Columbia College Chicago was invited to participate in a summer intensive at the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin, just outside of Paris. In this blog post, student Kennedy Ward shares their experience of studying with Brazilian choreographer Volmir Cordeiro.
Having found nothing short of wonder and exploration to pull me away from my housing in Pantin, it goes without saying that I walked just about every avenue and street afforded to me before and in between classes. In the weekend before my final week of intensives, I was stupefied, to put it lightly, in the surrealism that leaked from the bricks of the buildings past, pooled underneath the cars of the subway trains, and amassed in the fissures of broken stone on the banks of the stream parallel to the CnD. On a regular basis I was engaging in conversations of how France was different than America; topics ranging from contrasting western performance qualities and ideas to the range of cultural and racial representation to the food. And for all of the intellectual stimulation, I found that I was still hungry for knowledge that had less focus on the decipherable meaning and more scrutiny on the act itself. I wanted to participate and dance and act and let the beginning and the end of its meaning to fall within the action itself. And somehow, with the permissible wave of who (or what) ever controls cosmic acts of self indulgence, into the heat wave riddled studio on the top floor of the CnD walked Volmir Cordeiro.
As I sit and write about him, and as I sat and thought about him in the weeks concluding that summer, I am awash with admiration and respect for him; but I can honestly say that in my 15 minutes of seeing him first I was acute in my judgements. In walked the tallest, longest, and most brightly colored man I had ever seen. Perhaps it was the heat wave, or the fact that jet lag seemed to have just then hit me, or maybe against all odds I learned to exercise patience, but in the blur of our first day, I can say for certain that I watched him set up his music, take out his water, and change his clothes with an absolutely blank mind. I can't even recall if he said anything to us at all, I just know that once we started, we started.
We followed Volmir, we gave him our complete trust to lead us and in exchange he presented the opportunity to trade humiliation, disgust, pride, and hesitation for an exaltation, really, by way of dance. If it sounds like I’m being vague, I am; to recount and record the exercises and practices we went through would present useful imagery but as best as I can, I believe that the actions themselves pale in comparison to their effect, and that is what I hope to describe. If it sounds like I’m being hyperbolic, I might be but I can't attest to that. Although I am sharing with you, the reader, my experience, there are moments that exercise private exclusivity, if not between Volmir and the group he worked with during the intensive, then between me and my memories of it. The detail and significance of it would be soured and lost in the menial cherry picking of words for, of, and by it; I hope you’ll understand. Nevertheless, by the end of the first day we were all dripping in sweat and called by Volmir, we sat in a circle and massaged the hands, feet, elbows, inner crevice of the knee, necks of the person next to us either in complete silence or to a song someone had sung or poetry someone wanted to recite. It was intimate to say the least. And this is how it continued, walking into the studio each day felt different from the last, it felt like the more we worked and bit, and licked, and sweat, and kissed, and held each other, the more accommodating the space would bend to meet our needs. And it did.
Perhaps his practices were unorthodox to me before, but now I am immensely grateful to participate in his practices. He moves directly and with such earnest feeling that listening to him direct his thoughts or the movement he wants inspires buds of contagion to grow within yourself. The subtlety in how a week with him has been able to rewire my understandings of community, passion, sensation, and pleasure is immeasurable. The idea that Volmir represents is one, of many, touching freedom beyond form and power within a body.
Kennedy Ward, fall 2019
