DANCER AS A METHOD

Dancer as a method is a result of research what took under focus the issues of the individual performer as a source for building up the structure of a performance. 

The specific method covers:

• The authenticity of the movement

• The ability of the performer to ‘read’ their own emotional state and use it instantly in the performance

• The group interaction with each performer’s individual state being within the common pulse

• The use of sound as a partner

In the process each performer’s unique physicality and individual movement qualities are explored. A strong and trusting relationship between choreographer and performers is crucial in the process of finding authentic movement. The choreographer’s role is to safeguard a deeply personal process. 

Dancer as a method ables to get as close as possible to authentic movement in a theatre framework. Most performers find it very hard to look inside themselves and to discover emotional reality. Dancer as a method provides ways of coming as close as possible to a performer’s personal state.

You can say that giving a performer the exact choreography can put the theme “Dancer as a method” with the subject ‘authentic movement’ under question. But as a choreographer, I see a given movement as a structure that helps to stimulate the performer’s emotions and to find rhythmic coherence.

Theatre performance needs form and the movements created by the choreographer are a stimulus and raw material for the performance movement line – a structure.

One can say that movement created by a choreographer is like a shield, protecting the performer’s individuality, but it becomes authentic because the characters or roles originate from the performers themselves. The performer as a private person in the past. Or as Tortsov puts it, characterisation is the mask which hides the actor-individual. Protected by it he can lay bare his soul.

That way the role is true, and this lets us say that the movement material achieved is authentic, because the performer has experienced it personally in the past in her/his life.

This procedure allows us to state that the process can be called: dancer as a method.