Working on:  Section 3 – Choreographed Clave

SOMEONE ELSE IS HERE!!!

First, I want to talk about bringing someone else into the work and what this has done for the piece. For the longest time, this piece has been a solo. It is deeply personal, deeply rooted in my own experience of the world and so it was only right that I do it on my own. As the possibility became open to have people in the piece I rejected it at first, I thought there would be too much catching up to do and it wouldn’t work to have someone just dropped in because so far the audience and I have been walking this path alone. However, anything in dance is possible when done right and so I am exploring the idea of a duet. In the back of my mind, I still have a seed of a back-up plan involving a piano but until then, I’m going to try this duet thing work. 

I’m going to take a pause here to talk about who I’ve brought in. Her name is Isabel Gomez, she is one of my best friends. We’ve come to Smith with the same scholarship and have been building a very strong friendship together ever since. Isabel and I have a lot in common, too much sometimes (our 99 numbers are nearly identical). And so she understands already the lens and overall values of this piece. Of course, not everything but most of the parts that can’t be explained. We have had different paths when it comes to dancing and I love that I get to explore her journey as well and we can come to a place of understanding movement-wise during this duet. Working with her will be a challenge in that she will be out of her comfort zone with the abstract sense of it all, but I hope we end up at a happy medium. 

Now to what this has done for the piece. Bringing her into the work has given me a clear ending and arch to the work. I’m loving it! The arch is that everyone’s movement comes from somewhere, and when our paths cross with someone and we dance together we create a language to add to all the people that ripple throughout our bodies. In this duet, I want to walk out of my living room into a world where I meet her and our bodies come to pure synchrony and we explore movement through this seemingly cold space. We’re both calling on things we learned, things our bodies can do. Here is our first attempt at creating that world:

Working on:  Section 4 – Possible End, Isabel’s narrative

In the end, I want to follow Isabel as she walks into her space and recalls where her movement comes from. I want the audience to feel like we could see this happening forever. Someone tells us where their movement comes from, they dance to it, they meet someone else, then we follow that someone else into their space and they tell us where their movement comes from and so on and so on. We played with Isabel having an almost identical ‘nameless phrase’ in between what she talks about. We’ll keep exploring different movements and ways to tell the narrative differently so that it is more generative. This was her first jab at it: