teaching by LYMI
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LYMI Teaching Philosophy
In the daily “performance” of living, we all compose our own experiences in real life in real time. A coherent performance of group improvisation, however, is a complex task that must be informed by rigorous physical investigation and shared inquiry as a part of a group.
Like You Mean It reaches dancers through the body first, encouraging the expansion of individual movement vocabularies and their conscious arrangement. Once dancers boost their own possibilities for movement invention with specificity, clarity, and craft, we move that attitude into group explorations, which amplify attention and awareness, illuminate the perception of composition, and then look at interaction as an opportunity to exponentially increase the inventiveness of the group compositional form as something that is simultaneously perceived and generated internally.
Like You Mean It approaches the classroom/studio as a site for the collaborative exchange of ideas, opinions, perspectives, experiences, and knowledge. We work to create a community; then we create in that community. Improvising dancers bring the body into situations, which are beyond the control of any one individual and the responsibility of the group to enliven through their collective choreographic rigor. Ultimately, we coax the group to engage in a shared endeavor to initiate, build, transform, and interrupt emergent events in service to an unfolding dance.
Like You Mean It addresses improvisational dance-making from our multiple perspectives, modeling a meeting place of our values that becomes richer at their intersection. We expand that attitude to include the shifting identities of dancers’ moving selves. It is our hope that through this kind of work in improvisation, dancers we work with may contextualize their improvisational experiences to inform their own interests and particular practices as dance artists.
