Taking Inventory

46 Ziplock "Trace" bags plus assorted boxes and papers

9/7/10:
Craisins package
Clif bar--White Chocolate Macadamia Nut flavor
Plastic packaging from Sony Mini DV tape
2 film containers, one black, one gray
brown and white feather

10/7/10:
1 plastic fork

10/17/10:
Propel water bottle--Grape flavor
Plastic packaging from Sony Mini DV tape

10/31/10:
Many dark chocolate Hershey's kiss wrappers and Mint patties wrappers

11/9/10:
Thai Pavilion box: single serve Pad Thai
empty ziplock bag
Wheat Thins bag

11/19/10:
Birthday confetti

New Journal!

I've reached the end of my choreography journal, just in time for the end of the semester. My dancers probably think of it as another appendage, as it's rather omnipresent during rehearsal! I bought a new one the other day, bigger than the first. More space for thinking, mapping, a wider expanse to carry these pieces forward to the concert.
Some photo documentation of the original notebook (by Sinru Ku), and a photo of the new, still empty one:

Post-showing Percolating

Sorry for the long silence--the end of the semester has overwhelmed me. Grades are nearly in, the holiday break is almost here, so I'll be returning soon.

For now, I'll just say that last Tuesday was my end-of-the-semester committee showing, where I showed all my work to my thesis committee and other grads. It was great to see the dances all together, and to get a sense of how much we've accomplished this semester. Since then, I've been meeting with my committee members to get their thoughts and feedback about continuing to develop the work. It's been both harder and easier than I expected to hear and consider their responses (more on that later).

And even though I'm looking forward to a break from the weekly rehearsal schedule, I've also been...well, maybe "haunted" is the right word...by these dances. I can't stop thinking about them as I fall asleep, as soon as I wake up, in the back of my mind throughout the day. Problem-solving, considering new possibilities, imagining what we might try when rehearsals start again. I don't really mind--I WANT to be thinking about them--but I do wish for a few more hours of sleep unsaturated by dancing thoughts!

Here are a few photos from the showing, taken by Sinru Ku.

on Not Knowing....Yet

Recently, in rehearsals, in conversations with colleagues, in my own thinking and planning, I've noticed myself saying frequently, "I don't know what happens next yet," or "I'm not sure why this happens here, but let's see what happens."  I probably wouldn't have noticed so much if comments from a few others hadn't suggested that not everybody works this way (or says it out loud, anyway).  It feels so natural to me that I forget that I haven't always worked this way, either. 

At the beginning of the semester, one of my committee members said something to the effect that he hadn't expected me to be so comfortable with uncertainty, with holding that uncertainty and still going forward.  At the time, I wondered about this, too.  In everyday life (not just choreography-land) I certainly have known myself to want to KNOW things, know what I thought about something, even if what I thought I knew changed later.  I wanted to be certain about myself, my positions on things, at least for the moment.  I don't know when that started to change, but I don't think that's true for me anymore.  I do feel more comfortable with uncertainty, with not knowing, with trusting that clarity will come...sometime.  Not that this attitude is always easy.  The uncertainty facing me next year certainly gives me a fair amount of anxiety!  

In my choreographic approach in the past, I also wanted to know.  If I didn't know what happened next, I worked hard to figure it out right away.  I think I came in to rehearsal knowing.  Not that things didn't change in rehearsal, but I began with a very clear sense of what I wanted to happen.  Again, I'm not sure when that started to change, but in the last few years, that certainty has generally loosened into trust.  I hold a great deal of questions about each dance like a bunch of balloons, trusting that as we continue, the answers will start to come clear.  I trust that the dancers will make choices, will show through their embodiment of our ideas, what the dance is turning into.  I trust that when I see or sense the/a right answer to one of the questions, I'll recognize it.  I have a very clear sense this year of discovering the dance and its meaning(s), not necessarily creating it.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say, discovering what the dance is and what it does, rather than creating those things.  There is definitely creation and shaping going on constantly in the process, by me and by the dancers.

This weekend, as I plan for my Sunday rehearsal, I'll be sharing some of the questions floating around for that dance at the moment.

Progress!

