Internal Landscapes

By John Ollom MFA

Internal Landscapes is the revolutionary methodology created by John Ollom MFA. It is archetypal movement that leads to art creation. This book is supported by 14 years of movement research as well as a praxis that is founded on Dance, Movement Art, Jungian Depth Psychology, the Philosophy of Nietzsche and Queer Studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483548791

Book preview

ABSTRACT: The psychological and anthropological findings in my work combine my extensive research into the writings of Carl Gustav Jung and his disciples. In my movement research, I took my findings beyond mere dance productions into movement art filled with running colors. Major findings explore my work in analyzing archetypes, the shadow, psychological projection and the liminal space that is found in my artistic work as well as my praxis. The poems, photos and drawings reflect my own artistic expression that existed alongside the production of the Ollom Art Festival in August of 2013. The philosophy of Nietzsche was examined in his aphorisms that I then analyzed in power dynamics between men in my newest work Prisoner of My Projection. One of my artistic goals was to go beyond traditional queer models of man to man relationships on stage but find imperfection, love and longing as the central premise for movement research in my work.

KEYWORDS:

DANCE

MOVEMENT ART

JUNGIAN DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

QUEER STUDIES

Copyright 2015 by John C. Ollom©

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4835487-9-1

Cover: Internal Landscapes Movement Artist: John Ollom; Photo by Jim Sable©

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank my husband Jim Sable.

I would like to thank Sylvia Brinton Perera, author/Jungian analyst. I so appreciate the guidance of Susan Brookhart, Franklin Brookhart, Erica Eaton, H. Lan Thao Lam, and Gale Jackson.

I would like to thank the colors of the prism: Janelle Abbott Staley, Sophie Poletti DeVore, Makiko Ishimori Sato, Matt Clemons, Miguel Villalobos, Amber Nalle, Muriel Ote, David DeMato, Osamu Uehara, Greg Thornsbury, Randy Spence, Casey Mauro, Abbie Vachon, Elizabeth Woods, Douglas Allen, Matthew Gayton, Paul Hays, Matthew Wagner, Janet Aisawa, Emily Winkler-Morey, Jeannette Hardie, Shirley Hardie, Fuyuko Asano, Chris Sarasin, Fred Riccardi, Steve Brammeier, Aaron Mann, Matthew Stone, Brie Lobbett, Eric Diamond and Jeff Carr;

our special friends from the Ollom Art Summer Program: Karen Brunette, Jendi Reiter, and Roberta Pato, thank you for always holding us in your arms of love and support;

the board of Prismatic Productions Inc.;

and, our loyal students, fans, friends and family who have shared our journey on the way: Tory Rosen and Diana Alvarez, Jacqueline Lincy, Stacey Asip, Michelle Wang, Emma McCagg, Ellen Terry Trent Hinds-Brandt, Milton Kerr, Danny Foceri, Barbara Parker, John Healy, Heather Chandor, John Rappapport, Rock ‘n Roll Ria, Yael Acher -Kat Modiano, Randall Klein and Jessica Zinger.

I would like to thank Rachel Brookhart for her unending support of my work.

Artist Statement

I live in the holes between narrative arches. Over years of choreographing movement art, I have found tableaux vivants of movement art that have surpassed definitions of dance and definitions of theatre. Though there is a definition of narrative in my work and there are characters that interact, there are holes of ambiguity that are left on purpose by me. It is in those holes that the mystery can be revealed. It is similar to the Japanese art world view or aesthetic called wabi-sabi. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity). This parallels my deep commitment to texture in my work. Texture informs my lack of man-made uniform structures, but rather creations that we find in the forest, woods, or ocean floor; texture that invokes age, experience and interrelationship.

I have a deep respect for the forms found in nature, the ocean or the dirt in the ground that form the personifications in the human forms in my work. This is a deep commitment on my part to the stories of the Other: the marginalized, the demonized and the repressed in our current societal structures. There is a reverence for diverse forms of being which translate to diverse forms of sexual pairings as well as gender manifestations. Diverse body types, diverse ages, and diverse levels of technical ability are encouraged in my work. This cornucopia of diversity fill my work with a texture that informs the vision of the viewer. Seeing juxtaposed images leaves the audience member to not be able to embrace the gender binary in human culture, but find new insight into diverse ways of being.

This is a direct attack on Judaeo-Christian forms of body identities which encourage body shame and sexual shame. Consciously attacking shame in our society, nudity is often used to free up the genital region as an area of inquiry into the order of expression in the whole body. This is in direct rebellion to the aesthetics of ballet whether classical or neoclassical or contemporary. It is in turn a definition of movement art that looks to the artist to let archetypal energies be released instead of holding the body in a defined shape of what the choreographer or director should direct the object to look like. The beauty is found in the imperfection and the texture.

