Creative Reset: The Practice of Making with Audacity

Creative Reset: The Practice of Making with Audacity

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

What: Seven sewing classes in which you will make a dress and learn to adapt that basic dress pattern to work for different bodies and styles. 

When: Tuesday evenings, 7-8 PM, October 6, 13, 20, 27, November 3, 10, and 17, 2020

Where: Right in front of your very own sewing machine in the comfort of wherever you have room to make a dress. Yes, you need to provide your own sewing machine. We will help you learn to use it. Classes are held online.

How: Register here. Classes are $10 each, and you must sign up for all seven classes in order to finish your dress.

Why: Once, I tried to make a dress. I put a square pocket on the chest, and I sewed all four sides of that pocket to the bodice. It was not great. If only I’d had Ashley Horn Nott to help me.

Ashley would have had a plan for my inexperience, my ignorance, my besotted love for the fabric and my overconfidence in “figuring out” a sewing machine. The first time Ashley took on a costume-making project for a dance company, her sewing experience was straight lines and stuffing. Pillows. She knew she could sew a pillow cover, and the rest she had the audacity to make up.

And it worked! Today, Ashley has made costumes for most of the modern dance companies in Houston, including her own productions. Absolutely hundreds (possibly thousands?) of dresses and other costumes gorgeously crafted. Why did Ashley’s gamble worked and mine didn’t? I’m guessing that Ashley had more tenacity to match her audacity than I did. She also made the compelling decision to promise other people that she would complete her project. No one cared when I folded up my half-dress with its unusable patch of a pocket and never unfolded it again. Ashley had a commitment to people she cared about, people who were counting on those costumes, and that accountability motivated her through the “now I have to seam-rip the whole damn thing” moments.

Let us be that accountability for you. Maybe you’ve been saying that you want to sew your own clothes. Maybe you found the most amazing fabric. Maybe you found that fabric years ago and you’re ready to give it form. Maybe you are a dancer and you want to be able to make costumes for yourself and others. This is a chance to create beside a self-made professional. Grab your audacity and make it into a dress. Your dress.

 

How is making a dress a creative reset? Um, can I answer that tomorrow? It’s kind of a whole thing…

 

 

 

The World is Our Dance Studio

The World is Our Dance Studio

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

Outdoor Fall Programming from Frame Dance

Quarantine and social distancing has taken away many habits and practices, but sometimes the things we replace them with are so very sweet. We’ve been forced out of the dance studio this fall, but when we walked through that door we found ourselves on the grass, under the sky, breathing deeply among the trees. Frame Dance has a lot of practice using the city as its stage, an now we are using it as our studio, taking our dance classes into the parks and green spaces of Houston.

 

Like other dance programs, we offer online dance and dance-related content. Unlike other dance programs, we have not gone hybrid or into taped-off personal areas in a studio in order to dance together.* Instead, we offer you the uncommon joy of dancing outdoors. 

 

Three outdoor classes happen on the weekends: Creative Movement and MultiGen on Saturday mornings, and Beginning Modern Dance on Sundays. The first two are are grassier versions of the classes we’ve offered season after season, but Beginning Modern for adults with Jacquelyne Boe is all new. To us. Jacquelyne had taught modern dance to adults for many years at various studios, and we are proud and pleased to offer this first ongoing adult class with a member of our prestigious company. I personally take classes with Jacquelyne whenever I have the chance because her classes are thorough and inventive and good for one’s physical and mental health. I mean, all dance classes are, or should be, but these have an extra layer of goodness. Our girl is insightful and efficient. Give yourself the gift of experiencing it. Register here.

 

Creative Movement is for families to dance together at a park, which is exactly what I thought parenting would be before I became a parent. Lydia leads this idyllic interval of sweetness. Each family will purchase a bag of dance accessories to use at class and at home during the week where the learning and joyful activity can continue. Register here.

 

MultiGen is the epitome of Dance for All. Every body can dance and every mind and spirit can grow from the practice of dance, and this happens with uncompromising quality of instruction and abundance of heart at MultiGen dance class. For everyone, all ages, all abilities, even babies worn by a dancing adult are welcome (those special pairs of people are also welcome in Creative Movement along with their dancing child). MultiGen is about radically inclusive community, which means that you, all of you, automatically belong there. Register here.

