May 4, 2006

Singdance with Vanessa Nowitzky

By Cindy Blankenship
For the Tidings

Vanessa Nowitzky performs singdance, a form of movement she developed to expand her range of expression. Nowitzky is seeking highly skilled performers for upcoming events. To audition, call 482-2977. Photo by Alegha Nowitzky

When Vanessa Nowitzky, at age 12, discovered Betty Edwards’ classic, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” she was thrilled, but she had no idea that she would someday, as a performer, choreographer, singer and teacher be dancing on the right side of the brain and inventing what she’s coined as “Singdance” (for which she won a 2005 Alden B. Dow Creativity Fellowship).

“I grew up watching Ballet in the Park, but I didn’t start dancing until I was 21,” she says, explaining that while she was singing intricate madrigals by the age of 8 with her parents who were renaissance singers, she was a “bookworm” and had never considered dance.

“I wanted to be an actress to express my emotion. But then acting school forced me to take ballet,” Nowitzky recalls. “I thought, ‘what am I doing here?’ ... because I was a klutz.”

While studying at West Coast performing art schools, including the California Institute of the Arts where she earned her BFA, and the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts where she earned a certificate in acting, Nowitzky had difficulty with the dance classes that she knew she needed for musical theatre, her goal at that time.

The dance and music didn’t seem integrated to her, it brought up emotions that couldn’t be expressed through the technique and she often found herself out of breath and later experiencing motion sickness. She had a vision of “singdancing,” musical sounds emanating from the body’s movement, even from flips, spinning leaps and fast whirling gymnastics. It was a clear vision, but she didn’t see how it could ever become reality for her. While she’d always appreciated the beauty of ballet, she didn’t have the alignment, and with tap, she couldn’t integrate the rhythm.

A guest artist in one of her classes, a modern dancer, brought hope.

“She expressed something so intense that drew me in and I could see was a form of self-expression. I realized that dance could be a form of communicating any emotion — a language I could express myself in.”

After graduation and returning to Ashland, her course changed when she started taking dance with Suzee Grilley. Nowitzky says it was Grilley’s “yoga like” style with emphasis on breathing that made such a difference.

“I felt coordinated musically in her class. Her style combines with a Brazilian martial art form using upside-down moves. I started doing cartwheels and flips and now my dream was turning into reality.”

From here, sprang Nowitzky’s singdance, a form of dance that allows movement to create the music, to affect vocalization, and where breath is exaggerated into a movement or a shape.

“Body positions affect the timbre and range of the voice,” Nowitzky explains. “With singdance, you are feeling into the soul and expressing through movement and voice simultaneously the vibration that you find, the way a riverbed carries water.

“Little children do this all the time, humming their way through their days, letting their movements create their vocalizations, like a young child does when running and singing, ‘aahhhh.’”

With the collaboration necessary to musical theatre, the left-brain comes into full play, says Nowitzky. “Words must be used to collaborate. And words are wonderful, but words are symbols. They compartmentalize energy. With singdance you can be the playwright, composer, performer and even the teacher. It’s like doing musical theatre with the right side of the brain.”

Chosen to perform in the Ballet Rogue’s program at Lithia Park, Ballet in the Park, Nowitzky will perform four solo singdance in July. She will Perform her singdance, “The Creek,” written in honor of Ashland Creek. She performed this at the Angus Bowmer Theatre in the 2005 Horizon Institute Concert, “In Celebration of the Human Spirit”

“I choreographed the creek while in New York City for three months ... it was so polluted there ... I was so homesick for Ashland where I’d grown up wading in Ashland Creek,” she says, adding, “I can’t wait to perform this at Lithia Park because the bandshell is right on the creek.”

Nowitzky, who also entertains a strong interest in quantum physics and teaches singdancing classes and private voice and music composition lessons for adults, says, “My mission in life is to remind people of nature through art.”

She can be contacted at 482-2977. Learn more at www.AshlandCreativeOutlet.com/Singdance.