Inspired by a video of Trisha Brown performing Accumulation and Watermotor while talking, I began working with improvised movement and text, which includes many of the questions I ask myself when I dance and stories that formed my identity as a dancer. The work is currently in process and may remain in process forever.

As long as I can remember myself, the thing that has defined me is that I am a dancer. From a very young age, it was clear to me that I was meant to dance. Dance led me through the challenging years of puberty, of high school, through heartbreak and falling in love, through moves from school to school, city to city, country to country. The thing I most wanted to be in my life, more than a wife or a mother, at times more than even a good person, was a dancer. 

Today, I am a wife, a mother of two, I am 41 years old, striving constantly to be a good person. I have 22 years’ experience on stage as a dancer and yet, the question that nags at me and lives in my mind when I am home, in the studio and even on stage is: Am I still a dancer? 

In my works, I use various tools- text, video, props, movement, comedy, audience participation and more. It is difficult for me to categorize my works as dance works as they stray from what I was raised to understand is dance. My choreographic language communicates subjects that interest me, bother me, inspire me, but I do not know if they convey me as a dancer. 

I feel I am following a path delineated by my works. And on this path, in order to best convey the messages and thoughts I deal with in my process, I get farther and farther away from source as a dancer. 

Last year, I joined the Choreographer’s Association. This act made me identify with which form I identify and I chose dance. Around that time, I was told “if you are going to make something new in the next year, it should be very dancy.”
This comment annoyed me at first but, as many disturbances it slowly turned from a grain of dirt into a conceptual pearl. I wanted to check what a dance piece that I made would look like? Was I capable of making such a piece? Was I capable of going into the studio and dancing? Would I enjoy it and, even if I did, would it be interesting to an audience?

FREE

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/598607891317

Website: www.orilenkinski.com 

Instagram: @orilenkinski

Contact Ori: olenki@gmail.com

In addition to A Dance Piece, Ori joins us for a movement workshop, Text and Subtext: Words and Movement, on April 19th at 5:30pm. There is a $20 class fee and registration is required for this event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/594866611047