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.