Working on:  Camera Angles

Today we got our first look at our dances through cameras. Here we got to tell the crew where to look and at what times. And I have to honestly say I hated it. I was really attached to the illusions I had built for this piece in my head, and more specifically attached to having the whole stage to work with for the duet. Now I am worried that at any point if I don’t look at the floor I’ll be out of the shot, I’m confined. I wish we could create boxes around the sets and the Marley but I understand it would interfere with lighting and such. Also, the music is traveling a hair late to the audience and it is imperative to the type of dancing I am doing. In addition to that, there wasn’t enough time for me to acclimate to the camera shots and make use of other cameras because I am in my work. I don’t know anything about how anything looks when I’m on camera. In my head, the piece is shattered in fragments and sections that have yet to become one. Maybe it is because I can’t stand back and watch it as a whole as it is coming together on the stage. Here is me walking around in the Marley watching for the markings on the floor.

This same day at rehearsal I started hating my piece. I walked into Berensen saying “I don’t like it anymore”. The duet felt like a commercial high school dance by two teenagers, the merengue and reggaeton pieces felt like we were at a talent show or a resort showing folkloric/exotic dances for foreigners. It feels like you look at this body of work and there is nothing to figure out. Everything is there and requires no second thought as to what it is and what it means. It feels that only contemporary forms of dance permit you to question what is happening, to see the work as intellectual, deep, meaningful. Whereas social forms are just, that. Nothing to pull from them. Unless the work is contemporary, with nameless movement, it is no longer deep meaningful personal work, it is no longer something that requires skill or vulnerability.

I realized while no interaction with my peers or supervisors has told me this narrative, I have a pervasive oppressive bias bubbling inside of me when I look at my work. I have never been able to see myself, my dancing, my movement, the things I have learned from my family, the things Isabel learned from her friends on a stage. When I say this I mean a stage that isn’t a music video, or a resort show, or a high school talent show. It’s something about these dances showing up in a stage of a predominately/historically white institution. It’s something about being the only non-contemporary piece in the show. It’s something about Angie not being able to give me feedback on specific movements like with the other choreographers. It’s something about in a world of dance that only puts ballet and contemporary on the stage, that only requires professional dancers to arduously train in those two forms. It’s something that tells me that this work doesn’t belong here. It belongs at home, it belongs in parties, it belongs commercially, maybe at competitions, just anywhere else but here. Because this doesn’t require thinking, this doesn’t require the audience to ask themselves what this is about, this doesn’t challenge or confuse the audience. This is somehow less meaningful, it is shallow.

I love contemporary. I love to improvise with nameless movement. I love doing it as much as any other form I know. It spills out of me the same way other forms spill out of me because my body has found itself in it. Yet when I sat down to work on this piece, what I have now is what showed up. This is what showed up for me. A burst of some social dances that my body put forth with a dash of contemporary as garnish.

As I ranted to Isabel about what I felt wasn’t right with the piece and started discovering my own bias towards what we had made she said “what if we cut me out of it and you just end with a solo of whatever you want”. When I responded I said “I could, I have been working on something contemporary just in case we didn’t work out but if I do this I would feel like I am buying into this narrative that none of this belongs here” and I immediately burst into tears. I don’t know.

In my last year of high school, I got to be Cassie Ferguson in A Chorus Line. One day in rehearsals with just me and my dance teacher Mr. Lugo I did the dance and then started crying that something wasn’t right. After comforting me Mr.Lugo tweaked a few things and all of a sudden I was able to do it. I think more than anything I was scared to dance alone on a huge stage all by myself for the first time. I hope I’m scared of this piece too. I have the urge to undo the whole thing and just start something different. Maybe that’s because I’m scared. I hope that in doing the piece during tech I can fall in love with it again.