 

See you on the grass, under the sun, surrounded by living things, dancing outside like the happy, wild artists we are.

 

*No shade. If we had our own studio, with rent to pay, we’d be taping those floors for sure.

Creative Reset: The Practice of Learning from Others

Creative Reset: The Practice of Learning from Others

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

A History of Modern Dance with Jamie Williams

What: A series of three one-hour lecture/conversations on modern dance history with dancer and professor of dance, Jamie Williams.

When: Monday evenings, 7-8 pm, October 5, November 2, and December 7, 2020.

Where: Your screen of choice.

How: Register here. Cost is $10/class.

Why: Modern dance pioneers were masters of the Creative Reset.

The earliest modern dance artists knew that existing forms of dance – primarily ballet – were insufficient to explore and express conditions in the early 20th century. It was an era of seismic recalibration in all areas of human culture. These artists were working at the time of Freud, Einstein, and early Picasso, and their ideas were no less self-consciously revolutionary:

 

Denishawn Dancers, 1900, photo by Bain News Agency, Library of Congress

 

“I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionize our entire epoch.”

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)

 

“We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.”

Ruth St Denis (1879-1968)

 

Merce Cunningham, “EyeSpace,” 2009, photo by Daniel Arsham

 

Contemporary and post-modern dancers also recognized the need to drop what is non-essential and do a creative reset, to accept and stretch into the new senses and modes that reveal themselves:

 

“I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself”

On randomly chosen movements: “…I would always try it because the mind will say `you can’t do it,’ but more often than not you can, or you see another way, and that’s what’s amazing. In some cases it’s impossible, but something else happens, some other possibility appears, and your mind opens.”

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)

 

“Making dances is an act of progress; it’s an act of growth…”

Alvin Ailey (1931-1989)

 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performs Revelations, Miami, 2011, photo courtesy of the Knight Foundation

 

“I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn’t work.”

Meredith Monk (1942)

 

Meredith Monk gives us some direction on finding the “set” part of “reset,” a way to recognize when we have hit that sweet spot of a new “sense” – to take Olafur Eliasson figuratively – that will work for us in our changed environment:

 

“That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.”

 

Meredith Monk, “On Behalf of Nature,” Brooklyn, 2014, photo by Steven Pisano, courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music

 

Dancers have studiously refined senses, and no one literally or figuratively pivots with grace and strength like a dancer, so I can’t wait to have my mind blown by the facts, the philosophies, the responses, the lives of modern dance masters. 

 

*I tried to bold every synonym of RESET in this post. Did I get them all?*

 

Featured image: Meredith Monk, “On Behalf of Nature,” Brooklyn, 2014, photo by Steven Pisano, courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music

Creative Reset: The Possibilities

Creative Reset: The Possibilities

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

In 2019, ahead of a massive exhibit of his work appearing at the Tate Modern museum in London, artist Olafur Eliasson spoke with Mark Turner, art correspondent for The Guardian, about his installations, specifically about a piece titled “Your Blind Passenger.” The work is a room filled with fog and lit by colored fluorescent lights such that all that is visible to the viewer is a shallow, blurry colorscape. Only a few people are allowed into “Your Blind Passenger” at a time because it is so disorienting, making the viewer even more likely to feel detached and alone in an indistinct but colorful unknown. Eliasson said of the experience, “Very quickly you realise, and I mean this quite literally, that you are not completely blind after all, you have a lot of other senses which start to kick in.”

With this realization comes a shift, a transfer of attention. Something is taken away or blocked – in this case most of the visual information –  and the response of the viewer is to adjust how they engage with their surroundings. According to Eliasson, “it shows that the relativity of our senses is much higher than we think, we have it in our capacity to recalibrate or at least stop being numb” (emphases mine).

 

Eliasson’s work is often about jarring, all-encompassing alterations, like “Your Blind Passenger,” and they are often about connections that are simultaneous with fracture. Some of his visually quietest pieces sound the loudest social alarms. I feel like Eliasson’s work is made for coping with COVID and our ongoing strangeness. I feel like the quote above is instructional for living in a world where the the crisis alert is stuck at 11.

First – I think the quote is telling us – we need to be aware of these numb and underused senses. Then, bringing our attention to them, we can start to turn them on or turn them up. We can do work and practice actions to heighten the senses to the point that they become capable of nuance, of making and receiving meaning. Because our attention is finite – even when turned up to 11 – by attending to new areas, we are less reliant on the ones that used to dominate our awareness. We have recalibrated.

