The creative juices are always flowing here at Curious Motion, but recently it seems we have even more opportunity for sharing, creation and artistry, as we embark on creating our new inclusive performance company for Welland 2024.
A fantastic group of community members from all walks of life have come to collaborate with us on a restaging of ‘This Here Land, a piece we made a year ago for Welland 2024, which explored the local landscape, culture and community. Our previous rehearsal process was very intense – just one week! This year we are stretching it out more, coming together weekly in preparation for Welland in October. This is giving us more time to try things out, discard them, change them, share them with each other. It’s such an exciting time at Curious Motion and I firmly believe we can co-create something really very special.
But as always, I do believe that the process is as important, if not more, than the performance itself… so without further ado here are some of my thoughts from the rehearsal room so far:
We are committed to co-creation.
As usual, co-creation is central to our process – there is a strong commitment to authentic collaboration between professional and community dancers. I wrote a whole blog post about this a while back, you can give it a read here! As a professional dancer in the space, this involves the acknowledgment that my ideas and those of the community performers hold equal weight, and that a key responsibility of mine is to provide support so that everyone can contribute to the piece as a whole. At points I am required to step back too, and support the community members in their ownership of the work. So far, the group have been incredibly generous with the sharing of their thoughts, stories and movements and I have felt genuinely inspired.
The space belongs to everyone.
I suppose you could say this comes under the umbrella of co-creation, but for me it feels more about creating the parameters for co-creation to take place. We spent a lot of time in the first session getting to know one another, and we have set out, and are still in the process of refining, a manifesto for how we want the process to feel and operate. This involves a strong sense of respect for one another as human beings, with an understanding that we will all need different things on different days. It’s about fostering a space where we allow each other to be ourselves without judgement, to feel safe, to feel welcomed.
It’s not a Curious Motion session without a brew break!
Creation can feel like a lot of information is flying around the room at once! As such, as a group it seems we really value the time to pause, reflect and put the kettle on. Rest is such a key component to working well, and can provide much needed processing and discussion time.
Each session is peppered with small, magical moments.
My favourite highlights in a process are the little ones, not just the big triumphs. I can think of several lovely sparks of connection and fun so far. The collective “whoop” of agreement when everyone likes a music choice during warm up… the careful insightful feedback given after watching another person’s work… the gentleness participants have with each other when someone is nervous, and the genuine happiness for one another when the resilience pays off… the way others quietly listen as a participant shares their personal experience of a movement exploration… I could go on and on.
We are still very much in the early days of this project, and already there has been so much insight, collaboration and creativity. I’ll be sharing more about the process in coming blog posts.
Until then, I look forward to immersing myself into this journey with this wonderful group of humans.