Spontaneous Art

I love making art without a plan. From creating a dance film on a lunch break or call up a friend and start collaborating. You don’t always need a festival or an event to create art for anymore. You can have a YouTube channel or post videos on Instagram or Tik Tok. Right now, we live in a time where it is effortless to find and consume art. As well as being able to create art and share art

You can create with a team.

When you choose to create with someone – especially when it is just for expression and not for a “performance,” you should make sure to surround yourself with radiant energy. With people who uplift you, and excite you, and that you have exciting dialogues about art with. Work with people with who you enjoy embarking on journeys with and that you’re comfortable around. If you know someone like that, keep them around – it is a rare gift! When I want to create a dance film, I always create with one of my most beloved human beings in the world – Thomas Kassian. When I work with Thomas, I will be supported, challenged, and have so much fun, which is such a gift of a foundation to start creating from.

Thomas and I mainly create dance films together. We pick a time and a location and leave the rest up to what we discover in the moment. Such as:
Where the light is
What song fits the environment
What movement to explore
The busyness of the location

We create and collaborate from where we are. I say this quite literally and metaphorically. The whole process is an improvisation.

As a dancer, I love improvisation, and it is a large part of my dance practice. I work from where I am that day and what I want to explore at that moment.

LIMELIGHT

LIMELIGHT was a creation I made with Thomas Kassian. Often Thomas and I will spontaneously get together with the intent to create something. Most of the time, we don’t even know what it is until I’m done editing it later that night.

While filming on this particular day, we played a lot with different lighting and filming angles. The lighting resulted in beautiful focus changes in the footage.

When moving in the space, I played a lot with shadows and reacting to them with my movement. The movements varied quite drastically. From large movements to create beautiful shadow images to small positions to limit the shadows forming. It was like a game I was playing. We played with this movement/game for about 30 minutes utile the song – came on. Automatically the room changed – The environment, mood, lighting all took on a new weight. This density and intention in the room/song came into the movement, and after noticing that, we started a new recording, which ended up being LIMELIGHT.

When editing the footage, I was looking at the movement, and it was very contracting and very much rejecting the light in the space. While I was improvising, I remembered I had a very similar feeling/emotional response to the circumstances. I was trying to escape the light, or at times get entirely consumed by it. It reminded me of the RUSH song “limelight” and the verses where they talked about a dancer who couldn’t escape the limelight – the fame/attention that comes with success in the arts. So that’s what I titled the piece.

Create for yourself. When you push to create something, it can be hard to enjoy the process. When you decide to make art for yourself and for your timeline, the art doesn’t seem rushed, and you can have a free mentality while creating it.

Always remember to be kind to yourself. Even when you create for fun, it is easy for your critical brain to turn on and evaluate everything you do (This isn’t the worst thing). Being critical allows you to continue learning and assess how you make art. Make sure that it doesn’t take over from your experience. If you critic your work to the point it is no longer giving you joy, take a step back, take a break and remind yourself that creating art is what you love to do.