Watch a video of Dana Caspersen dancing. She makes millisecond shifts between efficiency photographs – pedestrian, quixotic and utopian. Simply once you suppose you will have pinned her down, she is like quicksilver into the subsequent picture. She may by no means have achieved anything in her profession past that includes in a lot of William Forsythe’s most influential works, and he or she would have had a rare profession. And but, it isn’t as an artist that Caspersen practices nowadays. She has reinvented herself as a battle engagement specialist and simply launched her second e book, Battle Is An Alternative: 20 Basic Choices for Navigating Troublesome Instances (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2025).
Caspersen has been working in battle now for 15 years. Initially, she saved battle and dance separate; finally, connections between the practices started to emerge. “Formulaic responses don’t work. Not solely does it not work, it irritates folks,” notes Caspersen. “When folks sense you might be coming to somebody with a battle decision technique, they sense it and get irritated. Any software can develop into a weapon. Particular methods of speaking, concretizes concepts. That may be very related to bop follow. You go in day-after-day and it’s not like what you probably did yesterday is essentially going to be accessible to you. The follow is reinvigorating your connection to concepts. It’s an alive course of that acknowledges as a part of the follow of constructing means for brand new issues arising.”
Battle Is An Alternative: 20 Basic Choices for Navigating Troublesome Instances clarifies key concepts in battle research, gives follow options for widespread unfolding conflicts and instance statements to elucidate battle conditions and behaviors. The follow options often have easy spatial options hooked up. For instance, dealing with instructions to attach or disconnect from completely different concepts or beliefs.
“I used to be a dancer for 35 years,” Caspersen says. “A lot battle can happen within the studio that may get in the best way of accessing the work strongly. Among the methods I see that occur is in the best way suggestions is given and obtained. How the work is described. In the event that they put a query between them and the dancers. Right here’s what I’m noticing. Here’s what I’m interested by. What might help us get there? When that doesn’t occur, when blame will get in the best way, we lose all types of prospects.”
She provides, “The work as a performer was to have the ability to be current with all types of knowledge, generally seemingly contradictory info, and to experience that, discover the road between that. Comparable in writing, how do I take all these things and discover a line that an viewers can navigate?”
In addition to writing and publishing her work, Caspersen gives coaching each on-line and in individual for people and teams. “The subsequent one I’ve developing is all dance artists,” she explains. “It’s a give attention to creating your individual capability, to pay attention to the selections you’re making and pay attention to how you might be focusing your consideration. We work with folks’s precise expertise. We’re working with idea, but in addition with the complexity of actual life.”
Caspersen concludes, “I don’t suppose I’ll return to bop. I adore it. It was such a robust expertise. My work with risk has taken a unique kind now.”
For extra info and to order the e book, go to www.danacaspersen.com.
By Tamara Searle of Dance Informa.
