January 7, 2019

Today I asked myself why I hadn’t discovered dance sooner, because I was struck by how both expressive and intimate this experience can be. It was like a hidden treasure hidden in plain sight all this time. For me, the highlight of today’s class was the partner dance exercise in Ondrej’s class. It felt like Daniel and I were engaged in a constant negotiation of the world as it appears to each other. And at some point, even if one can see and the other does not, we both reached a common state – I couldn’t see anything but I never felt so much ease in my walking.

Trajal’s class was really inspiring because he showed us every step he took in defining his artistic practice. And I feel that when these methods of thinking are broken up and analyzed thoroughly they become more eligible and offer you many new perspectives. After creating the “a ab abc..” dance sequence and learning to dance a part of Trajal’s debut piece I feel like dance becomes synonymous to an act of translation where our internal, invisible language is transferred into a direct embodied experience through the mixing of the two different styles, the conformist, rigid neutral body and the Voguing attitude.

I feel that talking about the structure in which the class was divided gave me a deeper understanding of the concepts and processes involved – from telling a story then jumping to a dance demonstration, from readings to the creative workshop, and then mixing them throughout the class. Also, what struck me is the concept of transcoding which I have never heard of before, because I realized that I was somehow trying to follow a similar direction in my painting; it was more of an intuitive feeling than a well-defined concept that I could follow. Now I feel that I could borrow notions from this class to my other art practice, as I realize how interlaced these areas really are.