Working on: Section 2 – Merengue Improv

In this section, I am letting everything in my narrative come to life. I dance to a Merengue song and let my body do the talking. I think there is a natural progression from the first section to this one. I know that it may seem obvious but I’m not afraid to lean into that direct line of “here is where the moves come from” to “this is how it shows up”. I also like to think of this as those intimate times where I do play a song and lose it in my own room. It’s hard to do this in front of people because I don’t feel self-conscious about any of it when it’s just me, but suddenly when having to show others under bright lights I can get in my head about the movement that is happening. Like I mentioned in the narrative, this is what I’ve learned to call ‘vulgar’, ‘too sexual’, ‘ungodly’, and so to put myself in a place in which people can see me in that space terrifies me a bit. I know better now than to keep seeing it as vulgar and one-dimensional, but that doesn’t stop my body from reacting as if it is when in front of a camera. 

With this section, I would also like it to be as developed and rich as any other section in the dance. This section holds a lot of values like duration, stamina, musicality, ancestry, shame, pride, and complexity. But physically,  I don’t want it to read simply as that one section where she is dancing Merengue for 4 minutes. Even if the audience were to see it that way I want something to challenge me movement wise each time I do it, I want to grow and learn something new in this section. After talking to a mentor we came up with some ways that can keep this section living and breathing. 

• Changing the song
• Tracking the spine
• Improvise with implied space
• Emphasize a foot
• Accent the front
• Accent the back
• Focus on pelvis
• Focus on hands and feet
• Just listen to the base

Working on: Section 2 – Clave Improv

With the first two sections being so clearly tied together, it’s hard to find something that can follow it. I can feel that the work is not finished which means that something is to come I just don’t know what yet. Something that I bring up in my narrative without speaking about it is this idea of there being nameless movements that exist in the same body as the Merengue dancer. And as I show in the narrative they weave into each other and exist simultaneously in ways that are obvious and sometimes not so obvious. In this section, I play a salsa clave that for me it allows me to go in and out of these two worlds. This rhythm is under every single Salsa song at the least and yet shows up in Contemporary classrooms. And so at the end of this rehearsal, I played around with what came up for me while listening to it and tried to come up with specific small phrases that can return. In this section, I want to come in and out of three spaces: walking, nameless movement/abstract/contemporary, named movement/salsa/groove. My hope and dream is that this section can be choreographed, we’ll see.