After a period of stagnation, I finally feel like the new version of Every Falling Thing is moving forward. For this dance in particular, it seemed important to find just the right music, with just the right emotional tenor, just the right amount of instrumentation. I hoped that finding the music would jump-start the process of structuring the large amount of material we had created. It was quite an ordeal to find something that felt just right (or at least, right enough...). Finally, success! Instead of one track, I've found 4 separate pieces that I've arranged in a way that seems promising. I like the music quite a lot, and it has, in some ways, prompted a jumping into the next phase of the choreography. The music itself, while not really serving as a rhythmic structure for the dance, does have some distinctive moments, and I'm having a bit of a struggle with the musical side of myself. One of my aims for this piece was to loosen the relationship of the dance and the music; the first version seemed too tightly bound to the rhythmic nuance of the music. I haven't created the movement to this music (or any music, for that matter). But how much do I let the music shape the movement, now? Can I (how?), should I ignore the musical cues that are tempting me to highlight them with movement? In many senses, this becomes a philosophical question, surrounded by considerations of modern and post-modern dance, the relative values of dance and music, tradition, innovation, change for the sake of change, comfort of the audience. But it's clearly also an aesthetic question, as I decide what relationship between dance and music makes a stronger dance in this case (stronger how? stronger for whom?). I imagine I'll be wrestling with this one for a while...

Here's a tiny clip of a recent rehearsal for this dance (sans music), and just a glimpse of some of the movement we're putting together. The dancers are Kristen Lucas, Chelsea Flanagan, Lindsey Archer, Denise Murphy, Morgan Carroll, (and Jessi Tilden, not captured by the camera's reach).

Impressions

The works are developing. In fits and starts, sometimes, but all of the works are going somewhere. The process is simultaneously thrilling and agonizing, as I watch the dances take shape and wonder whether I'm making good/interesting/useful/important choices.

My own impressions of the works--their character, their "aboutness," a sense of their arc-- are coalescing enough so that I can solicit impressions from others. I had my first observers in rehearsals last week; on Tuesday, a member of my thesis committee who was also my choreography teacher for two semesters, and on Sunday, the chair of my thesis committee, both supremely perceptive and skilled observers and interpreters of dance. Since hearing their impressions (not really feedback, in the way of improving, but more: "This is what I observed and this is what it meant to me."), I've been thinking a lot about how these impressions affect or intersect with mine, whether others share those impressions, and overall, what do I do with them? How do they go into the continued development of the work? My current course of action: invite others into the rehearsals, ask dancers for their impressions, collect information. I may end up with too many different interpretations, too much information. I hope that it won't stifle the process. I don't really expect it too, however. Right now, I feel like I'll be able to choose the information that seems most important, and not feel obligated to satisfy everyone's interests or interpretations.

Already, the comments I've gotten from my two committee members have been quite revealing about my own impressions about the work, what it is that I've been thinking about. And it's even brought up something of a contradiction for me in how I think about and "do" choreography. I've been saying and writing and thinking about how important it is to me that my dancers are really individuals, not just any body, but these people. I solicit movement contributions from the dancers, and foster an individualistic approach to performing the movement. I generally welcome variation. And ultimately, it is important to me to be working with these particular people; I know the work would not be developing in the same way if I were working with others. However, I realized that in developing most of these dances, I've been thinking about how the movement interacts. What is the character of the movement? What is the movement communicating? In contrast, one of my committee members posed this question to me: Who are these women? And why are they moving in this particular way? My committee chair wondered similar things--why that dancer with the other dancers? What does it mean that those three people are doing something different than the rest? What is the relationship of the big group to the small group? What does it mean that these dancers belong to one group in this section and a different group in the next section?

I realized that I had not thought about the continuity of character, or the implications of these particular dancers in this particular combination. I'd been making sure the movement was seen in particular ways, or at particular intervals, as if the movement was the only thing communicating.

Big questions now, about how this new consciousness affects the choreography...

I hope to post some more video soon, so stay tuned.

Pictures #2

Pictures and a request

In this post and the next (Pictures #2) are recent photos of the new work (all photos by Sinru Ku).  They represent different sections of the larger whole.  I'd love your input--what, if anything, do these photos tell you about the work?  Do they say anything to you about the movement, about the way the groups are arranged, anything about theme or story, or anything?  Although they are just selected moments--and out of context for most of you--I wonder how they read to others, and whether those impressions mean anything to or for the developing work.

Research

A lot of the early part of my process is research--real research, like the kind you do in a library, or online, or in a science lab.  I like to test the boundaries of the ideas, of the movement, to begin to understand what we're working with.  As part of this research process for my new choreography this year, I've been investigating the concept of "drift," or a gradual, incremental changing or shifting.  A few weeks ago, one of my casts helped with this research into the nature of drift.  Here's a reflection I wrote after that rehearsal; I'm still working on what it means for the dance, or how it affects the choreography itself.

