Dancers Spin With a Japanese Twist

Author: Colin Penley and Katrina Uhl

The week before classes, a few dedicated dancers re-entered the world of the Center for the Arts for a pre-semester workshop with Luis Tentindo, a dancer from New York.
Over the next three days, he led us in a test of strength, dedication and will-power. Each morning we came together for two hours of stretching and focused muscular work, pushing our summer-wearied bodies to extremes they had not reached for months.
After a short lunch break, we spent our afternoons experimenting and creating work derived from a short phrase Tentindo taught us.
By the end of the workshop, with input from Tentindo and multiple different exercises and creative tasks, the group had developed two short works, which, if given more time, could be expanded into longer pieces.
Tentindo possesses a broad knowledge of dance styles and a variety of ways to use his and others' skills. The use of his expertise, and his unique, funky style had us leaping, spinning, stomping and rolling across the floor of the dance studio.
Some of the techniques Tentindo's studies include classical ballet, contact improvisation, gymnastics, martial arts, yoga and butoh.
Butoh is a style of Japanese minimalist and grotesque dance, the full name of which can be translated as "dance of the dark soul." Butoh has recently become a prevalent style in the world of modern dance. It combines dance, theater, improvisation and influences of Japanese traditional performing arts with German Expressionist dance and performance art to create a unique performing art form that is both controversial and universal in its expression (For more info, visit www.butoh.net).
Tentindo's résumé is quite impressive, including work with the White Oaks Project, Mikhail Baryshnikov's current company, the repertoire of Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, Laura Dean and various other dancers, teaching at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Summer Dance Intensive as well as at other universities, high schools and studios across the country, and in Taiwan. Tentindo also earned two Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach, in dance and in painting and sculpture.
We entered the workshop with very little idea of what would take place during the next six hours. The brief description of the workshop from a one-page handout, littered with such phrases as "zero-altitude," "post-modern movement" and "depart from conventional responses," left us fairly clueless.
Armed with our limited knowledge of French ballet terminology and a summer's worth of chasing young campers around the volleyball court and a small wooden cabin, we knew that we were probably in way over our heads. The first morning both assuaged our fears and proved them to be very true.
Tentindo had a number of directions that were in French rather than in English, and our muscles certainly were not ready to be tested the way they were. We were, however, able to achieve everything that we did.
At least in our heads we could follow everything. Our bodies were a slightly different story.
The afternoon session was exercise for both our muscles and our creativity. After some improvisational partnering work and learning some simple lifts, Tentindo taught us a simple movement phrase.
We split up and each took a few minutes to create our own adaptive phrase using aspects of the original dance in our creations.
We then paired up and taught our partners our phrases, combining the two into one working product. We ended our session by performing double duets with another group to show the rest of the participants what we had developed.
The second and third days followed the same pattern with technique sessions in the morning and a creative workshop in the afternoon.
The technique classes both forced us to push our physical limits and allowed us to work out all of the muscular issues that we had formed over the course of the summer recess.
The creative sessions gave us the chance to explore how our experiences over the past few months had begun to inform the choices that we made in our motion exercises.
Overall, the pre-semester workshop with Tentindo was a great way to start the fall semester and force our bodies to move in the ways we have missed over the past three months.