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.