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Frey Faust PDF Print E-mail

After receiving primary discipline and essential experiance under the tutelage of his mother from ages 8 to 15, Frey Faust went on to accumulate an eclectic skill-set including contact improvisation, pantomime, capoiera, aikido, percussion, voice and several modalities of dancing. He traveled from California to Paris to New York to augment his experience through collaborations with choreographers such as Gina Buntz, Donald Byrd, Merce Cunningham, Nita Little, Ohad Naharin, Meredith Monk, David Parsons, and Stephen Petronio, Randy Warshaw to name a few.
A two-year stint as artist in residence at the Werkstaat e.V. Duesseldorf (now the TANZ HAUS NRW) allowed him to set the foundation for his pedagogical and artistic vision. Since then he has traveled the world, collaborating with like-minded artists and teaching. He is the author of the book and the originator of the Axis Syllabus-universal motor principles; a method for teaching movement through which he aspires to assist his students to deepen their understanding and use of nature's gift to us.

" Between 1985 and 2000, my teching transformed from the ordinary attempt to transmit choreographic ideas to an interest in passing on safety parameters and biomechanical principles. Successes and failures inspired or goaded me to continue to study and try various transmission techniques. In the mid-nineties I decided on a title for my method, The Axis Syllabus. Syllabus means a kind of grammar or a list and Axis refers to the three dimensions, and also the points around which we turn. The axis implies direction while the planes imply mass and both indicate inertial and momentum mechanics and therefore physio-dynamics. We could call the AS the grammar of human physio-dynamics.
My aspiration with this work is to develop clear criteria for a rational approach to training the body... the muscles work like this, the joints are more supportive in this relationship, this is how you construct a logical ramp, this is how you get the force of momentum on your side, these are the appropriate moments to breathe in or out. That is the how, but not the what; what kind of jump, what kind of gesture, etc. We share a similar model but we have different shapes and tonicities and these values alter the way we move."
(excerpt from an interview in April 2009/ Dance Magazine Athens)

My Body, Metropolis
Studying anatomy has left me with the realization that my pinprick awareness of “self” was as far from the truth as private insurance is to real healing. The stunning revelation of the nature of each living, intelligent structure; bone, muscle, fascia, ligament, cartilage, nerve and organ, gives me the strong impression that these structures have a great deal of independence and make many decisions without my meddling. If inanimate objects have “character”, then these things should be considered individuals, a teeming society of thinking, living, striving, feeling creatures... a metropolis. Twenty-six organs, two hundred and six bones, seventy thousand muscles of which only six hundred and forty are named and understood, countless veins and arteries and countless nerves, and one trillion cells that comprise these entities… they must co-habituate and collaborate in order to live well, but do they? Not always! There is often rebellion, for example when a psoas muscle feels it is working too hard and strikes, or murderous slavery, when a hapless lumbar disc crushes under the abuse of a relentless and dictatorial thoracic cage, or litigation, as when the stomach accuses the mouth of swallowing the indigestible, or even retaliates… rebellion, conflict, discussion, and harmony are constantly being negotiated in the body. As if that were not complicated enough, those one trillion cells are host to ten trillion bacteria, who help us fend off invaders, digest food, clean up the aftermath of internal battles. Even if there were no marauding virus or enemy bacteria to ward off, solitude is a fiction.

Musing about the possibility of democracy and justice in human society, I wonder how far we can get before understanding and coming to terms with the multitudes we live with right here in our own skins.

Every motion evokes sensation, is connected to a state of mind, heart and spirit, whether remembered, current or projected. This is also why it is so important to nourish our muscular- emotional memories with meaningful informationand healthy sensations. In the case of artistic research, the limits can and will be explored. We will then have a tactical basis for calculating the risks when departing from the zone of physio-emotional safety. If we truly want choice and freedom of motion, we need to understand the limits that nature has set for our well being in order to know how to harness them to our purpose without destroying those same means.


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