studio-307-janlee

Jan Lee is a dancer, musician and somatic educator. She creates and performs work that lives between music, dance, physical theatre, poetry, immersive or intimate performance or installations. She has shown her own work at places including Tate Modern, The Place, Curve Theatre and Victoria & Albert Museum. She is a certified Pantarei Approach somatic practitioner, teaching people to connect to their own strength and abilities, using a combination of empathetic touch and creative verbal communication. She is currently developing creative and educational projects with/for performers using a somatic approach to sound, music & voice. janlee.org

Studio 307. The floorboards sung out as soon as I danced on them. It was a play-space to ask myself as honest questions as I could.

How am I seen? How am I heard? How do others make meaning of me that challenges me? If I can’t enter into dialogue with how others see or hear me, then I feel invisible and silent. At the moment I feel I have to confront that. Because it’s the door that leads me into more depth and empathy with others eventually. So I play with surface until I can break in deeper. The many characters and images I play with in social interactions…One of them is a small Chinese woman who pretends she is not there. I tried to rewrite the lyrics of bad love songs. And speak English and Chinese thoughts until feeling pours back into my voice, and fill the rest of my body with intention to move through space. The attack and delay of the tongue and the breath as a drone pushing in time, the drop of the belly into its natural passions and the spine snaking its way through its own asymmetric native language. Next steps: I’m taking this research into developing a performative score.