Lillian Rose Movement Project

Why is it named this? A long answer to a seemingly simple question that involves… cats.

It might seem that I’m just flower crazy and I kinda am. Every girl cat I’ve had in my life is named after a flower except for one, my first all white cat who was named Emily Dickinson (of course, she was).

But the flowers originated somewhere deeply important to me: my paternal nana. I wanted to name my first girl cat Lilly after her, but she was stubborn and sassy (my nana, but also the cat) and said, Oh, no, you don’t. So I snuck around the back way and called her Rosie, because, yes, my nana’s full name was Lillian Rose.

Now I have a Lilly cat and a Daisy and, of course, Begonia, who were all preceded by Rosie and Peony. A flower garden of sorts.

That’s how I think about these bodies of ours and the community of movers we’ve created together… and each of us has unique flowers that arise from the compost of our experiences.

So that’s what we’re building together: a big, beautiful communal garden.

WHAT is the Lillian Rose Movement Project?

From the time I started to teach somatic dance about 15 years ago, I had this powerful vision of creating a sort of communal choreographic experience. I knew that it did not mean teaching people specific steps to music that they then memorized and replicated on some sort of stage. I knew it was looser and freer and more spontaneous than that.

But I didn’t understand the vision for years, until I studied Butoh. Then it all fell together.

Butoh is a Japanese movement art that arose out of World War II as a sort of protest against the ever-increasing western influence on Japanese arts. It was also an effort to understand the horrors they had just lived through … how does one make art after such experiences? (A question we can all understand to some degree in today’s world.)

I kinda accidentally studied (meaning I had no idea the gift I was about to open) with Maureen Fleming (and continue to study on my own now for years, taking in anything from her that I can read/watch/listen to and of course, reading and watching from the originators and current artists all over the world). I had previously spent time with a Butoh artist living in Erie who was linked to other teachers who are also important in this work. Maureen Fleming, though, is my link to the past, as she has studied extensively in Japan with Kazuo Ohno, co-founder of Butoh. (As I say, lineage matters.)

Butoh was the tool I needed to understand the visions I had had and the communal experiences I wanted to shape.

How the “projects” evolve + How we work together.

I approach each project with a vague idea or question or an area of interest. My first project was about grief.

How do we each experience grief uniquely? How do we share grief in ways that are the same? And how do we share and hold grief as a community? Is there a way to create a movement ritual to help process grief?

I got together with a few of my movement students, and we started exploring grief in the body and grief expression. Dancing or moving with grief. Sharing it with one another without words. Honoring each others’ griefs, again, without words and through movement.

From there, we came up with a loose structure.

Imagine that you are given designated movement designations that we will represent as “A” and told to, via your own unique movement (by allowing your breath to guide that movement), get to “J” and then perhaps “Q” and so on.

The way I create a Butoh based piece is to find those marking points and then the mover, each time they go through the piece, finds their own way between those points. It will differ every time, because every time, you are in a different body and mind.

We do the same for the group to get them to “work” together… as in spontaneously problem solve in the moment, whether in front of a live audience (which we did) or for film.

What’s coming up?

I’ll be filming the next iteration of this project this Spring in Erie. We’re exploring relationships among women and how we function with and without our cultural masks.

And soon I’ll be announcing a project that can be participated in via Zoom and bits of film. (I tried this about 14 years ago but the tech and my own skills were not yet there. Now we’re all ready.)

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