Curiosity + Creativity
Earlier this month I had the exquisite privilege of working beside Wendy Clinard of Clinard Dance (Chicago). We co-facilitated a zoom course titled Compás + Creativity with the goal of modeling curiosity and choreographic inquiry within flamenco’s martinete form. While we’d talked about finding a way to cross-pollinate our Midwest flamenco communities for some time, logistics had seemed challenging. Finally we dove in this Spring. What a joy!
I wouldn’t say we were teaching the students - we were a cohort sharing and digging together. The participants modeled vulnerability and generosity. The ideas for dances ranged from family members with dementia to baseball as a metaphor for going home. Dances were both narrative and abstract. Students openly shared their processes and commentary on others’ work. We all learned from and inspired one another. Although flamenco grew from community, when it comes to new choreography, it can often be an isolating process, but not in this case.
As always, Wendy left me awe-inspired after the culminating weekend in Chicago. I first came across Wendy’s work while down a YouTube rabbit hole in 2016. I stumbled upon Clinard Dance’s Watershed Project: https://youtu.be/6_1xmcVib6E?si=jrHTGY3AmLa0ysQO I was so excited to see such experimental and forward thinking flamenco - in the U.S.! I wrote Wendy an email sharing how much I enjoyed the piece, and she responded with curiosity - she wanted to know my flamenco story. How unexpected! How rare in the U.S. flamenco world! Curiosity!!!! What I’ve learned more than anything else from Wendy is the beauty that arises on our artistic journeys when we keep curiosity at the center of our work. There are no dead-ends or wrong turns when curiosity illuminates our path.
Wendy sees movement and images in a way that I just don’t. When she saw the cover picture on my phone screen, she was fascinated by the way my family members’ limbs interweave in the photo. I’d never noticed that! I see their faces resting against one another and totally missed the layering of arms and legs in the embrace. Suddenly the picture became a new and fascinating abstract painting; I never would have noticed that without her eye…and that’s the beauty of collaboration.
Wendy working with Christina Patterson & Lindsay Gifford in rehearsal.
And so it is in dance too. For Wendy, everything is an experiment, a lab for visual and sonic discovery. As we edited and helped students craft their original works, she’d grab other dancers, place them into the scene, direct them and boss them around - as if she were casting spells, because the transformations of the dancers and the pieces were indeed magical. More than anything she has an eye for how to shape negative space (the area around a dancer).
Lindsay Gifford, Sujata Lakhe, Christina Patterson, and Tianyi Guo in rehearsal.
With Tianyi Guo’s piece, Wendy took three dancers and had them huddle around and restrict Tianyi’s movements. I got goosebumps - Tianyi’s movements suddenly took on a much deeper meaning, and her movements actually stood out more in the restricted space.
Some experiments get thrown out. But if we hadn’t tried them, we would never have ended up where we did with some of the pieces. For example, we tried all speaking a poem simultaneously. It was just too much - too much chaos and the poem itself was lost. So we tried just one voice echoing one other person. Aha! That worked!
What a joy and a humbling experience to work beside someone who so fully puts artistic rigor and excellence at the forefront. Ego, predetermined outcomes, and impossibilities are left outside the studio so that the space can truly be a blank canvas for collaborative creation.
Learn more about Clinard Dance here: https://www.clinardance.org/