 

The issue of recalibration has been on Lydia Hance’s mind over the spring and summer. Accustomed to helping people bring attention to their (often underused, not quite nuanced) sense of movement, Lydia knows that practicing this set of sensations – practicing dance –  reduces stress and reduces the need to rely on other sensations for managing stress. Dance practice heightens the sense of the body in space, making movement more efficient and less stressful on the body. It also gives people another way to process and express emotion, again reducing the stress load we carry in our bodies and our thoughts. Lydia knew that during the stresses of quarantine and social unrest, people had lost some of their most powerful coping devices – face-to-face interaction with people we care for and freedom of movement both within and outside of one’s community. She knew that people needed a reset.

Lydia has a mighty set of creative friends, makers of one kind or another (or a whole bunch of kinds at once) who identified areas where a little attention to an underused skill goes a long way toward recalibration. Creative Reset is designed on these practices. Taken alone, the practices allow for recalibration. Taken multiply, you’ve got yourself a transformation!

Coming Soon, Creative Reset: The Practices

Cover image: Photo “Your rainbow panorama” By Harkolufs 

Inset images: From “Room for One Color” Tate Modern 1997, Photos by Anders Sune Berg from olafureliasson.net

Dance in Quarantine: Responses and Resources

Dance in Quarantine: Responses and Resources

Education Frame | Work Links We Like News & Updates

I don’t need to tell you that we as a society have gone through massive and abrupt changes in recent months. I would like to take this opportunity to notice and celebrate the ways that dancers and choreographers – always nimble, always flexible – have created, discovered, expanded, adapted, worked and reworked formats for creating and sharing dance in this time of uncertainty. In the role of artist, dancers and choreographers both lead and reflect our responses to events and our shifting perspectives. The art of dance has held an important place in quarantine culture since it began, becoming uniquely popular as we stay home to stay safe. 

 

By the end of March, publications like the LA Times and Vanity Fair were reporting on online dance classes and dance parties, while industry journals like Dance Enthusiast had designated space for social distance dance content. Dance companies responded with choreography and editing that allowed dancers to dance alone together. On March 29, the Martha Graham Dance Company posted “Sharing the Light,” excerpts from Graham’s dance Acts of Light performed by company members in domestic and outdoor spaces. In format, “Sharing the Light” is reminiscent of the gorgeous dance films of Mitchell Rose, specifically 2016’s “Exquisite Corps” and 2019’s “And So Say All of Us,” where dancer-choreographers are connected by movement, music, and editing while dancing worlds apart. It is an adaptable format. For example, it is used adorably and with feeling by YouTubers Dylan Arredando in a series of Quarantine Movement Chain Letters, and Prischepov TV to present the Quarantango.

 

Dance educators were quick to adapt to virtual dance. Within days of cities declaring lockdown, studios big and small moved their classes online, and we all found the most Zoom-able corner of our house and turned it into a dance studio. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could study dance with the schools of Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Gibney Dance, and the aforementioned Martha Graham. Smaller local and regional studios without the resources of these legends have not had to navigate digital dance instruction alone. The wonderful people at the National Dance Education Organization began sharing resources for on-line dance education on March 24 and, as of today, have produced and shared fifteen free webinars on the subject. Luna Dance Institute in Berkeley, CA, hosts weekly practitioner exchanges that gather dance leadership from around the country to discuss concerns and solutions in virtual dance education. 

 

Our dance community has not missed a step (pun intended!) in it’s goal to provide quality dance training, and has even found exciting new possibilities in the online format. Student dancers are having a crash course in dance-for-camera as they consider framing, space, and editing as part of their “digital studio” skills. Pre-recorded classes give dancers a chance to look carefully, to slow down the movement, and to revisit it at will. Holding classes in the home allows the entire family to participate in dance education, and interacting with studios via social media provides a different, sometimes broader, sometimes deeper relationship between a dancer’s family and their instructors. The domestic/public spheres are being broken down and renegotiated, as are so many parts of the larger culture, offering new possibilities as old practices are eliminated or put on hold. We are learning together, and together we are remaking our world. That’s not hyperbole. That’s bodies, in motion, making choices.

