Wow, a busy few weeks by all accounts!
Finished writing my PhD thesis (now just the viva to go before I can officially
call myself Dr. Southall!), went to Tribal Massive for 8 days of training, and
Infusion Emporium just over with... lots to tell you about, so grab a cup of
tea and find a comfy chair! First Tribal Massive – I won’t bore you with the
details of my 28 hours of travel to actually get to Las Vegas, so I’ll just cut
to the chase!
Tribal Massive
We began the first day with 6 hours back to
back with Kami Liddle. Kami has recently studied Bartenieff method and was
incorporating these ideas into her warm up and dance practice. She led us
through a series of exercises and finished with a choreography, which we
continued learning the following day. I found this very interesting and the
different ways of moving were something I will definitely incorporate into my
own dancing. I loved the choreography, it was so powerful and full of contrast
and space. I was glad that we continued to work on it the following day. Following
the workshop I went back to the hotel to Skype with Dan as it was his birthday,
and I was selfishly missing it to be in Las Vegas! After this was the hafla,
which I performed at – an improvised piece that I think went ok. The hafla was
full of lovely dance pieces, but it was a pretty long night and after 28 hours
of travel the previous day I was feeling too destroyed to really give the
performers all my energy like I usually do.
Day 2 was our first day with Zoe. Five
hours of bellydance flow drills, musicality, crazy layering, combos and finger
cymbals. We learned a bunch of combos that were new and exciting, but the brain
was so overwhelmed with information that I can no longer remember them. I wish
that I had the propensity to store more information than I actually do! Despite
taking notes, there was not much time to write down the combinations, and so
they have disappeared into the ether. However, the combos are not the important
thing, rather the technique and concepts behind them are the important things
to remember, and I came away with pages of information to work with.
Following this was Kami again – we did tons
of footwork with layering, which I absolutely loved, followed by continuing
with the choreography. Last year I enjoyed Kami’s workshops and took things
away to work with, but I felt that this year she has really developed a new
body of material with fresh ideas and I’m excited by her new workshops. I felt
like I came away with so much to work on from this class and the previous one.
Day 3 was again Zoe – flow drills, dancing
slowly and musicality was the name of the game. As always she offered useful
insights into making dances, interpreting the music and training. Following this
was Sharon Kihara’s first workshop ‘Digging for Gold’. After some welcomed
yoga, she discussed the need to be flexible as a dancer, and by that she meant
being able to not be you, and sometimes having to be a character you don’t
identify with, referring specifically to her current role in Jillina’s BDE
show. She followed this with some
contemporary dance movement, which was a stark contrast to a lot of the
movement we were introduced to the rest of the week. It made my desire to
return to contemporary dance stronger – I have wanted to take classes again for
a while now but the only class that’s in a reasonable travelling distance for
me is the same night I teach – so annoying! After getting us to move across the
floor, we got into groups and played that game we used to play at school –
Consequences – though the game I remember at school always turned out
significantly cruder than the stories each group produced! We then had to
create tableaux that represented different points in our story and then fill the
gaps with movement – the purpose being to dig inspiration for a piece from this
silly game and produce a group choreography from it that had a story and could
be easily portrayed. The exercise produced surprisingly good results! I was
rather sceptical at first, I always am with these kinds of games in dance
class, but I was really impressed with how it sparked the creativity of each
group and made us thing differently on how to make a choreography.
The next day was our final day with Zoe,
where we covered more zill patterns while dancing, drilling and working with
musicality. Zoe is an inspirational creative force that continues to inspire me
on my dance journey to be a better dancer, a more exciting choreographer and to
train hard. She has changed the way I think about dance and has heavily
influenced how I approach using a piece of music from a musicality perspective.
There are few other teachers that currently feed my soul and my spirit in the way
she does, and I had the great pleasure of getting to spend time having
conversations with her this year instead of just seeing her in class, which was
a great experience.