What is the nature of drift?  How far can something drift before it becomes something new?

Last week, I asked my dancers to create phrases that were abstracted from the original phrases I taught a few weeks ago.  These abstracted phrases were to retain something of the flow/essence of the original.  This week, I asked my dancers to start with these abstracted phrases and see if they could “drift” the phrase back to the original.  The process of drifting back to the original from this place happened in different ways in with different degrees of difficulty for each dancer.  When we reflected on their experience afterward, we discovered something about drift. 

For one thing, it seemed clear that this drifting backwards depended in part on the choices one made to abstract the original phrase.  Dancers who chose to keep their abstraction fairly close to the original by maintaining the spatial pathway, for instance, or changing the level of or body part performing the movement, found that drifting backwards was a gradual process of reversing those decisions.  Each reversal brought them closer to the original phrase.  Another dancer, who had gone farther down the road of abstraction, described her experience of the relationship between the abstracted and original phrases as two parallel lines—in relationship with each other, but never actually intersecting.  For her, the process of trying to drift from one to the other put her in the space between them, a liminal space that was sometimes hard to navigate.

Although the idea of “drift” has an organic, flowing feel, we all found that this exercise required strategy.  (To be fair, they had not created the abstracted phrases by “drifting” the original, so to “drift” back was really not an organic matter.)  It seemed to be a process of addition, deletion, and substitution, as one dancer described it; an intentional process of change, rather than a gradual one—even if those intentional changes were gradual and incremental. 

At the same time, the dancers described this process as making stronger the links between the abstracted and the original phrase.  The exercise required them to retrace their steps in a manner of speaking, to remember what they did—what choices they made—to abstract the phrase.  

The idea of memory came up again in our discussion of the second part of the exercise.  After they struggled with drifting back to the original for a while, I asked them to start with their abstracted phrases and let them drift—in the more organic sense.  I asked them to be aware in the back of their minds about when or whether there’s a point that what they are doing seems like a new thing—totally different from what they started from.  Many of them described thinking of the original phrase (or their abstracted phrase) as an anchor point—a point that allowed them to find their way back if they felt they were drifting too far or too fast.  Others talked about the way letting the phrase drift was different from improvising on a theme—drifting, one said, makes you set restrictions, since each version is still connected or related in some way to what came before it.  In terms of becoming a new phrase with enough drift, most dancers were clear that even when what they were doing felt very different from what they started from, as long as they knew what the original was—as long as they remembered the origin—then it was still related, still part of the same phenomenon.  However, all acknowledged that someone from “outside” might not recognize the threads of the original in the new.  One dancer let her phrase drift quite far from the original, first preserving the general spatial pathway but drifting the movement, and then letting herself drift the spatial element.  She described feeling that what she came to was, in fact, a different thing entirely—it felt unconnected.  Even though she could probably trace the pathway of the changes, the new movement required her to use her body in an entirely different way from the original and made her feel very different than what she started with.  Despite the tether of memory, the somatic experience of the movement had drifted significantly for her. 

So, how does one tell whether something has drifted to become a new thing or whether it still contains enough traces of the original to be related?  Visual perception does not seem to be enough.  In fact, it seems clear that this ascribing of meaning and identity to something seems entirely based on individual perception.  For the dancers inside this experience, the distance of drift could be much greater than for an outside observer.  Even if a visual similarity is established between one thing and its origin, the experience of the two things might be different enough (somatically) to push it over into the “new” category.

Conversation Piece

Finally, some video of rehearsal. This is an improvised trio from the Conversation Piece rehearsals. We work quite a bit with improvisation, to really inhabit the movement material, to discover how it interacts with other movement, to find the variety of movement qualities possible for the vocabulary. Everything we do is focused on coming into communication with another person (or people), developing and practicing this sort of non-verbal communication and awareness. I am in awe of my dancers' ability to open themselves to this kind of work. We have been learning and talking a lot recently about the different ways we each communicate and how that translates, or doesn't, into our movement style. We've done a lot of work in duets, but not much in trios, so this is an exploration from a few weeks ago, to see how each of the dancer's individual movement might work together.