Please share online dance resources – instructional and/or just fun to watch – in the comments. Show us part of your world!

Lydia’s News from Quarantine

Lydia’s News from Quarantine

Frame | Work News & Updates

Hi Friends,

It feels like it’s been awhile since I’ve written to you. My world has turned upside down with the birth of my sweet daughter, Willa. She is truly something to get delightfully lost in during the emotional rollercoaster that is COVID and quarantine. I am not exhausted by my newborn. Oh, no. I am exhausted from feeling scared, peaceful, alone, claustrophobic, irritated, anxious, and frankly, thankful for my family’s protected time together. As one who already feels my feels big and intense, this time has amplified them even more. And I know I am not alone in that. You are exhausted. You are scared, alone, claustrophobic, irritated, anxious and maybe thankful, too. This experience has been one of extreme training for my thought-life, not allowing my thoughts to run away. I’ve been trying as hard as I can to literally count my blessings as a means to control my emotions and maintain perspective.

Another reason you haven’t heard from me as much as usual is because with businesses and people turning to social media platforms, there has been an abundance of content to digest. That’s great! There was no reason to compete. However, I did want to share a few ways to connect with me and Frame Dance moving forward. I’ll start with the first event:

Saturday, April 18

National Water Dance Performances

Tune into our social media channels (@framedance on IG) at 3pm CST to watch Framers dance together with people across the world in community and solidarity for caring for our planet, our home, our natural resources.

Ongoing

Online dance classes

For the children and for the families, we offer both live zoom classes and prerecorded creative movement and ballet classes. Our master teachers are continuing their semesters online. Even if you live too far to usually attend, you can join us virtually. I’ve been so pleased with how the classes have transitioned from classroom/studio to the computer. It truly is a time of connection and joy to inject into your quarantine.

Starting now, or when you’re ready

Coming This Summer

Book club with Lydia.

This summer I am reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn it and use it for life. If you consider yourself a creative person, or would like to be more creative, or are craving accountability and structure in your creative practice, I invite you to join me! We will meet online to discuss the book a little at a time this summer. If you’d like to get a jump start on the reading like me, go ahead and order it now and we will begin meeting in June for discussions. Email Bobbie.Hackett@framedance.org to let us know you’re reading with us.

Rescheduled

Soirée

Good question, glad you brought it up. Our smashing, dazzling, super fun annual bash is being rescheduled. We are celebrating 10 years! But we want to do it safe, and right, so stay tuned for a new date.

Virtual hugs, and stretches, and dances, and sweet thoughts to you.

 

Lydia

Experienced or Exploring, We Support You!

Experienced or Exploring, We Support You!

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

Week-long summer camps are the perfect chance for kids to do two things: spend focused time on something they already like, or try on something new, something shiny that catches their curiosity but that they might not know much about. One week of focused exploration gives your child a greater understanding of and hands-on experience in a subject. That knowledge might make them hungry for more, or it might satisfy their desire for that particular dish; in either case they come away knowing a little more about their world and about their own appetites, which is great information to have!

 

Day camps in Houston are also an opportunity to learn more about local organizations that are eager to engage your family throughout the year. Museums, theaters, studios, and other institutions offer behind-the-scenes experiences with professionals in their field. These relationships and experiences are enriching and inspiring for kids, and make meaningful connections that enhance school-year studies and can be continued throughout the year.

 

Frame Dance appreciates the chance that summer camps provide to deepen our relationship with current and former dancers, and to meet new dancers (bring your friends!) as we share our inclusive, smart, and supportive approach to dance. We have just one camp available for each age group, so sign up quick

 

July 6-10 Ashley Horn and Lydia Hance teach our Wiggle Worms: A Bug’s Life camp. Creative movement, music, and mural-making for age 3 to 5 years. 

 

July 13-17 Ashley, Lydia, and educator Kerri Neimeyer (that’s me!) present Leaping Lizards camp for ages 6 to 8 years. Our theme is Sheroes and Heroes, and includes modern dance, ballet, music creation, costume design and visual arts practices.

 

July 20-24 Ashley, Lydia, Kerri, and Alli Villines present Formers and Framers for 9 to 13 year-olds, featuring training in dance, choreography, costume design and poetry/songwriting. We are making makers!

 

Whether your child is looking to dabble in dance or go deeper, we welcome and support them in their dance experiences and explorations.

