Glenna Batson    

Movement Muse

photo, Anna Maynard

 

I call my artistic self, G;emma – a name, relatively free of past identities with only a hint of my Italian ancestry, when voiced. 

 

movement muse

I call myself a movement muse –  an inspiration – as well as a guide, scout, mentor, coach, partner, buddy – and bricoleur– one who probes new depths of making for signs/portals of the not-yet-envisions.  Sourcing from moment, memory and motif,  I cobble together new ideas, visions, objects.  My main media (of the moment) are body, paper or fabric, and Smart phone photography. As a movement muse, I inspire. I articulate between diverse fields. I am a catalyst for finding new bridges to ease and expressiveness, to new collaborations, idea syntheses. I create a milieu for new thoughts, feelings and images to surface and jump-start movement. I help people find empowerment in their movement, helping them gain practical embodied knowledge – knowledge they can use – and that stirs inklings of their own aesthetic, allowing them to how to live life more easily and enjoyably.

Movement is a unique sensory language, one that speaks softly to us daily and often eludes us.  Movement expression – intentionally formal or spontaneous., is a key to understanding what this language can mean. Exploring movement – even functional, daily movement, is a way of asking questions and then receiving the alchemy in the form of answers.  When I improvise, I dance out the answers to my life’s questions. With this embodied knowledge, I can help others.  I often do not even know the question.  The process is a push-pull, forces that hover between constancy and change, habit and novelty, doing and non-doing, training and eruption of the new.

 

movement muse as artist

 

My foundation as an artist is built on the transparency and mutability of things written on the body. To “muse” is to act, imagine, discern, ponder, brainstorm, mull over, reflect, weigh, fancy, kick about, and chew the fat…acts rooted in creativity. My whole life I have been inspired by many global dance and movement traditions as well as Somatic disciplines. These traditions, along with a rich background in human movement science and embodiment studies, form a complex mosaic of body literacy, the inscriptions forever providing insight into the cryptic.

My own movement creations are sourced from everyday experience and intuited from all my relationships. Such creations not only are the (t)issue of my own process and aesthetic, but also enable me to teach others to tap the resin of their own muse as source of transformative growth and development.

Texture is my most palpable resource – the ‘felt’ world of things tangible and intangible and of bodily expressions that are made manifest in movement exploration. I am nested in the moment of sensory contact that itself becomes an impulse for movement. The art begins in that poised moment when the inner echoes, the shimmers from my inner and outer body, reach out to meet the world. a generous reciprocity and a rich partnering. The cloth of these impressions (the corporis fabrica) becomes a pattern that threads throughout the body, connecting the whole.

The fabric of my life evolves from my sensed contact of my skin with the mundane – my fingers to paper, tissue, metal, my feet to rugs, dirt, shoe leather. I am nested in the moment of sensory contact that itself becomes an impulse for movement. Answers emerge through the movement of body and cloth. It is an intimate partnering like no other. At once, this partner shows up as the rhythm of my hand/brush to paper; at other times, the layering and enfolding of cloth over my body reveals a new anatomy, a new vocabulary of movement. Cloth finds its origins in surprising places – packaging wrappers easily dismissed as trash, trade magazines whose pages provide the fodder for abstract sculptures, the scratching sound of graphite against watercolor paper, the crack of fabric-made-whip against my flank – cloth emergent, cloth transformed. Cloth is always in a state of becoming through a process of deconstruction – the bleed of watercolor as it flows into neighboring territory, the crushing of paper beyond recognition to render a whole new ‘linen’ sculpture, the tearing of silk as I pass through its membranous web, the quality of silk crumpling to the floor.  The art begins in that poised moment when many skin-like textures of material meet my human skin.  (t)issues.  I dance out the answer, not even knowing the question.

 

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