Our Summer Sizzle Dance Festival is quickly approaching, and we are thrilled to be able to welcome Maryann Perrone as a Teaching Artist to this year’s festival! We recently interviewed Maryann to learn more about her class Reigniting Your Creativity, which she will be teaching August 5-9th, 3-6PM. Maryann brings her 35 years of experience as a dance artist, choreographer, and teacher -with an emphasis on interdisciplinary arts- to this class, and the experience she has had building relationships within culturally diverse communities through numerous arts initiatives and projects. Read on to learn more about the class and Maryann’s passion for her work!
Q: How would you describe your workshop, Reigniting Your Creativity?
This workshop is designed to discover or renew creative energy and possibilities. We will open spaces, within and outside of ourselves, to plant seeds for the imagination to grow and flourish. Through principles of contemporary dance and a reconnection to self, we will use movement and the environment around us to delve deeper into the creative process – discovering ways to go beyond preconceptions and codified movements. We will have valuable time each day to reflect through dance and discussion, and to create together.
Q: Why do you feel it’s important for people to be able to discover themselves through movement?
For me, discovering ourselves through movement is important because it encourages a more intimate connection to self. It invites us to a more heightened awareness of who we are through our physicality, through our senses. As we discover how our own body works, we have a better sense of how we breathe and move within our personal and general space, and in relation to others. Ultimately, we are able to release tensions and blockages that can cause disconnection to self as a whole.
Q: What do you feel is a new and innovative way to discover movement?
Presently, we are combining diverse styles of free flowing or structured movement in a more holistic way, and this can lead to many new discoveries. Since early postmodern dance, many dancers and movement specialists have been looking beyond the dance studio to the dance of everyday life, continually developing new movement concepts and language. I feel that when we do this, when we reach into the essence of movement and creativity and allow it to flow into our personal and/or studied movement, we always open unexpected paths and innovative ways to move.
Q: What do you feel the benefit is to teaching dancers and performance artists how to create a Site Specific work?
The environment teaches us so much. Site-specific work can inform our state of being, our movement shapes and dynamic, and our creative expression. It requires the senses to be very alert. We have to look carefully, listen intently and feel the space around us. We cannot come into the space with set movements, and therefore, we learn how to create differently – from our sensitivity to the space, from the inside out. I believe this helps create a more intuitive, artistic approach to dance and performance.
Q: What experience from your work overseas do you hope to bring to The Dance Complex through your class?
My perception of dance has been greatly influenced by the years I lived overseas, in particular, by the European contemporary dance movement. Moreover, it is the work I did for the French National Diploma of Dance that I hope to bring to the Dance Complex through these classes. When teaching dancers to become dance teachers, we study and experience what it means to be “awakened and initiated into dance and creativity” – from a beginner dancer, to a performer, to a dance teacher. We examine how we can be awakened and reawakened each new day, as we learn more about ourselves, our movement and our artistry. It is like an initiation rite; we leave our preconceptions at the door each day and allow our ideas and knowledge to be shifted and transformed. The goal is to ignite and reignite the dancers’ authentic and creative approach to movement and technique. I would like to bring these ideas to Reigniting Your Creativity.
