Interview by Anke Vetter with Riccardo Morrison July 2004 for the project "What is dance?" of "fetter Engel e.V.".

"It's some kind of an appearance expressed by the body."

Riccardo Morrison, born in California, is a dancer, performance artist and movement educator. A practitioner of Contact Improvisation for over 20 years, he uses this dance form (as well as modern dance, Butoh and ritual dance), often in combination with storytelling and poetry. He has collaborated with a wide range of artists: dancers Nancy Stark-Smith and Steve Paxton, poets Robert Bly and Coleman Barks and drummers John Densmore and Miguel Rivera among others.
He is one of the founders of pARADOX dANCE, USA and pARADOX dANCE Co, Denmark (groups which produce workshops and performances involving people with and without disabilities) and of the SOMEBODYELSE DANCECOMPANY, Berlin.
Most recent performances: 1998 and 99 he created and directed pARADOX sPECTACLES, a street performance played in the city hall plaza in Copenhagen; 1998 he danced in IOSIS, directed by Dieter Heitkamp, Berlin and 2000 in „Empty Man“ directed by Konstantinos Mihos, Athens.
Like most nomadic artist he has a long history of other works, mostly in Europe and West coast, USA.

A.V.: "What is dance?"

R.M.: "It's some kind of an appearance; it's expressed by the body. So it's not just movement - it might have nothing even to do with movement - it's more about this shifting attention, that something happens. Sometimes it happens if somebody is feeling very joyful, they just do some movement... - or sometimes it happens while one's concentration is on a movement in the body and then it becomes dancing.
So there is something like excercising, something like training, something like moving in smaller steps... - but it HAPPENS, dancing 'it' happens. And then the person is dancing."

A.V.: "Can you explain more specific what it is what happens?"

R.M.: "It's a shift in attention or focus or concentration. Not like always thinking of it, allthough it can happen that way. In working with people with a disability, those people have very bizarr movement forms, there comes a point, where you see, that they are not just functionally moving there body, the body itself is expressing something. This could be connected to the imagination or to the heart, or it could be connected to the soul - all different words, but something happens. And you can see it often from the outside, there is this shift: They move there fingers and move there fingers and move... and all of a sudden it's not just moving there fingers anymore, something happens. It appeares.

It happens from various people trained different intensive, whatever is there style, but whenever they go through the motions of there style, then it's a mechanical movement. Any technique from Ballett to Contactimprovisation, if it's approached only as a technique, then you are doing the technique. It's not necessarily dancing, it has danced like movements, it has rhythm, but I think dancing has this other thing. And as a person percieving it, whatching it, seeing it, you feel it. It goes beyond your eyes in the body. As a person doing it or being in it, the shift feels less like doing something, than being in something. It happens, like aah, now I'm dancing. It's clear, I'm not doing any kind of excercising.

Something is also expressed. It might be a kind of a story or can just be something without a word. It's the body expression, the cellular expression, the expression of the tissues of the body.

A.V.: "How do you train that?"

R.M.: "I'm also a physical philosopher, so this is how I describe dance. So therefor I'm a dancer that way.

There are all these categories of professional dancers because of being in a paid job; there are a lot of people dancing, who I consider as dancers, who are solving not being paid for a job - thats a whole other dynamic...

But there is a way of training that I'm comitted to, and that also then makes my dancing comitted to this exploration, to this philosophy of dancing. Because it happens doesn't mean you cannot search for it and also doesn't mean you cannot prepare the vecicle, so to say the bodymind, means the whole vehicle.

So in that way that's why I'm a dancer, I was caught by this exploration, the feeling of it was something like a call. Now I work with it and train with it, with this idea of exploration. That means sometimes finding sometimes not finding it, sometimes being prepared and ready, sometimes not.... But all through that I approach it as a dancer, so I'm approaching it through the physical expression.
And it's a philosophy, but a physical one. It's not one that's only spoken and thought of, but the thinking is in the bones, in the muscle tissue, in the sweat.
So in that way, I feel, it's a little different to other modes of thinking and being.

The form which primarily caught me was Contactimprovisation. So I would say, that my exploration is informed by that form, which has a lot to do with creating a physical communication. Maybe getting the information from the environement into... . So there's a slidly little difference from say classic dance forms, where they learn steps and then they place those steps in the environement. A lot of the work in this form (Contactimprovisation) is actually feeling the environement I'm stepping on.  So the step is, I'm recieving from the environement, from the floor, from the different surfaces and than translating them, how I express in my body with that.

So in that way the form itself is an exploration relating to the way I think about dancing and moving. So in this way it becomes the way, that I train. I train and practise it both in solo movement and in moving the space and also in working with partners."

A.V.: "In the workshop warm up you worked the attention of the students standing in the studio from their periphery to the inside. Why?"

R.M.: "The world and the thinking is very full of many things. Where do I go? What do I eat? So starting training to bring the concentration even to an idea of what is inside. It is like a discovery and it is a discovery that seems to work, to bring, to allow the body itself to have some form of expression. It's a little bit freeing oneself or a changing where ones concentration is.

It's very like this excercise from Steve Paxton "Where is your concentration?"
And in english this word is very good, because it's not only your thinking, but where are you concentrated, where have you put yourself? In your eyes? In your brain? Are you concentrated on the next or concentrating on the sensation, on the feeling of where I'm sitting. My body is resting here in this couch, on this surface, sinking slidly, and as I put my concentration there, I discover there's more and more sensation, feelings, the couch is more warmer here, now my breast is sinking in, etc; different sensations trigger that focus on concentration. So concentration on the sensation is like one circle which feeds into itself. Then from that place, from the focus on the sensations, comes the feeling of the space, of your partner, but first yourself. In relation to yourself you can extend to the world. And there's is no way to explain it, because it's a personal experience - but then you extend out differently, rather than you reach out in the world.

