Audition Process 3.3.2021

I’ve known since I first started preparing for my thesis that I was interested in working with a fairly large cast of dancers. In other years this may have looked like seven or eight, but I’ve scaled down to four or five in order to minimize the issues with campus safety restrictions.

Large casts appeal to me because I feel it allows more opportunities to play with spatial patterning and asymmetry, things that appeal to the “math” side of my brain. When trying to write the equation that fits a set of points, the equation is more accurate the more data points are available, they call this the “curve of best fit”. I think in some ways that’s how I see bodies in space, they contribute more information and allow me to find a clearer curve.

Still, the audition process has been hanging over my head since the start of the semester, as I knew it would be necessary and would need to happen fast. I’ve never held an audition before and in the hours leading up to it I was just as nervous as I might be if I was one of the dancers being auditioned. Sharing choreography is a really intimate process for me, and I didn’t feel like I had anything “worthy” of teaching in that moment. Of course, I have many weeks to refine and rearrange and create new material, but presenting something as the first impression of my making style to dancers was scary.

Ten dancers showed up to the rather impromptu audition, and all of them were really fun to watch and work with. It’s been difficult to narrow down my cast list and determine who I most want to spend the semester with, especially since so many of them are strangers to me. It’s tempting to only cast friends and dancers I know but I think my piece will be more interesting and this process will be more enriching if I open myself to new people.

One thing I found surprising was how helpful it was to watch Auxenia’s movement on the dancers. Her section of the audition really gave me a chance to sit and watch them work without the anxiety of my own teaching or choreography factoring into the equation. I think that was where I gained most of my opinions and insight on the dancers. When it was my turn to teach, it was hard to play both teacher and watcher, and I’m finding that watching the recording after the fact is giving me a lot more information than the audition did right in the moment.

My final cast list is: Emma Frank, Naomi Carpenter, Helen Danielson, Mara Kelley, and Ella Ammann-Bianciardi.