About BARBARA METTLER

BARBARA METTLER Artist or Educator? Autobiographical Sketch 2 Page 3 If dance is, as I believe, the art of body movement and if movement is our most natural, universal language, it is imperative that we all do it. It must be cultivated, and who is to cultivate it if not dancers? The answer is obvious, but there is still more to be considered. The dancer who is to teach anyone and everyone must find common denominators of dance which offer opportunity for free creative movement expression to any individual or group. Throughout my professional life I have searched persistently for these common denominators, without any help from the dance world other than the influence of Rudolf von Laban's work on our study program at the Wigman school. I have been an explorer, seeking basic elements of dance which can make the practice of it available to everyone. Truths which I have discovered and verified by continuous testing have shaped my own dancing and influenced the dancing of many others. I have found ways to liberate and cultivate the natural creative movement impulses which are latent in every human being and in every group, rejecting uncompromisingly every attempt to reshape natural human movement to conform to artificialities. Very early in my iconoclastic approaches to performance, I had the spectators sit in a circle around the dancers, occasionally participating in the movement. After my New York period we never used music as a background; instead the dancers accompanied themselves and each other, not only with sounds of voice, hands and feet but also with any other kind of musical instrument which they could handle. At my New Hampshire farm school we danced in relation to the environment outdoors and indoors- a direction which we continued to follow. There came a time when, in a burst of artistic insight, I realized that my groups and I should no longer practice composed dances. Rather, we should improvise. This was the most definitive turning point in my professional career. Until then I had approached improvisation merely as preparation for composition, as we had done at the Wigman school. From that moment on, I have put my major effort into developing the craft of improvisation. All our performances since then have been improvised. I believe that the most creative moment of a dance is when it is first being created, and that improvisation is the surest way of evoking the unique creative dance potential of every individual and every group. A peak in my creative dance work has been reached in performances of large group dance improvisation. In these I do not dance myself, but my groups improvise under my direction. I train the members, give them movement themes, and guide them critically through their dance creations. The film "A New Direction in Dance" shows my seventeen- member dance company improvise for an hour. Who am I? An alien in my own land, dance? There are few who understand the meaning of my work. Movement is a language which always has a meaning, and I am more concerned with the meaning of the dance than with the display of technical proficiency. My book "The Nature of Dance" states clearly what dance means to me. It is for someone else to decide whether I am an educator or artist, if it is necessary to make a distinction between them.   copyright Barbara Mettler 1981 <<< previous