I thought hard about whether to share video from this rehearsal in particular, because the atmosphere we create together seems almost sacred. I wasn't sure if I wanted to open it up to other people. But, ultimately, I'm thrilled with the kind of work we're doing here, and wanted to share it with you. The dancers are Melanie Greene, Ally Lloyd, and Morgan Carroll.

Process/Progress Report

Apparently, the six-week mark means something for my creative process...or maybe I've just internalized the academic calendar.

Six weeks is when I start to feel that the initial creating, researching, exploring period is drawing to a close and it's time to start putting things together.

Six weeks is when I start to feel that it's time to find the music I might want to use.

Six weeks is when I start to doubt myself, when I feel that however I start to organize the material we've created won't really do it justice.

I'm feeling these "deadlines" particularly in the two newest dances--my "Drift" piece and "Every Falling Thing" (or whatever it'll be called eventually). For "Conversation Piece" I don't feel quite the same pressure, although I did resolve last night, on the warning of one of my dancers, to take a break in the active research of the movement and see what we can do with what we have. Otherwise, as my dancer cautioned, I'll just have more and more information.

A year or two ago, I started to notice similarities between the way I choreograph and the way I write papers. In writing, I tend to construct small chunks of the paper at a time, often including phrases like "something more here..." when I know that I need to round out my idea but am not sure yet how to do that. I might write the parts I am sure about, leaving some holes to fill in, or rearranging the parts until they feel right. When I choreograph, I often do that too--putting together small pieces of choreography and moving them around, knowing where the holes are that need to be filled, sometimes even reaching the "end" of the dance before going back to fill them in. (This is in contrast to one of my colleagues who was thinking about this metaphor with me--in writing and dance-making, she tends to start at the beginning and work straight through, just get it all down, before going back to edit.)

This year, I'm reminded that when I write a research paper, I go a little overboard, usually, in the research phase, and have to really rein myself in to be able to start the actual writing part. So, maybe this is the time in my dance-making to start to wind down the research, and force myself to start "writing." I'll have to trust that, like the research paper, once I get going, it'll start to flow on its own momentum.

Snippets on change and drift

Today, just a few passages from George Kubler's The Shape of Time that are seeming relevant to the nature of drift, or gradual change. Soon, some of my own thoughts on drift, and how we're discovering it in rehearsal...

"Without change there is no history; without regularity there is no time. Time and history are related as rule and variation: time is the regular setting for the vagaries of history. The replica and the invention are related in the same way: a series of true inventions excluding all intervening replicas would approach chaos, and an all-embracing infinity of replicas without variation would approach formlessness. The replica relates to regularity and to time; the invention relates to variation and to history.

Human desires in every present instant are torn between the replica and the invention, between the desire to return to the known pattern, and the desire to escape it by a new variation." (p. 72)

"Change is occasioned by the many ways in which entities join and separate." (p.77)

"The decision to discard something is far from being a simple decision. Like each fundamental type of action, it appears in the experience of every day. It is a reversal of values. Though the thing once was necessary, discarded it becomes litter or scrap. What once was valuable now is worthless; the desirable now offends; the beautiful now is seen as ugly. When to discard and what to discard are questions to which the answers are governed by many considerations." (p. 77).

Back to the Source

One Heart

by Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

When I returned to working on Every Falling Thing (EFT), I knew that one of my main interests was in going deeply into this poem. It was part of the basis for the first version of EFT, but we moved away from the poem, into flight in general, and a progression from falling to flight. This time around, rather than returning to the previous dance, I decided to go back to the source of my inspiration, this poem. It sets up an emotional atmosphere that feels important to work with. My cast and I have read, talked, and written about what the poem (or its parts) means to us, how we understand it, what it makes us feel. Knowing that not everybody has the same love of and relationship with poetry that I do, I was impressed that we all seemed to have a lot of the same associations with this poem, that we came to a lot of the same images and themes. Now, we're trying to figure out how to work with those, how to infuse the physical atmosphere of the dance with those things.

Upon reading a snippet of a quote about how poetry "works patterns and then rejiggers its patterns into different relations and constellations," I decided to recombine the words of this poem and see what happened. I don't know how or if they'll influence my choreography, but I thought I'd share a few of the new combinations.

The day was fastening the sky open.

Work is born of falling.

Heart flying

Wings inside you

day is born

Birds either falling or flying

open sky

the end of wings

first nothing is inside

every day heart falling

even the sky is work

Look--freedom!

fastening flying wings

to the sky

Photos

Our first Sunday rehearsal, 8/29/10.

Photos by Sinru Ku.