 

Do you have any favorite summer camp memories? Recommendations? Surprising or niche summer camps in the area? Share them here with #FramerNation. 

Performance Anxiety with Matthew Cumbie

Performance Anxiety with Matthew Cumbie

Frame | Work Interviews

Introducing Performance Anxiety, stories from the artistic trenches

Framers, we support you as dancers, as performers, as creators, and as risk-takers.  Toward that end, we asked some of our favorite creatives to share their risk-taking and anxiety-producing experiences, to give us a peek at their process through whatever they personally have to push through or float through or let wash over them to achieve their goals of art-making and art-sharing. We hope you find encouragement and recognition in their words.

First to share is Matthew Cumbie, a collaborative dance artist living and working in Washington, DC, originally from Houston, and an experienced multigenerational dance leader from his time in Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange. We are incredibly excited to welcome Matthew “home” this weekend as guest teacher at our MultiGen class on Saturday morning.  We are so excited to share Matthew’s considerable talents, in fact, that we are opening Saturday’s class to the public. Please contact Bobbie.Hackett@framedance.org to register.

Here is Matthew’s story.

About Performance Anxiety

I like to think that, by nature, I fall more on the introverted side of a spectrum. Which I find interesting, considering that my creative practice is rooted in working with people of all ages and backgrounds, and across ideas and disciplines. It takes a lot of energy and focus to step in front of a room and facilitate a process that will foster enough curiosity, generosity, and imagination to move the room, no matter the size; to perform- if you will- in such a way that will bring me and these ideas and people closer towards collaboration. 

 

This past fall, I was on residency in South Carolina, making a new work with the Moving Body Dance Company and teaching at the University of South Carolina. Before stepping into my first workshop, I sat down in an empty studio to breathe and collect my thoughts and energy. I was about to feel a rush I only find from collaboration, and the thrill of discovering things together. And I knew I needed this moment. It didn’t strike me until then, though, that this was my pre-performance practice. I sometimes imagine that the moment before stepping on stage, or starting a workshop, or leading a meeting- that this is what it must feel like to be launched out of a cannon or blasted into space. It’s exhilarating, terrifying, and kinetic. I have come to know that, wherever I am and whatever I am about to do, I need a moment to turn into myself before I share myself with others.

 

When I was asked to write something on performance anxiety, I immediately began to wonder what I would write about. The more I think about it now, the more I think that we can find examples of this in all parts of our life. Because isn’t this anxiety ultimately about sharing what we have with others, and doing the best we can with that? I’m reminded of one my favorite sayings by Liz Lerman: “The world is fragmented. I am not.” 

About Matthew

Matthew Cumbie (he/him/his) is a collaborative dancemaker and artist educator living in Washington, DC. His artistic research cultivates processes and experiences that are participatory and intergenerational, moving through known and unknown, and bring a poetic lens to a specifically queer experience. His choreography- considered “a blend of risk-taking with reliability, [and] a combination of uncertainty and wisdom,” by Kate Mattingly- weaves together a physical vocabulary of momentum and clarity, revelatory moments, and a belief in a body’s capacity to document and reflect back our lived experiences. 

 

He has danced in the companies of Christian von Howard, Keith Thompson|danceTactics Performance Group, jill sigman|thinkdance, Paloma McGregor|Angela’s Pulse, and Dance Exchange- an intergenerational dance organization founded by Liz Lerman- where he eventually became an Associate Artistic Director and the Director of Programs and Communications. Currently, he creates work with Annie Kloppenberg, Betsy Miller, and Tom Truss, and collaborates with a team of multidisciplinary artists through Matthew Cumbie Projects; Matthew also dances for Christopher K. Morgan & Artists. His work has been commissioned and supported by places like Dance Place, the Kennedy Center, and Harvard University, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, the Arcus Foundation, and the Somerville Arts Council. Originally from Houston, Texas, Matthew holds undergraduate degrees from Texas Lutheran University and Texas State University and an MFA in dance from Texas Woman’s University.

