Dance - Emotions - Movement - Drawing - Timing - Animation

 Last year, Sabine de Clerck and me facilitated an experimental workshop which put together dance and animation in a most peculiar way...

Sabine is an experimented 5 Rhythms facilitator (what is 5 Rhythms?) whom I not only love as a human being but also admire as a professional.

We put together a workshop where students were invited to experiment dancing according to this method Sabine works with. They were invited to dance some emotions/states and afterwards translate what they felt and danced into images.

They then showed someone else a chosen drawing of theirs and the other person was invited to move/dance according to what it made her/him feel... 

The process went on going through different stages and we came up with a series of drawings, movements and timings regarding those different movements - knowing that those images and timings were directly connected with the original emotions.

In the end, the students animated the drawing respecting as much as possible the timings they'd found for them/for the represented emotions. 

Dancing my feelings - which I did along with the workshop students and a sciatics crisis which almost impeded me from getting through the weekend - was, as always with the 5 Rhythms sessions I've attended so far, an amazing experience.

The participants were all very touched by Sabine's approach and the invitation to dance themselves and then put it on paper.

The focus, from the beginning, was set on the construction of a bridge-method for students to transform emotions into animations in an unique way. 

Of course, this is something that, after years and years of trying to get a style in place, years and years searching for the thing which seems right... this is something, I was saying, ver4y difficult to achieve on a one-weekend workshop.

Bridging between dance and images, then images and decomposition of movement and timing these movements... it's work in progress. A lifetime work in progress probably. Getting better and more original one animation at a time.

The seed was planted and the work has stayed with me as a very worthy one.

My belief is that, rightly nurtured, watered, exposed to the sun, this method will help these persons in finding unique ways of expressing emotions when animating... or in any other form of creation they choose.

(all photos have been approved by the portraid people for posting on this blog in association with this article)