I recently led a drawing workshop for a Dance Composition class at the Boston Conservatory. My goal was to connect drawing with movement and create a space for the dancers to explore an expanded point of view to inform their dance composition process. I wanted drawing to exist within the context of movement and offer another tool for the dancers to use in their artistic understanding.

Rather than focusing on a traditional drawing exercise, I instructed the students to allow the marks, forms and visual space to emerge from intuition and the body. We explored the quality of feeling behind mark-making at its essence, focusing on a particular feeling as related to movement and interpreting that in contrast with varying marks. We further explored abstract space and form and made compositional discoveries that were applied to dance vocabulary.

Following the drawing exercises, the students chose a drawing or particular aspect of the exploration and created an original dance composition. I was delighted to see what they created and how they articulated their creative process and discoveries.

I am intrigued by the dynamics of this intersection. The space that allows an artist to step out of their traditional comfort zone and training, to pick up a new media, process and concept, and translate this exploration into their own familiar language. Especially when given a media as fundamental and immediate as drawing. I think the connections are natural, and drawing and dance seem to intertwine, the sensuality and the formal constructs implicit in the process and presentation.

Drawing is fundamental to all art practice, a way to come back to the present moment and the natural tendencies to create and find one’s voice. I think it’s at the source, and art can be further expanded upon and developed. Finding the quality of the mark is the beginning, and language then follows.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can. -Jim Dine