The Plan

In the process of planning our MFA thesis concerts, the grads make different decisions about whether to create entirely new work, or revisit some previous work, whether to make a continuous, evening-length work or to show several separate dances. I've chosen to go back to some work I've created previously in this program as well as to make some new work. The pieces are definitely separate works, but for me, the ways I'm working on them as well as some of the content seem related. I don't know yet whether those through-lines will be clear to the audience or not.

Previous work:

I'm returning to a work I created for 7 dancers in Spring 09 called Every Falling Thing. When I made that dance, it felt like a dance that I just needed to make. In fact, it practically made itself. Afterwards, however, I wasn't entirely pleased with how I had developed the work. The original ideas were still interesting, though, so I'm going back to the source of my inspiration and seeing where else this dance can go. At this point, it seems that this will not be a reworking of Every Falling Thing, but a completely new dance; it just happens to stem from the same source. That source is mostly a poem, by Li-Young Lee, that has captured my imagination and elicits a strong physical and emotional response.

I'm also coming back to Conversation Piece, created last Fall (09). This work for 5 dancers grew out of a number of improvisations and explorations about communication, sending and receiving, transfer of information and of movement from one body to another. This time around, I've got most of the same cast, with one new addition (one of the original dancers graduated). We are working on reviving the material, mostly from memory (rather than video), and finding new interactions, new possibilities in how we can work with this material. I'm totally excited to see how it turns out. We're still playing a lot with the material, not "rehearsing" but creating, trying to get a read on what this dance is or can be, a year later.

I'm planning to perform in my own concert, although I still have mixed feelings about that. I'm going to be doing a work, originally a solo, inspired by my grandmother's with Alzheimer's disease: On the Tip of her Tongue. I created it last summer, and haven't done much with it yet. However, I am exploring adding another dancer to the work. I'm imagining this not so much as a duet as this second dancer adding imagistic support to the dance.

New work:

I'm still figuring out what this new work might be. I'm thinking of it as a dance in at least three sections, maybe like a triptych in that the different sections are related but not exactly focused on the same thing. What's really driving this choreography is the concept of "drift." What is the nature of a gradual evolution from one thing (movement/word/image) into another? When is the balance of this incremental change significant enough to change the meaning of the thing? When does it stop being the first thing and start being a new thing? What essence, or trace, of the original continues on? What traces are left behind?

I'm taking these questions into the whole creation process, as I'm revisiting old work, seeing how it's drifted, seeing what still remains, what seems to be its essence, even as it is created anew.

Finally, the last component of the production is an installation that I plan to create. This will be set up for the audience to walk through on their way into the theater. I envision the installation providing a tangible sense of the traces left behind in the process of making the concert. I have been collecting "traces" of my dancers' presence in rehearsal--disposable water bottles, granola bar wrappers, receipts, broken hair ties--that will make their way into the installation. I have also arranged for two photographers to document many of our rehearsals throughout the year; these traces--created, not collected--along with video recordings of rehearsals will also be a part of the project. I don't intend for this to be a display that explains the steps of the process, but more of an experiential component that the audience members can make sense of in their own ways. I also hope it will be meaningful for the dancers to witness the tangible evidence of their presence.

So, that's the plan. I have a fabulous cast that I'm thrilled to be working with. The whole cast is 17 dancers plus 2 photographers, and I'm honored to be working with these folks. I can't wait to see what we create.

What's going on here?

So, I'm making an MFA thesis dance concert, the culminating event in the 3 year MFA program I've been involved in for the last 2 years and 3 weeks.

And I've been feeling the urge to share something of this process with others as well as to have a venue for reflecting on my work beyond my private journal.

This concert--these dances--have a history, are creating a history, that I want to acknowledge and share with more than just the cast of the concert.

Therefore--a blog! What else?

What it's not:

I don't anticipate a blog that exposes all the behind-the-scenes elements of the concert, ala JCT (one of my colleagues from last year: http://jctworks.com/), but more of an extended program insert, I suppose. None of this information will be necessary for understanding the concert itself--it's not an "insider's guide" or a Cliffs Notes for the performance. It's not an glimpse of what the "real" meaning of the concert is, although it will surely reveal the ways I am thinking about it.

What it is or might be:

A conversation starter, an open journal, background information, a photo album, a "book" of poetry, a collection of notes on creative process.

Stay tuned for some thoughts on how I'm starting out this process and what I'm thinking about these days.

And welcome.