So I think this is a primary difference in this way of training: You come to yourself first, find where your concentration is, and then you extend to another place, state... in this way."

A.V.: "You also worked in the workshop warm up with the shifting of weight...?"

R.M.: "It's about what we take for granted. We are just here in our bodies, just moving around, doing our things and we are this age and now we have all these complicated and various things in our lifes....

But inside we are simple mechanism of physics on one level. We have this weight moving. Again, I just discover, if you focus on where your weight is and how it's shifting, something changes in the way you think. You take your life in a simpler moment. I'm this weight, these are my bones... When I begin to bring my concentration to it, I can begin to feel my weight as an actual perceiption and it's different than "how do I look?", different than "How do I feel?", "Am I nervous?". It's coming to this very basic physical sensation. And if you can come to it in a very simple way, it changes how you think about the next thing you do. I'm just here, that's my weight - the simplest fact of my excistence in the moment.

So that's why it has sometimes relations to other philsophies, but it's a very simplifying thing to do, to focus on your weight."

A.V.: "What has the weight to do with impuls?"

R.M.: "Nothing! The focussing on the weight is so, that you become more clearly noticing what the impuls does to you. So sometimes the impuls moves your weight. The impuls can come from the weight, the weights falling. I mean there is this simple fact, that we ignore most of the time, probably for a very good reason, that we're actually falling. The power of the earth is pulling us right down and if we weren't trying to maintain a posture of sitting or standing, we'll be falling down. So actually we are falling and to bring some attention to this, maybe within that little falling, there'll be an impuls to movement. But I also don't seperate out the imagination impulses to movement, or the desire-impuls to movement: I want to go over there or I want to sit here.

The attention to the weight is more like a conclearing screen and than you start noticing all the impulses, which are always there - to move, to get up, to sit down - and then the impulses which is from the physics of it. The physics of the earth is continuiously saying: fall down. If you just get into that, there you have an impuls already.

The imagination I call the other ways of thinking. For example the imagination of the bones. It's something even different - it's not even in a word, it's the bone-thought. Hard calcium in relation to fluid marrow bone, the muscles filled with blood and lymphe, in constant motion, even in total stillness as long, as you are alive. There is already movement going on. There is an impuls of the blood, which is just moving inside of you.

So on one level there's no relation between the sensation of the weight and the impuls. On the other level, me and some people in this practise, need some sort of cleaning the screen for a moment to begin to identify impulses. This is another difference in this dance form to other dance forms, that we actually search for these impulses and maybe to eliminate other impulses like I'm not doing this or that.

There is an excecise: wait for ten impulses and then move. The nature of excecise is to arbiturate limits, so that you then can start to study something. In this particular excercise you create the arbiturate limit of ten impulses. I have no idea what this is for each individual, if it is to scratch my eye, one impuls; if that is to shift my hips, another impuls ... so there is the limit. Or just bring the concentration to the idea, that you have impulses, begins to identify them. And then, like in anything, we have certain habbits, nervous reactions or unconcious movement patterns, and those rises impulses. And maybe somehow waiting through ten of them, you get maybe to one, which is a little more unique or maybe not so unique, but at least it has a difference. By the time you focus on your body or the condition of your body for that many impulses, you are in a different state of mind by the time you start to move. So I think this is an other purpose for that sort of excercise."

A.V.: "What has this work on your concentration to do with your site-specific work and also with your artistic decision?"

R.M.: "Taking something outside -
so here is the outside world, we have to begin somewhere. So finding this place of concentration, again, I most often trust, that if myself and/or others can get in a place of concentration and a little bit of slowness for a moment on this site, there is information in this site, in this room, the angles of this room are present. It has a particular feel, movement. So if I slow down first, I can begin to sense, what's there, then fring out the impulses and then maybe I add something, what wasn't there before. And this is then the artistic or aesthetic, that I search to create and to make room for. I particular like these paradoxical justifications, where here is a group of ten standing by a statue, and all of a sudden they start moving. I think the statue looks different against to all the people moving. It's just following these tracks of imagination. And I also want to take dance out of the safe confined spaces, both of theatre or studio, what I like to do as well. But to take it out and have it appear in the world, on the street or in the U-Bahn or in the park or in front of a museum. Just these little art moments, which I sometimes see happen anyways on people unconciously doing something like that. So this, I think, is my one direction, that I have as an artist, placing the things out in the world.

I also like not exactly intruding into peoples thinking but bending it. So the people there in the U-Bahn, they're moving back and forth. I enjoy shifting their attention for a moment to something else. Maybe bring them more to themselves. I don't have a huge agenda, except that is to cause some little shift in the day. And when that happens, when I created something and I'm watching from the outside, and that seems to happen, someone stops for a moment and is curious to the space, I feel some little sense of satisfaction. That is an satisfying moment.

There is this moment first of shifting the world for one person who's whatching it for a moment and then it's something about revisioning this place. I mean we live in these places, we move through these places, they give us life and transportation. For the most part, is my feeling, that the most people don't care or don't see. And that seems to me a kind of a shame. What a shame, you walk through the space and it is actually beautiful or it's kind of ugly because it's build that way, and something happend to it.

This is something I'm drawn to or a way of thinking. It will be a little better, if we each just walk through the world and somehow enjoy the moment we are in. So somehow this is related to the work within the site. So the people didn't have to pay a ticket and come to the theatre to see this other thing, and they are slidly intruded into their live. And hopefully we create some little shift in that moment, that they see the place something fresh. As many people have done many kinds of work in the world and this seems a very nice thing to do."

A.V.: "One word for Dance?"

long silence, breathing ...

R.M.: "This!"