Coming from a background of having a BFA in Ballet from Texas Christian University, I analyze the body as a vessel and a means for artistic revelation. Analysis in the studio can take the anatomy of the body to be the map by which inquiry begins, but realizing that many students and humans are locked in paradigms of held theory, for example, Judaeo-Christian body shame surrounding sexual expression from the genitals, I looked into my own autobiographical body of work to find my own issues of shame, fear, trauma, anxiety and doubt to form my vision. In this analysis, I came to create Internal Landscapes a methodology by which listening to our unconscious could come up with images, shapes, colors that we could then in turn manipulate as if a sculptor would then turn to clay to take form and shape. After our archetype has form, we can decide if it lives alone or with others, outside or in the studio. We listen to our innermost internal guide to let that vision evolve to find its place of rest.

Much of my research has come from Jungian Depth Psychology and the dance of archetypes that bubble up out of the unconscious. I find these moments of bubbling up to be healing for both the artist creator as well as the artist participant as well as the audience viewer. The entities that dance to our conscious teach us of the repressed and denied stories that live beneath the surface.

Table of Contents

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Artist Statement

The Tree

Chapter 1: Psychological and Anthropological Findings

There is no Male or Female

Movement

Chapter 2: The Movement Art

Negative Space

Freedom

Chapter 3: Zur Nietzsche

Craig

Ode to a Little Boy

Deep in the Woods

Chapter 4: The Ollom Art Festival

Appendix 1: Website and Email Information

Appendix 2: Feedback

Annotated Bibliography

Photo, Poetry and Art Credits

Introduction to the Artist

The Tree

When people see the trunk of my tree

they comment on the power of the solid frame

yet inside I am feeling the

push and pull of the divine goddess

surging vaginal flow into my roots

evolving in seasonal moods.

yet my branches

reach up for a god that is not

above me

he doesn’t hear.

yet the wind blowing

through my branches

is the dance

that they see.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chapter 1:

Psychological and Anthropological Findings

My movement art research and choreographic works live alongside my teaching practice. In the studio when I teach, I realized that I needed to create a methodology that would help students find their archetypal expression as they danced in my works and in my classroom exercises. Internal Landscapes is archetypal movement that leads to art creation. This methodology that I created came out of a place in my teaching, choreographing, and directing practice of over fourteen years that was based in New York City. I had encountered many people who had been over trained in the syllabus of ballet, or modern, or contemporary dance or acting. Many actors and dancers and performance artists had come to work with me and their technique was actually getting in the way. It was a hindrance versus a tool to lead them to new levels of artistic expression.

I had a massage experience that made me find the connections between places in my body that housed archetypal truths. The movement art piece Internal Landscapes was born out of this inquiry. I created this piece where each piece of my body had a different movement vocabulary and a different intention. This piece was presented to the public on October 20, 2007. Memories from my own past also appeared in the work along with my archetype of my inner child and a floating goddess figure.

This was the Ollom Movement Art production that was created out of this research, but I dove even further into this inquiry. I wanted to create a methodology that could help my students and others. I wanted to help not only dancers, actors, performance artists, but non dancers. I knew there was a healing aspect to this work and I began to develop my own process that eventually led to the Internal Landscapes methodology.

At the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library, I looked at the videos of past choreographers and dance companies. When I looked closely at the work, all that I saw were shapes of the choreographer’s original intention. You can see this strongly in Balanchine’s work in New York City Ballet and Martha Graham’s work on the Graham Company, also in Cunningham’s work. There had been reproductions of shapes that had been translated from years to years from the original choreography. I wondered why when a choreographer died did his or her work die with him or her. All that was left is a museum of shapes, devoid of original intention. New York City Ballet is a perfect example of this.

I had to find a way to look into the intention of movement. Balanchine believed that music was the basis of all movement. I disagree. I have no problem basing choreography on music, but I feel that this is what locks the art form of dance into a secondary art form. It is giving too much power to the music. This is of course my analysis of dance as a theatre art form, when we discuss dance anthropologically, we see dance as the first form of prayer in many cultures. Consequently, the inner intention is matched with the body’s manifestations of choreographic structures.

"The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows arts to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense- he is ‘collective man,’ a vehicle and a moulder of the unconscious psyche life of mankind." Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Literature (1930).

I had spent much of my professional career dancing for people who had put their choreography on my body. I was looking for a way for movement and impulse to come from within the artist. It would be a translation of internal energy and impulse into my choreographic structure. Now stating this, it is not a good way to make quick choreography for the stage. It is much more cost effective and efficient to tell people what to do with their arms, legs and motivation. It saves time and money, but by doing the Internal Landscapes methodology you create work that is transcendent for the artist creating it, the choreographer/director and the audience members.

One of my Internal Landscapes students states in the Robert Kazmayer documentary about M.U.D. (Men Under Dirt) that John Ollom is "one of the rare individuals who is concerned with the dancers internalized psychology for each moment. You can contrast this to method acting, but it is different in that I am not putting the art creation into a sympathetic character. I am letting the impulse drive the process. It is more similar to discussions that I have researched with Jerzy Grotowski and his discussions of creating a score" on stage from the actors’ sounds, movements and interactions. Grotowski is attempting to redefine theatre and take away external elements like lighting and costume. In Internal Landscapes I am not opposed to those external elements, I am seeing rate as the defining moment in how we analyze our movements to speak of truth either onstage or without an audience when the Internal Landscapes work is done for healing purposes.

This speaks to a need for a new progressive pedagogy within the world of dance and/or theatre and/or performance art training. I had seen