I’m finally to feel like I have something resembling a dance. Big puzzle pieces that just need to be turned and studied and clicked into the right places.

But the more the dance becomes something legible the more I struggle with articulating what it is exactly or what it’s conveying. I think this piece has become about myself in a way I really didn’t anticipate: my interests in movement, my insecurities, my exhaustion, my delight, my frustration. These feelings and themes that are coming up for me are filtered through my dancers and reflected back in a way that’s hard to ignore. Maybe that’s what makes this dance “my piece”. I wonder if all choreographers feel this type of intimate connection with their work.

This week we extended the sweeping phrase, focused on transitions, and started playing with different iterations of the dance.

3.28

The extended version of the sweeping phrase is something that I created as I taught it to the dancers. This often becomes my process as I find seeing the work on other bodies so integral to my creation of movement. While this may sound like a good excuse to avoid prepping for rehearsals, I really do think I’ve made my best sections of work with this method and it’s faster for my process and for the dancers, especially when I have so many other things to prepare for rehearsals.

Here is the extended sweeping section from rehearsal on Sunday, the second half of which the dancers just learned an hour earlier.

4.01

Thursday was a really exciting day! This was the first time the whole cast could be together for a rehearsal in Berenson, only made possible because Laura (one of Smith’s dance graduate students) agreed to supervise from Zoom. This was such a crucial rehearsal for setting the piece’s spacing and transitions, as well as improving the comraderie between the cast. They’ve really never worked togther outside of weird zoom rehearsals and nerve-wracking Friday showings and I think it was really good for them to dance together without the pressure of performance.

By the end of the night we had some solid runs of the piece done and had finished up with our costuming decisions! Laura was also able to give us some feedback on the piece; having someone else validate some of the decisions being made really makes a big difference. I wish there were more opportunities to hear about our work, but the schedule really is tight.

This night made it especially clear that my decisions are becoming increasingly about suiting the group and their energy rather than a narrative, which isn’t how I saw this process going, but which I think has given me a new sense of creative freedom. I wonder how much that shows up in this draft of the piece.

Friday’s Showing: (unable to upload to vimeo)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mO6w-yMSAbdpB6tnk0Gdgp_pzc20KBRR/view?usp=sharing