*disclaimer about videos – they’re flipped because of photo booth and when I tried to flip them the right way they were upside down*

I feel reinvigorated and full of new ideas after seeing movement on other bodies. It is so inspiring and yet I feel lost trying to direct it – the visioning is so new to me. I am trying to pull the threads of what feel meaningful and continuous to me at the point in the process. My subconscious is speaking to my conscious and slowly, I am putting together the pieces of what this is becoming – what it is in essence.

I am realizing that my internal stories of self knowing, questioning, doubting, reaffirming, are all present in this work. The words that are acting as the opening pitch are grounding me, reminding me that this is not separate from myself. I am curious about the things that we believe to have put behind us that continue to come up again. In myself I recognize this as affirmation of identity, feeling “enoughness” or not enoughness of something. I want to know and question how we orient ourselves to our histories, heritages; how this brings us into orbit with others; in what kind of revolution do I exist? In whose orbits am I pulled and who is in mine? What dust makes up the galaxy I exist in? I am beginning to see this story unfold slowly and am grasping onto the strings that are falling almost unnoticeably into place.

In the draft I put together for this week, I have three main sections. These are in relation to the word/sound movement research that I had been doing in previous weeks. The first section I’ve called the “bowl of soup phrase” because of the progression into a recurrent upper back arch where I described the quality as being like holding a big bowl of soup (rather than a big beach ball or something because I wanted to encourage a heavier groundedness to the movement). After seeing other people do this, I became extremely interested in manipulating the timings and patternings of the progression. I asked my dancers to choose three segments of the progression to do in whatever order and then told them to either do it before or after completing the sequential phrase.

The second phrase is born from something Angie noticed in my work last week in the small staccato movements I tend to do frequently in improvisation. I have been working to compile a phrase/vocabulary of these small movements to build on this section. As of now there is a very short phrase that I need to continue workshopping and specifying. I’ve found that describing the movement quality in order to allow the dancers to embody it is challenging in this. It feels like a kind of pulling apart tension like a rubber band that never snaps together and you’re afraid for it to (I guess I just did it here!). I want this to be more random. I am feeling that the evolution of this phrase may end up being only some of the dancers doing this rather than all of them. As I build this story, what feels important to develop in this section is the stop-start uncertainty. Not in a monotonous way, because I think it could easily fall into that, but in a way of tension and recovery.

The third section is something I’m excited about. I’ve titled the section REVOLVE because that word was the jumping off point for developing the score that I am developed/am developing for this section. This idea feels important to me – around who/what do we revolve? Who is in our orbit, our universe? What is our sun and stars? What does it mean to look at something as revolving around us as opposed to us revolving around something? I want to evoke a feeling of affirmation, some kind of internal/external support that comes from these revolutions around whatever it is that we find ourselves being caught in or inherently part of.

Moving forward I need to storyboard and work on transitions between sections.

In this week of rehearsals I realized that I need to do a little restrategizing. I originally planned to have two rehearsals with two people in each and one on the weekend with everyone. I’ll be having Wednesday rehearsals with everyone (half in person on zoom) and adding a Saturday rehearsal starting next week.