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.