After a couple of weeks without actively thinking about choreography, I'm back into these dances, watching the videos of the last showing, reading through my notes. I think in some way I hoped that some time away from the choreography, some rest for my brain, some new and different kinds of input would magically transform the works into masterpieces. The places I've been stuck, the sections I haven't figured out yet, would suddenly become clear, and the solutions would be brilliant and simple.
Well.
Not so. It turns out that I'm still working with my same self, my same brain, my same habits of thought. I still have to figure it out, in that real and laborious way, part obsessive imagining, part scribbling notes and diagrams, part trial and error with the dancers. Luckily, after talking to my committee members following the showing, my mind was teeming with ideas, ways to fix, tweak, breath new life into the dances. I wrote these ideas down before the holidays, and have been returning to them now to see what potential they hold. Some of them seem rich. I hope.
Maybe that was the magic transformation--the showing and then discussing the dances with others. Somehow, my meetings with my committee members did seem to make the dances both more and less than they were before. More, because suddenly the dances were not just something shared among the small cast of dancers in rehearsal. Not confined to a studio, not just as much as we--my dancers and I--understood. Suddenly the dances took on numerous interpretations, as many meanings and lives as there were viewers. The range of comments from my committee gave me a sense of this expanding presence and purpose of the choreography. It was a powerful thing.
And yet, the dances were also diminished in some way. Suddenly, the dances were reduced to the moment of their performance for the audience, not the ongoing process, the hours of rehearsal, all the things the dancers have tried, the music we've chosen and not chosen, the conversations we've had about the works, the ways I understand the works, the ways I've decided to create them, all the thoughts I haven't even put into words. And later, in my conversations with my committee, the dances were reduced even further, to whatever each person remembered, and what their memory had created to fill the blank spots.
Both of these conditions, the expansion and reduction of the dance, are simultaneous and inevitable. But it brought home in a new way for me the challenge of creating dance, or maybe creating anything. The struggle of balancing the dance you create with the dance that each person sees, the transitory nature of dance.
What does it mean for me now? How can I manage these slippery perceptions in a way that makes my art stronger? That really does make it magic?
