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“Dance is powerful!” said Kara Davis as she described her experiences performing for dance anywhere®, “dance anywhere® brings to light the power of dance. It has a strong message”. Davis, a longtime dance anywhere® devotee has many memories of her past experiences. One year she organized a performance at the SF Public Library at the spur of the moment. She was almost arrested for this piece, which she described as a “slow creeping force” whereby dancers slowly danced towards one another from various locations throughout the library. “A collective force is threatening, and the security at the library clearly felt the power of this moment, this performance”.
Davis, a dancer and choreographer from San Francisco, CA, co-founded project agora, a dance company dedicated to “promoting creative dialogue among artists” with dancer/choreographer Bliss Kohlmyer in 2006. Since then, the company has engaged artists and community members from a variety of disciplines in the exchange of creative insight, information and inspiration.
project agora performed “Mother Tongue” at The Garage in San Francisco.
This January, project agora performed the collaborative work Mother Tongue at the Garage and the Museum of Performance and Design in San Francisco. Mother Tongue, a multimedia improvisation, is truly a product of project agora’s collaborative model. Three dancers performed a structured improvisation in front of a screen where visual artists projected magnificent and visually striking abstract sketches, while musicians improvised deep chords and resonant beats. The performance was thus a conversation between each artistic medium as the artists conversed and responded to one another through their own artistic discipline.
Davis explained that the improvised performance was based upon exercises that the artists explored during rehearsals. Each week an artist would devise an improvisation score for all of the artists to explore. The artists also shared unique techniques specific to their own discipline and methods that they individually use within their artistic practice. “We essentially created a gymnasium that revealed structure” said Davis. The artists used the creative structures devised in rehearsal to converse with one another during the performance. Thus, the performance was truly democratic in that no one artist planned the outcome of the evening.
Dancer Alex improvises with live drawing and music.
Mother Tongue created a laboratory for realizing the common language of creativity across artistic disciplines. The artists understood the language of their artistic counterparts and were therefore able to react and respond within this discourse. Said Davis, “rehearsals for Mother Tongue were a laboratory for realizing difference and using these differences so we realize leadership and readership”. Davis was interested in exploring the distribution of power in a collaborative environment and how to democratize this distribution of power amongst artists. “More and more I’m realizing how intricacies of power and play out in the body. The body is our mother tongue when we are really trying to connect with someone”.
Davis is excited to participate in dance anywhere® again this year. She will show a piece at the San Francisco Public Library once again- But this time
the library is hosting dance anywhere® for the second year in a row. She continues to participate because she perceives that the event creates a spiritual moment for individuals to reflect and feel their embodied self. “dance anywhere® is a call to prayer…It causes you to stop and consider what you are doing in that moment…it’s a breath of air. dance anywhere® is a powerful thing!”
Kara Davis & Nol Simones at SFMOMA – dance anywhere®
For more information about Kara Davis and project agora view her dance anywhere page
