Last year I was invited to work with the Curve Little Movers to create a response to Akram Khan’s Big Dance.
On seeing Akrams choreography for the pledge I was immediately struck on how this piece of work could be accessible very small children together with their parents. Children are already expert improvisers, they think and celebrate life with their bodies. As People Dancing Producer Richard Parr states:
“We knew that Akram’s piece puts the emphasis firmly on inclusivity, encouraging people to create a dance that can be inspired by the choreography itself, or the themes behind it to tell their own stories”.
Akram’s choreography was indeed perfect because it’s connected to the stuff of life; ritual, the rhythm of life, it’s gestural and so immediately engages children. So many children had an immediate response to seeing the film of choreography. One little boy just couldn’t get enough and wanted to see it over and over again, whooshing and swinging his arms. He was only 2 years old. All children need is the invitation – and the film alone can be invitation enough.
The Big Dance choreography generates a feeling of sacred space similar to that space when an parent dances with their child and all the rest of world melts away in that moment of them being ‘lost’ in each other. Beautiful….
“It’s going to be an interesting process of creating a piece, then handing it over to people, handing it over to communities who’ll then transform it. It’s like planting a seed and that seed then takes root and grows into all the different trees. The more the original seed is transformed the more interesting it will be, so I’m interested to see how each new tree becomes different, yet you know that everything is connected to one seed, one idea.”
Akram Khan
http://www.bigdance.org.uk/big-dance-pledge/inspired-big-dance-pledge/