Saturday rehearsal:
I’m feeling very happy with where the movement aspect of the piece is right now aside from finding what feels like the “right” “ending.” I’m really interested in getting the dancers invested in creating their own narrative within the overarching theme of the piece as well as creating a communal understanding of the journey we are and have been going on through this process and in this piece.
On Wednesday for our group rehearsal, we spent the first 40 minutes talking and doing a free writing exercise. I told them a little bit about where my head has been in regards to the development of the theme of the piece and what this means to me. For me, this piece is taking the literal water cycle and overlaying my experiences and understandings of water and relationship. The Pacific Ocean has always felt like the great connector of worlds – where my family is from and where I was born and raised. The great dark blue expanse resonates with my feelings of inbetweeness with which I struggle with daily; feeling like I am constantly crossing oceans to contextualize my being. This narrative of cycling feels so important because of the growth I have experienced validating my own identity and existence and the resurfacing of these feelings of not-enough-ness and being lost. The end of this piece feels important in not feeling like an end but one more step in the cycle, breaking out of ice-liquid-gas and becoming body, ground, being.
I am thinking of how this piece might be perceived by viewers who don’t know this aspect, and I wonder of the intrinsic connections we now make between ocean and climate change. In this ode to ocean, I am seeking relationship to water. How have we been socialized to treat bodies of water and water generally?
After doing my best explaining of all these things I asked them to take 10 minutes to free write, thinking about their relationships to these themes of water, recurrence, and relationship. This wouldn’t have to be shared if they didn’t want to, mostly to build their own narratives in this piece as well and have it be something resonant with and personal to them. I was delightedly surprised and everyone shared what they had been thinking about afterwards. I loved hearing from all of them and overlaying our individual experiences seeing what overlapped and connected.