Photo Credits, top to bottom: Photo by Jesse Scroggins, featuring Darryl Pilate and Matthew in Growing Our Own Gardens: Reminiscin’ on Roots. Photo by Sarah Christine Nastoupil, featuring Matthew leading a workshop at the Texas Dance Improvisation Festival. Photo by Ben Carver, featuring Matthew and Thomas Dwyer in Dance Exchange’s “New Hampshire Ave: This Is a Place To…”

Let’s Talk About Women and Social Anxiety

Let’s Talk About Women and Social Anxiety

Frame | Work News & Updates

Considering Oh, I have to wash my hair In Terms of Cursorily Googled Research.

Yes, I am woman. Yes, I have (too much) experience with social anxiety. Yes, I am performing in Oh, I have to wash my hair this week. And yes, I did Google “women and social anxiety” to find authoritative sources for this blog post. Let’s talk about it. There is a place for comments, y’all. Use it.

 

First, let’s hear from a woman who has researched and experienced social anxiety. I found this personal and professional narrative on the website The Cut in an interview by Cari Romm with writer Andrea Petersen, science and health reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Peterson published the book On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety and in it she writes that “there is no greater risk factor for anxiety disorders than being born female.” Petersen continues,”women are about twice as likely as men to develop [an anxiety disorder], and women’s illnesses generally last longer, have more severe symptoms, and are more disabling.” 

 

Lydia Hance, choreographer and Frame Dance Founder and Artistic Director, has identified a very real phenomenon. She has also identified one of the insidious patterns of social anxiety, one that hides in the veil of “nature” and gender. It is the idea that girls and women need to prioritize the feelings and opinions of others, and the idea that girls and women are under threat and need be fearful and suspicious to ensure their survival. In On Edge, Peterson discusses research on parenting that shows both mothers and fathers, with their language and their behavior, discourage daughters from physically risky play while encouraging sons to take risks, projecting their assurance that boys are capable of either accomplishing the difficult task or of accepting the hurt they might suffer. 

 

“So, while this kind of parenting might protect girls physically, the research suggests that it also contributes to this feeling of vulnerability, that the world is a dangerous place. Because the message that it sends to girls – encouraging them to be very cautious and always highlighting safety and danger – is that the world is a dangerous place and that they can’t cope on their own. And that feeling of vulnerability of course is a core belief of anxiety as well.”

 

In the program Oh, I have to wash my hair, look for the generational, parental encouragement – or insistence – for girls to accept social discomfort and fear. Do you see messages that female safety depends on external approval, which depends on their presentation, which is expected to be inoffensive, congenial, pleasant, acquiescent? Where are these messages in the show? Do you find them in your life? How dated or contemporary are these ideas? How are they encouraged or challenged in society?

 

Peterson talks about a sense of vulnerability that is primarily physical when it comes to parents and young children, but she points to the idea that this fear becomes generalized, and in social anxiety the belief that one is threatened with damage or destruction is no less real than the risk of falling off the monkey bars. But it is endlessly more ambiguous and subtle.

 

Stephan G Hoffman is director of the Social Anxiety Program at Boston University and he says, in an interview with Olga Khazan on theatlantic.com, that “people are social animals, and we have a strong desire to be part of a group and to be accepted by the group. Social anxiety is a result of the fear of a possibility that we will not be accepted by our peers. It’s the fear of negative evaluation by others, and that is [part of] a very fundamental, biological need to be liked.”  Angela Chen of the website theverge.com interviewed clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen and about her work with social anxiety and about her book How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Hendriksen, echoing Hoffman, says the “social anxiety is a perception that there is something embarrassing and deficient about us, and, unless we work hard to conceal or hide it, it will be revealed and we will be judged or rejected for it.”

 

What does this fear of “negative evaluation,” judgement, and rejection feel like for you? Are there certain kinds of environments or people where these feelings are stronger? How do you address these fears when you see or hear about them in other people, perhaps in your child? Can you identify these fears in any part of Oh, I have to wash my hair, perhaps in the music, a dance score or scene, or an individual gesture or action? 

 

Both Hendriksen and Hoffman describe socially anxious people as employing certain habits before, during, and after stressful situations. Says Hoffman, 

 

Initially, they will dread the event, going there, they will worry excessively about the upcoming social event. They will be predicting that the worst thing will come true. And they will be extremely worried for a long period of time. Once you bring them into the situation, when they have to face whatever social challenge there is, they will then often report that they have no control over their anxiety. They believe that a mishap would have disastrous, long-lasting, irreversible consequences. They will report that they are not in control of their body, of their anxiety response, that others will see how anxious they are, and then they will try to avoid, to get out of the situation and escape. Sometimes they try to use strategies that are more subtle, such as holding tight on a glass while they talk to someone so people don’t see them shake and tremble. They will maybe stare at the ground to avoid eye contact. After the event, they will often engage in post-event rumination. Even in ambiguous situations that weren’t that bad, they will interpret them in a negative way, and identify weaknesses that they showed. This establishes a vicious cycle, and the next time they have to go into a similar situation, they will expect things to be even worse.”

