Star Pû Method
The Star Pû Method is a dance-theater technique and a corresponding theater work I created in 2012, formerly known as the Star Crap Method. Participants improvise together in song, text, movement, and digital sound, revealing the layers of the moment of performance; namely the dancers’ experience, emotions, hxstory, desires and the shared experience with the audience. Allowing for failure and anti-climax, we examine if the performance encounter is a space that enables healing.
Please connect with Larissa to commission a unique performance of Star Pû Method with your dance company, at your institution or to request a teaching opportunity of the methodology, which may or may not include a performance by the participants.
Hxstory of the Star Pû Method
Star Pû Method formerly known as Star Crap Method is a somatic movement, sounding, and speaking practice for dancers and other humans formulated and researched via the choreographic work of Larissa Velez-Jackson. It was taught and performed twice by students at the Eugene Lang Dance Department of The New School (in 2018 and 2022) as well as Princeton University in 2021, during LVJ's Caroline Hearts Choreographic Fellowship at The Lewis Center of the Arts. In 2024, LVJ researched the method as a form of disability artistry with members of the AXIS Dance Co. during their Choreo-Lab Fellowship.
LVJ Performance Co. premiered "Star Crap Method" in 2014 at The Chocolate Factory Theater with cast members Tyler Ashley, Talya Epstein, LD and Larissa Velez-Jackson. The method was researched between the years 2012 and 2014 during LVJ's Movement Research Artist Residency. Talya Epstein was nominated for an Outstanding Performance Bessie award for their role in the work in 2014. "Protecting Complexity with the Star Pû Method" premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2022 with cast members Angie Pittman, Mary Read and Larissa Velez-Jackson and was supported by the Caroline Hearst Fellowship at Princeton University, an FCA Emergency Grant, Dance.NYC's Dance.Disability.Artistry Award and a fellowship at The Yard in Martha's Vineyard.
When Star Pû Method is performed, a small ensemble of dancers improvises a work together—full of song, text, movement, sculptural elements and digital sound—by peeling away all of the layers of the moment of performance. These layers consist of the dancers’ felt experience, emotional landscape, hxstory (personal and their formal training) and what can be experienced in the room together with the audience. An important factor in the Star Pû Method is the allowance of failure, anti-climax and human ordinariness as the foreground for creative expression, on equal ground with the dancer’s exceptional stage skill. With healing as a core facet through movement, breath, communal connection and vocal sound, LVJ asks whether the performance encounter provides a space that makes healing actually possible. With an openness to the lessons accrued by failure, the Star Pû Method makes any attempt at healing and connection a form of blessing.
The Workshop
In workshop form, participants exercise their creative and transformative personal power through self-awareness, sound, meaning-making, joy, and non-neutral states (like the performance state). Participants commune with pen and paper, surfaces (outdoors or indoors), and energy centers of the body toward an experience that connects them with the vast field from which all of us are ultimately connected.
***The heading photo is by Larry Levanti / Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University