Following Zoe we had our second class with
Sharon Kihara, Infinite Inner Space, which was a Butoh inspired workshop. I
took this workshop in Bristol a couple of years ago, and while I felt I got
something out of it then, it didn’t inspire me on a deeper level. This year it
was much better – we went through several exercises where I really felt like I
was engaging with the material more deeply. One exercise consisted of half of
the class being ‘placed inside a glass box, about 3 feet wide, tall and deep’,
with the trigger ‘lost child’. I was in this group and I really felt that I was
embodying the assignment. I recalled how I felt when I was a child that lost my
mother – panicked, frightened, like the world had ended. And, I don’t really do
well with small spaces, so being in this ‘box’ also really freaked me out. I
couldn’t breathe for about 10 minutes afterwards. I usually don’t engage with
‘theatricality’ workshops well, but I made a conscious effort to open up more
to it for this week. These kinds of workshops bring up all sorts of emotions –
when people have dealt with illness, death, depression, fear... this stirs up a
lot emotionally, and there were several dancers that cried in class, myself
included. If I see someone crying I will also start crying, I’m that kind of
person! Sharon did a great job of grounding
everyone before class was over and having us return to a state that meant we
weren’t dwelling on the emotions from the class.
The following three workshops were with
Mira Betz. Anyone that knows me knows that last year I said I was done with
Mira. I’d had a bad workshop experience with her in 2011, and at the 2012
Massive I didn’t really enjoy any of the workshops that were not dance based. I
went into day one of Mira with this negative perception of her, and by day 3 my
opinion had turned around completely. She was like a different person this
year. Day one was lots of across the floor movement drills followed by a fast
choreography (and I’m talking UNMATA fast!) with a contemporary twist, which I
really enjoyed learning. Day 2 was ‘the talky day’, but actually it was unlike
any Mira lectures I’ve taken, where I felt that the information was relevant to
dance and didn’t involve as much talking as last year! It was essentially a
theatricality workshop, but I have to say was the best one I’ve taken. There
were no ‘imagine your father just died’ exercises which I have heard in
countless theatricality workshops and think is really inappropriate. All the
exercises related directly to dance movement rather than just being theatre for
the sake of it. I really felt like there was stuff from this I could take away
and apply to my dance to make the messages I want to portray more clearly in my
body.
After day one with Mira was an afternoon
off for the show rehearsals so I took the opportunity to Skype with Dan, get
some formatting of my PhD document done and relax. In the evening Antonella,
Sunci and I went to Cirque du Soleil’s show Mystere at Treasure Island. It was
an amazing show with impressive feats of all kinds – trapeze, silks, body
balancing and more. It was a really great show, but I actually preferred Ka,
the show I saw last year, as I liked having the storyline to follow. We paid
$60 for the tickets, but got moved to the expensive seats because there were
some spare, so all in all a great experience!
On the evening of our second day with Mira
was the show, which I cannot even begin to tell you about because every act was
amazing in its own right. It was even better than last year, and it’s really
difficult to pick highlights because it was just so good. Of course, I really
enjoyed Zoe’s performances, and UNMATA closed with the set that they did at
Tribal Umrah which never fails to get me shedding a tear. I performed in the
show, albeit for about 60 seconds! I danced a combo on the end of Sundari’s
performance, as I had done in Split last year. It was fun to dance on the
Massive stage, though of course I would have loved to have performed one of my
own pieces there! It did feel strange to be the only dancer in costume that
didn’t go up to take a bow. And it was very bittersweet, as sometime that night
the brooch I had pinned to my belt fell off, and it was a brooch that really
meant a lot to me. I checked with Security the following day and they let me
scour the venue, but I couldn’t find it. I’m really very upset that it has gone
missing, heartbroken in fact as it was a very meaningful gift from a friend.
Now it’s gone for good. I just hope that someone picked it up and will treasure
it as much as I did, because it would be so much worse if it has been cleaned
up with the trash. By the time it was all over we were starving and had to wait
a long time for food! It was 3AM by the time we got to bed.
The next day was more Mira – this time I
had to sit out because the turns in the combo she was teaching were making me
so dizzy I thought I would be sick. 4 hours sleep is not a good amount to go to
a dance class on. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to stick it out! The class was again
very interesting, different way to look at group choreography using a combo and
improvisation. It was actually cool to be an observer than a participant – I
think I actually learned more this way from this particular class.
