a more spontaneous and joyous performance with magic moments.
So for January, I danced my way around my little spot on Mother Earth, listening to the different sounds under my feet and found that I don’t have to venture far to find a wide variety of sounds to play with.
Stephanie x