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.