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SINGING WITH ANGELIQUE WILLKIE
By Heidi Wilm
Using voice, to many dancers, seems like quite a difficult thing to do. Although commonly applied in contemporary dance works, producing sound, talking or - even worse - singing onstage is still perceived as something quite remote from our daily practice and, in fact, it doesn't form an exhaustive part in dance education. We're used to working with our bodies in all sorts of ranges and registers, but using our voice is often perceived to be a red rag in stage work.
"Using the voice, we all seem naked", Angelique Willkie tells me, while I am observing her class. As a contemporary dancer and dance teacher with long years of experience, she is aware of the dancers' fears in this respect. Having worked with voice for a long time herself, she has, over many years, developed a teaching method for overcoming this initial shyness and for using voice as an essential part of the dance. And after all, the step doesn't seem too far: Maybe all it takes is just a small shift in practice to find a way of abandoning our hesitation and opening up towards this new dimension of bodily work.
"Traditionally, music is an external support for the dance", I read in Angelique Willkie's workshop description. "I propose that through the voice, the ‘music‘ is created and performed by the dancers themselves, in the same way and at the same time. Vocal techniques and movement improvisation can be very similar. They stem from the same instrument: the body."
Finding music in our own bodies, working with music, has had a long history in dance. In fact, nothing is more normal for a dancer than "being with" music right from the start. Being with music, not just in the sense of corresponding to the worlds' instrumentation but also working with the music, the rhythms and melodies we find within our very own bodies. It sometimes even seems to be exactly this moment of awareness of our own musical constitution that forms the essential moment for opening up towards a dialogue and resonance with the world, not only in improvisation and stage work. Which makes our (dancing) bodies more than just mute "matter", guided by restless minds...
Jean-Luc Nancy writes in this respect: "I would like to emphasize (...) that my body is not just here, but that, through its rhythm, it opens a space, through its modulation of the space surrounding it." [1]
Starting with our access to rhythm as the main connection between (spatial) body work and music, Angelique Willkie usually begins her five-day workshop with movement improvisation, rhythm and counting exercises. It is only on the second or third day that she slowly starts to integrate voice, working with her students on their awareness of breath as the first source of both, movement and sound. In individual and collective improvisations, the dancers get to explore ways of shifting from movement to sound and back from sound to movement...
"Seven people in the space please!" - It is the last day of the workshop and the task is to go a little bit further with what has been learnt, trying to play with the possibilities explored in this week.
A small group of dancers starts with a few minutes of improvisation in unison, finding a way of connecting by following an alternating "leader" of the group. After a while, the dance becomes fluent, the group starts to resonate as one collective object. Little by little, each "leader" starts to use their voice; the others follow. This provides a new way of connecting, another tool for group work: the sound has the freedom to go anywhere, transcending sight and reaching a space beyond the immediate surroundings.
I'm sitting close by, trying to take a few notes:
wooooom hmm hmm
oh eh oh eh
aaaaaa aaaaa[a] aaaaa [f sharp] aaaaaaaaa [d]
ts ts ts ts
ta ta!
haa RRe! haa RRe!
IYoooo-eeeeeeeeeeeeeh.....
wooooooooomnamu eeeeeeeeh
ki! ki! ki!
hhhhhhhhhhhhhh?
The last hour of the class is dedicated to task-oriented work: The dancers are asked to create different combinations of sound and movement, build small phrases out of this material individually and in groups, extract separate scores for each movement and sound, practice the voice part without the movement and finally: revisit movement again...
The class finishes with four group presentations of polyphonic orchestrations of the developed material, using counterpoint and unisono, both in voice and movement.
These complex compositions can no longer merely be called exercises, since they are already on their way to becoming a true piece.
Footnote:
[1] In „Allesdurchdringung. Texte, Essays, Gespräche über den Tanz" . Gathered texts from: Véronique Fabbri, Jean-Luc Nancy, Yvonne Rainer, Michel Serres, René Tom a.o. Translated by Andreas Hiepko and Ronald Voullié. Berlin: Merve 2008.
(August 6, 2008)
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