February 18, 2007 — Subtila

Each year in my ballet teaching, we spend two weeks focusing on artistry. I challenge the students with all sorts of sensory inspirations to interpret through movement – colors, textures, smells, emotions, dramatic situations, random words, poems, and works of visual art. At this time last year, I was writing the third part of my online series of fractal art courses, and thinking a lot about how I could translate what I know about teaching artistry to dancers into the uncharted territory of teaching artistry to fractal artists.

This year, at (ballet) artistry time, I reversed the process and used my fractal artistry text and images as the basis for a new approach to artistry in dance. We discussed these principles of visual art and how they could be translated into and applied to the performance of movement. I created this image as an example of the subtleties of lighting that can be introduced into a basically analogously-colored image.

I showed them the difference between an image that has the same all-over coloring (below), and the same image with very slight and subtle highlights and shadows (above). The finished image is much more interesting for those slight variances!

Then we discussed and explored the many ways they could introduce subtle changes in their movements – eye focus, angle of head, arm patterns, use of body, timing, musicality, etc. – to achieve the same subtle variations in their dancing.

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