Participants of all ages in a Moving Stories "Family Stories" Workshop write about family photographs. Photo by Josh Schachter
Moving Stories is a teaching method, choreographic process, and story sharing exercise that combines creative writing, dance, and spoken word. I developed Moving Stories in effort to explore for myself the possible intersections between writing and dance. For a long time, I held the two disciplines apart and almost viewed myself as two different people–one writer and one dancer. I began playing with words and movement and then discovered the work of Liz Lerman and the Dance Exchange and of Bill T. Jones and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In particular, this essay by Lerman helped affirm my belief that text and dance can indeed work together and in fact, sometimes must.
The workshops draw upon community building practices and collaborative choreographic techniques of a variety of arts organizations, dance companies, schools, and communities. At heart, the process explores how dance can become a vehicle for sharing both personal and community stories and how stories can become more relevant, comprehensive, and trenchant when “moved.”
Essentially the Moving Stories approach asks: “What stories do we tell with our bodies?” and “How can we move and speak the moments of our own and others’ lives?” The process is grounded in interactive activities that invite participants to explore and create connections between words and movement, using the juxtaposition of intent and chance to energize expression in multiple forms. The work is useful for dancers looking to generate new choreography, writers looking to energize their words, and others looking to creating material for performance. It is also offers tools for personal growth, awakening creativity, building community, and communicating important community stories. It is suitable for people of all ages and abilities.
Workshop participants in a "Family Stories" workshop share movement based on family photographs. Photo by Josh Schachter
Activities focus on eliciting written and “moving” responses from participants and introducing them to basic concepts of dance and choreography in the process. Writing exercises are geared to help participants express detailed experiences and events from their own lives and observations. Writing might serve as jumping-off point for movement creation, or might become a spoken narration offered for a particular movement phrase. Movement exercises are designed to help people represent particular concepts and express their ideas through gestures and movement. One of the basic tenets of the work centers on “intentional movement,” e.g. creating movement that comes from a particular intention, idea, thought, or word related to posed questions or discussion topics. Non-dancers often find this useful for letting their bodies communicate something without worrying about how “dance-y” their movement is. Participants are encouraged to focus on single gestures, creating simple movements that can then be modified through expansion, reduction, repetition, traveling, etc. These basic gesture movements then form the foundation of further choreographic exploration—in duets, trios or whole ensemble work. In general, the process helps not only to get people moving but also to break down ideas about “dance” as inaccessible and difficult. By demystifying the process of choreography, it invites non-dancers to move more freely and experience dancing and choreography and challenges dancers to broaden their definition of “movement” and imbue particular significance to the movement.