Kay Ottinger

You are where you are at the moment of learning

With the need to shed my own investment in the dance traditions of presentation and training I began immersing myself in a self-initiated study in 2020 that considered how dance could be re-learned, de-veloped, transmitted, and sown through a form of pedagogy created between teacher and student.

I asked three chosen artist-mentors: Melanie Maar, Eleanor Hullihan and Samita Sinha to share a particular practice or piece with me with no expectation of result. My study with each of them started in Jackson Heights, Queens, at New York’s Judson Memorial Church and over Zoom. Through extensive dialogues and sessions both together and on my own each process emerged and found it’s transition to me continuing completely on my own.

From 2021 - 2024 I moved to Colombia and split my time between the cities Medellin, Bogotá, and the rural mountain town of Silvia, Cauca. Responsive to place and time, the outdoor landscapes of Colombia along with the various Casa de Culturas (culture houses) in the cities continued to shape, transform and guide each practice to where movement, voice, and object collided. I learned to perform in situ for myself and for any sentient beings with whom I shared space—from strangers, to birds, and cows—as a journey of becoming through movement.

The beads originated in a collaboration between Melanie and sound artist Christian Schroeder and a version of the beads were first sighted in Taiwan with Uncle Oh. This is one of three artistic practices that was transmitted to me.

As I started to become proficient in beading I began to invite individuals to come witness. This helped me re-study performing. I asked friend Gia Kourlas to join me and she included her experience in her NYTimes article, “Using the Wisdom of Dance to Find Our Way Back to Our Bodies”

The Practice of De-veloping and Re-presenting
”A work of art to rest within itself is for it to have found its place. It has cleared its own clearing. This world is not merely a represented world. It is a world re-presented or, alternately put, self-presented in and through the continually transformative”

• Time

• Repetition

• Place

• Forms that invoke the improve

• Improvisation - problem posing education. what is being invoked from what I learned? What is the sensational memory or state being brought out? How do you crystalize it?

• Life-death cycle

• We are uncompleted beings. Being aware of our incompleteness

• What is in your control (content) and what is out of your control (context)

“I hope you leave here with more questions than answers” - Sara Shelton Mann
Below are questions from my dialogues with Eleanor, Melanie and Samita.

How do you broaden your horizon?

How do you interrogate yourself in such a way that you get pushed against the wall?

How do you wrestle with all the emotions?

What does it mean to pass on a practice vs a piece?

Can a practice inspire a piece, my piece? Is that a part of form and formlessness?

Traditions and contemporary?

What are the conditions needed to learn, re-learn, to de-velop, develop? 

How do you get to know a place? (the places I have practiced in have been like shelters, sanctuaries, welcoming places, unknown that have become familiar. How do you respect a place? Give thanks for allowing you to be there).

How can you unknow your body, yourself,  to meet it again?

How can you create states of yourself so that when you return you are changed?

What are the energetic portals, time portals, consciousness changing forms (beads, sound meditation, mov’t warm up), that invoke the invoking? What is the reflection that leads to the action?

What do you start to invoke so that you can let everything come from that source?

And when you do start to change, how do you follow the changes that are happening inside? What do you find inside? Where does it take you? What do you start to see that you didn’t see before in the exterior? What was in the background that has now come forward?

How do you grasp/take advantage of change (both invoked from you but also from outside forces)?

How does one sustain their practice?

If change and transformation is a constant. Do you pursue it? How do you resolve the freedom/liberation and change contradiction? What do we try to dominate or make permanent in the phase of change? Through existential experience we reflect if our present way of life is reconcilable or irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human.

How do you find freedom in the body? What has always been there and now is being pulled out? How do you pull out that purpose?

How do we find meaning in movement? What kind of movement do we need to help us change? To see? To connect? To understand?