 

And Hendriksen:

 

“The vast majority of social anxiety is anticipatory. People who are socially anxious engage in ‘safety behaviors,’ which are simply behaviors that trying to help you tamp down anxiety in the moment. For example, if you’re at a party and feel anxious, you hover on the edge of the room or you scroll on your phone or you might rehearse what you plan to say beforehand to make sure it doesn’t sound stupid. These behaviors take up a lot of bandwidth. If you’re thinking about how you come across, and there is very little room left over to just be our authentic, friendly self.”

 

Did you notice anticipatory anxiety in the dances? Specific behaviors dancers used to convey their stress? Can you identify “safety behaviors” of your own, or that you’ve noticed in others? How about the bandwidth of calamitous thinking? Doesn’t the idea of all this wasted energy and unnecessary suffering just knock you over like a wave?

 

Ugh. Thanks, I guess, Lydia, for asking us to look at this morass.  

 

I will, though, leave you with a few notes of encouragement. First, notice the subtitle of Ellen Hendriksen’s book: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. This sounds like a call to be gentle with ourselves (although I’ve barely touched here on perfectionism and all of the ways it lives in the feminine psyche and feeds social anxiety, it is all over Oh, I have to wash my hair). Hendriksen isn’t saying that we must Silence our Inner Critic and Destroy Social Anxiety, but that there is the possibility of shushing the voice of fear and taking a distanced, more objective posture toward the experience of social anxiety. Hendriksen advises that we continue to engage with anxiety-producing social situation, because if we give up then we give in to “the two most fundamental lies about social anxiety:” first, the idea that the “worst-case scenario is a foregone conclusion.” If you don’t go to the Met Gala because you know that you’ll fall on the stairs and no one will ever respect you again, then you can never go to the Met Gala and not fall on the stairs. “And the second is that ‘I can’t deal.’ When we avoid experiences, we don’t get the evidence to disprove those two lies of social anxiety. We don’t see our own capabilities.” If you don’t go to the Met Gala because you know that you’ll fall on the stairs and no one will ever respect you again, then you can never go to the Met Gala and not fall on the stairs, or, go to the Met Gala, fall on the stairs, and find that people still respect you, and are in fact concerned for your well-being. 

 

Hendriksen even finds a positive perspective on being a woman with social anxiety. “The one thing I always like to add is that social anxiety is a package deal, and it often comes bundled with strengths like high standards and empathy and being helpful and altruistic. People who have social anxiety are often good listeners and conscientious and they work hard to get along with fellow humans. And those are all really amazing strengths that won’t go away even as people work on their social anxiety.” (I might have to buy this book. Women With Social Anxiety Book Club, anyone?) 

 

If you have social anxiety, you are not alone. If you are a woman with social anxiety, you are surely not alone and you may notice that these identities are connected by myriad strands. You may also notice that you can make compelling, brilliant art out of these identities and ensuing experiences. You may also notice that Lydia Hance’s art about those identities also gives us subtle encouragements and embedded choices. As I see the show, she suggests that engaging with anxiety-producing presentations and situations is a choice, so we can either accept or reject the opportunities and messages we are given. I also see that we can become bristly and defensive in our engagements, or we can become soft and find a power in that vulnerability. Mostly, I see that we as women are in this together, and that, again, there is a kind of vulnerability that is actually empowering, and that we as women can give each other the gift of empowered vulnerability in our social interactions. 

 

What did you see?

