What are transitions and how do we pinpoint or locate them in language and movement?
We have been discussing the topic of transition and transformation in one of my Graduate Seminars at Sarah Lawrence College. As I mentioned in my last post, Professor Sara Rudner is directing our class through a semester filled with complex movement explorations and inquiries. I had a type of break through in class today after we took a common movement phrase and created physical limitations in order to explore its logic. As a class we discovered that by eliminating the “transitions” or transitional steps in between the “star” movements or main movements the so-called logic of the phrase disintegrated. This process of elimination and discovery led us to realize that the transitional movements of the movement phrase are necessary for the “flow” or logic of the phrase to move from one moment to the next. Without the distillation and limitation of the phrase material we would not have arrived at our conclusion.
The concept of transition speaks my thesis and choreographic work because it relates to the process of changing from one set of norms to another. I am mainly curious about what happens in the in-between space between transformation.
The explanations below is a description of how I’m starting to understand transition and transformation as the process relates to language and movement.
Transition: The process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another.” (Google)
Transition in language”: The “lag” time in between the switch from one language or concept to another. The moments/ words that fill the gap between two concrete ideas.
Transition in movement: The in-between experiences of the body that stitch together events or states of being.
