'Most dancers are not interested seriously about being dancers, not in a serious way…There are endless implicit visual messages about how we should be...Here there is more neon than nuance...Food is advertised rather than hunted for. I am not complaining because it is about 15,000 years too late to change direction. When I return to the country I am struck by the difference in what is required by the senses. Dance reminds us of the physical possibilities – refocuses our focusing mind...time, space, gravity…Dance will remind you of your feet, your spine, your reach…I think it’s good for us….'
Steve Paxton
Paea has been teaching dance for more than 20 years. When she began teaching her focus was on physicality, speed, technical accuracy and floor-work: something about 'training' as a dancer.
Now she is motivated by how to be in the body AS IT IS: changeable and changing, ageing and needing less and more at once. Now, she thinks the Dance is about collecting and sorting kinaesthetic data; then putting it to use in the moving or the doing that is the dancing.
Questions of beginning are important; how to work kinaesthetically or from the deep lacunae of body. Lacunae are gaps in bone - a space where we do not know - a tiny void. As we learn and teach and share practice, we are learning; doing and undoing, together.
We are unhinging the body from itself, hearing the noise, decreasing the noise. The aim is to work for intelligence to meet ease. The work, then, is in and with and through the body in motion - a potentialising laboratory.
Paea has been 'watching bodies' for a long time. Her choreographic work forefronts the materiality of the actual or flesh-body, physical imagining, and the value of the sensory over the sensational. Her teaching aligns with her research and is, as well, inherently interested in each body - limitations, histories, eccentricities, vulnerabilities, potentiality. Her classes range from basic to advanced 'techniques' for moving; inclusive of but not ‘limited’ to somatic work, alignment and structure, experimentations with writing and dancing and 're-languaging' movement.
The palette and dynamic shifts depending on who is in the space. It is interesting to read this dynamic and respond.
Paea teaches technique classes, weekend workshops for dancers, choreographic writing workshops, community workshops.