Belly is named for the intimate space that gathers and connects separate elements to invigorate a larger whole. The belly makes room for varied needed ingredients to unite and synergize, empowering a complex body to move fluidly through a complicated world.

In their newest choreographic work, Dishman + Co. explores digestion as a social model for building a vibrant, expansive collective that can hold, and is strengthened by different voices and bodies. The company’s artistic practice of receptive dialogue cultivates intimate environments for listening and response, synergizing varied embodied voices as vital elements in a new communal presence.

As in verbal dialogues digesting diverse perspectives, mutual understanding evolves within Belly’s nuanced physical conversations that give time and space for different bodily voices to “hear” and “be heard”. Connection grows and vigorous group movement becomes possible. Through artistic dialogue, Belly envisions and practices a receptive social world in which different voices and bodies can unite in a widening, more agile communal life.

THE PROCESS

Belly grows through concentric layers of dialogue, beginning with the creative bodies of the dance collaborators. Directed by Elizabeth Dishman, the company generates vivid movement expressions through dancemaking tasks - prompts in a physical conversation that seek individualized responses from the distinct movement voices of Dishman + Co.’s 6 co-creating dancers. Each task offers a receptive, activating environment the collaborators enter and fill in their own way - a first “belly” that draws out and energizes their unique movement qualities.

Expanding the dialogue, the collaborators begin to digest these individual expressions communally - layering, learning, and translating them from body to body, voice to voice. It is a connective process that emphasizes knowing the movement rather than copying, working to understand and move closely with a new voice while maintaining one’s own. 

Working through the challenges of sharing space among different people’s choices and needs, these sensitive movement conversations gradually cultivate dance sequences both intimate and vigorous that amplify each voice while building a collective vitality. The joined bodily voices begin to articulate a new movement dialect unique to the physical interactions of these exact people. 

Part 2 re-dances the existing choreography, this time in dialogue with a new musical score by experimental-funk-classical cellist Okorie Johnson. In a renewed process of listening and translation, Okorie composed the score in response to Part 1’s movement, which was performed for him in silence. Though unaware of the original musical partner, his creative voice connects with Bach’s as the sonata’s energies resonate through the dancing. The experience transforms for both dancer and viewer as the dance is re-performed in this new “belly”. Okorie’s vibrant, contrasting musical world holds and activates the movement in a totally new way, highlighting the deep role context plays in perception and understanding.

THE AUDIENCE

In a powerful act of seeing, audiences provide the last and largest environment for digesting the dance. Receiving the movement, music, and relationships through their unique eyes, ears, and perspectives, their witnessing presence brings a vivid new relational force into the dance. As Belly’s distinct collaborators have influenced the movement and music uniquely, each audience energizes the dance in a particular way, shaped by the exact people in the room.

Following each performance, intimate, receptive audience dialogues echo the connective world just modeled from the stage. Viewers are given time and space to voice their unique perspectives and inquiries; the artists become listeners seeking to understand the dance from many more angles. Challenging traditional power-based or us/them norms, this last “belly” transforms the artist-audience relationship into one of mutual listening and shared learning. Understanding evolves and connection grows.

Coming back to the body, the dancers invite audience members to learn simple movement tasks from Belly’s creative process, offering an opportunity to feel the connective power of embodied dialogue. Elizabeth and the dancers are skilled at helping participants of all ages and abilities enter this experience, building on Belly’s receptive listening practices to foster a safe, curious, and joyful environment.

Moving in dialogue with audiences brings Belly’s intimate conversation full circle, reaffirming the profound value of individual physical voices while building trust and bodily understanding among a much larger group of people. Current neuroscience affirms that shared bodily experiences powerfully nurture connection and community formation: moving together actually shifts and reshapes the brain’s neural pathways and learned social patterns, opening new possibilities for connection between different - even differing - individuals. 

Belly’s cumulative process of digestive dialogue seeks to activate this shift among its collaborators and audiences, co-building embodied experiences that envision and physically practice a more vibrantly connected world.

BELLY Performance Reel (2 min)