The past week of rehearsal has been focused on gelling and cultivating the group energy. One of the huge downfalls of zoom is that even though we can create, share, and build material, it is nearly impossible to feel each other in a room the way we are so used to doing when dancing.

Instead of having two rehearsals with the group broken up between in person and zoom, we were lucky enough to have everyone in the space together for 2.5 hours, running the piece and focusing on building the group energy. One of the notes that stood out to me in the last commentary was how everyone is so in in their solo moments – totally committed to their movement quality and the fullness of what it is – but the group moments seem much more discombobulated and scattered.

To solve this issue, we ran the main group section (Drip) a lot of times with me trying to give them different prompts each time to focus on each other. I tried to coach them to send out their dancer’s spacial sixth sense to feel the energy of other people. One run I told them to perform to one another, using their backspace as if they were facing away from the audience on stage. Another prompt was to actively use their heads and eyes to look at each other (this was a little wonky because the material for this phrase doesn’t really allow that). Something that really worked was telling them to commit to one another the way they are committing to the movement. In these group sections they are all going in on the movement itself and I think by changing the language to “commitment” something clicked. Initially, the focus on people rather than movement really slowed down the phrase work. In followup runs I told them to not let their shift in focus slow them down, but to help them find cohesion at the speed they were going.

The last run we did was magnificent. There were still a few kinks to work out, but I was honestly blown away by the transformation in the energy of the piece. In every section, I could feel the dancers having a heightened awareness of each other in the space and that felt so magical to be in the presence of again.

Now I hope that we will be able to capture that and put it on video.