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| Sciahina & Alexis prepare for the Massive Spectacular |
After Mira we had Amy Sigil, who took us on
the Human Experience. She taught a variety of combos in her own unique way and
we danced them all together at the end. She had us writing down things that we
then inputted into a paper that she handed out to make a story of our human
experience. If you’ve ever taken her STATIC workshop, it was a similar thing.
It was a great class – Amy always has really different and intelligent ways of
approaching learning, teaching and dance in general. She and Zoe are the
teachers I feel are feeding me the most creatively right now. That night we all
went to bed really early and slept for a long time!!
The next day was the final day. We started
with Frederique – another theatricality workshop. Her material was also
interesting and some parts were different to Sharon’s, others similar. I think
by the time it got to her, we had already done two theatre workshops, and I for
one was a little less receptive to doing a third. I enjoyed the class, but I
think I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t already done two workshops on a
similar theme. I did really enjoy Fred’s warm up, though, which targeted the
core. I’m always looking for new core exercises so I was pleased.
After Fred,
our final class was Amy, and was actually my favourite class of the week – ITS!
We covered many of the basic stall movement of ITS and their associated big and
little sisters, and it was really nice to be able to see the similarities and
differences between Fat Chance format and Hot Pot format. It’s definitely
something I want to do more of. I was grinning the whole way through, I loved
it. We were split into a stagger formation to begin with, having learned the
basic vocabulary she wanted us to work with, then moving onto circles in our
groups. We then worked with large staggers, circles, chorus line and multiple
circles and chorus lines that paved the way for passes and cascades. The format
is so complicated and yet so intuitive. I just adored it, I can’t wait to do
more. It was a great way to end the week, everyone dancing together, relying on
each other. Perfect. I was sad to say goodbye to the teachers and friends of
the week. It’s always hard to go back to reality and normality after such an
intensive training experience and being away from home for so long. I, however,
didn’t go back to normality, not in its entirety. My PhD is finished; I had
April Rose with me for a whole week. So my reality wouldn’t hit for another
seven days... somehow I think it’s worse this way!
For anyone
considering a trip to the US for training, Tribal Massive is the best festival
I have been to. You focus so much on dance, everything else is unimportant. I
saw such a dramatic change in my dancing last year; I can’t wait to see how it
affects everything this year. But I think it will change me in a different way
this year.
Infusion Emporium
Somehow it would be replete of me to
present a blog about Massive without including the event that occurred
immediately afterwards – Infusion Emporium presents... April Rose. I won’t go
on for too long because I’ve wittered on for long enough already. It was a real
pleasure to host April Rose – so easy going and easy to get along with,
unfussy. Really a great person to sponsor. Her workshops were inspirational,
teaching Making Choreography (a favourite of mine from her workshops at Split a
few years ago), and Making Choreography 2 for the first time ever - A UK exclusive! Sunday was
technique and dancing day, where we learned combos and short choreography as
well as steps from other dance forms for the Unapologetic Fusion class. April
attended my weekly class earlier in the week which was a bit nerve-wracking;
and we took a day trip to London taking in Camden market and the British Museum
as well as seeing the Ballet Revolucion show.
The Infusion Emporium showcase went really
well. We worked closely with the lighting team at the theatre so that we had
better lighting than ever for the show, and we’re really pleased how it turned
out. Below I’ll share my new solo and duet with Dawn O’Brien so you can get a
feel of the venue and what’s in store for November.
And on that note – Friday 15th
November is our next show, and workshops taking place all weekend. Our special
guest instructors for November are former director of the Tribal BDSS and Beats
Antique dancer, Tribal Fusion extraordinaire Kami Liddle; and three up and
coming dancers on the international scene: German dancer Giuliana Angelini,
Canadian dancer Heather Labonté, and me! So save the date! We’ll be putting all
info online very soon, with booking opening at the end of May. We hope that you
will join us once again!
Hope to see you somewhere on the road in
2013!
Alexis x
Alexis's Solo from Infusion Emporium - Til Enda
Alexis & Dawn's duet - Siren Song