Getting to Know Dance on Film: Recommendations for #FramerNation

Getting to Know Dance on Film: Recommendations for #FramerNation

Frame | Work Links We Like

Houston is a dance town; readers of Frame Work know that. But do you know about the massive territory being explored at the intersection of dance and film? And are you aware that now, with the opening of the second annual Frame x Frame Film Fest on October 4-6, Houston is becoming a locus for the particular art of dance on film (also known as dance for film, dance film, and dance for camera)? #FramerNation, this is a new and exciting way to be involved with dance, and we encourage you to jump in as artists and audiences. To provide a head start on your education in this field, and/or to satisfy your deeper dive after viewing the films on offer, we have assembled recommendations from our FxFFF jurors and dance on film luminaries, Rosie Trump, Laura Gutierrez, and Lydia Hance. 

 

Frame Work: Film-making and film-viewing friends, can you tell me some of the dance films – outside of the ones in our festival – that you find really exciting?

 

Rosie Trump: My favorite feature length dance on film is Blush by Wim Vandekeybus.  I saw it screen at Dance Camera West in 2006 and it blew my mind.  I also love Rosas danst Rosas choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and directed by Thierry de Mey.

 

Laura Gutierrez: Dance Documentaries really excite me. Most recent ones are Restless Creature by Wendy Whelan, and Bobbi Jene and a non documentary is Girl (2018) by Lukas Dhont

 

Lydia Hance: Right now I am really excited about ANIMA, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and can be found on Netflix! I’ve always loved Pina. Feelings are Facts is a fantastic documentary about Yvonne Rainer, co-founder of the Judson Dance Theater who is a dancer and choreographer turned filmmaker.

 

FW: Can you recommend any books about dance or dance on film to help our readers explore the genre?

 

RT: I read a lot of books about dance history. Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Susan Foster are two dance theorists that completely changed how I think about dance. Misty Copeland’s biography is on the top of my reading list.

 

LG: Deborah Hay, My Body, The Buddhist is my favorite book about dance.

 

LH: I love books about community creativity and finding ways to engage people with dance in authentic and meaningful ways that validate all humans as artists. I love Liz Lerman’s book Hiking the Horizontal. Right now I’m reading Anna Halprin’s book Making Dances that Matter with the MultiGen Framers.

 

FW: Any other recommendations? Inspirations?

 

RT: The OA and Russian Doll.  These are not films, but the best small screen cinema I have seen in a while. I am currently reading Lucia Berlin‘s Evening in Paradise.  My last dance film was inspired by an essay in Kim Gordon’s Is it My Body? Selected Texts.

 

LG: seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, a book by Robert Irwin.

 

LH: I’ve recently (finally) seen Junebug directed by Phil Morrison and i thought it was fantastic. I would recommend The Goldfinch (not a short read) for something fun and captivating, and I have been a fan of Virginia Woolf for many years. 

 

FW: Thank you, dance-on-film gurus, and we’ll see you in the theater!

 

Rosie Trump is a dance choreographer, filmmaker, and educator.  Her work is nostalgic in style, feminist, and deliberately understated.  Trump’s dance films have recently screened at ADFs Movies for Movers, San Souci Dance Film Festival, Extremely Short Shorts at the Aurora Picture Show, the Utah Dance Film Festival, the Philadelphia Dance Film Festival, RADfest, andDance Film Association’s Long Legs Short Films.  She is the founder and chief curator of the Third Coast Dance Film Festival. Trump is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Nevada, Reno. Rosie finds inspiration in pop culture, politics, and visual art.

Laura Gutierrez is a performing artist and choreographer and has been named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch”. Her most recent work “Center Aisle Blues” was named Best Placemaking of 2018 by Dance Magazine. She is a graduate of UNCSA and was on adjunct faculty at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts from 2011-2019 where she is also an Alum. Since 2014, she has toured with Jonah Bokaer Choreography. Laura’s inspiration comes from her family, politics, history, nature, traveling, architecture and art. 


Lydia Hance is the Founder Artistic Director of Frame Dance. She has been named an Emerging Leader by Dance/USA and has led Frame Dance in performances from the Galveston pier onto the METRO light rail, in the backs of U Haul trucks, downtown tunnels, and into museums, stages, and warehouses for the past ten years. A champion of new music composers, her work deepens interdisciplinary and multigenerational collaborations, and investigates the placement of dance in our lives. She is a choreographer, curator, filmmaker, educator, and dance writer. Her. She holds degrees in Dance Performance and English Literature from SMU and trained at the Taylor School, Graham School, Tisch School of the Arts, Limon Institute and SMU. Lydia is inspired by people’s stories, vulnerability, textures, the dessert, behavioral science, and new music.