We have a complete piece! This was the first rehearsal in which we ran the piece with a beginning, middle, and end that I was fully satisfied by. This was the first rehearsal in which I could envision how this story will be told on a main stage. This was the first rehearsal with multiple goose bump moments. It was also the last official rehearsal.
This piece took all the time it needed and all the time available to come together. Time is pressuring but it is also motivating. This piece took thirteen rehearsals of "hmmm"s, "no"s, "maybe"s, and "sure"s to lead to one big "YES!" We have one more extra rehearsal to clean and clarify and we will use it well.
(Rehearsal Twelve was whirlwind of change and experimentation. The video I took was lost... as was my mind)
Nonetheless... I have done a lot of work since my last post!
The sound is close to finished after many hours in front Audacity and my dancers are faithfully chugging along with all of the details, changes, and ideas that I am throwing at them.
Here are the most recent videos:
Run through of what we have at this point:
Alternate versions of the ending and the beginning:
"one has to know and not know, prefer and not prefer, empty oneself and acknowledge one's fullness, be passive and charged. It has to happen to you and from you. It has to be too fast for you to take in, and done in baby steps, one leaking into the other."
Susan Rethorst's musings on the choreographic process that read true for dance and for life. This philosophy is helping me to remember that in creating art (and in planning for life post-graduation) there is a delicate balance between the action that you can take and the ways things fall together that are beyond your power. Working on surrendering to whatever may come while remaining intentional and thoughtful.
Here is the material from rehearsal ten that we presented to the adjudicators last Wednesday:
They saw progression of my concept/idea and selected the work to be performed in DanceWorks on November 12, 13, 14. I am really looking forward to the opportunity to collaborate with costume and lighting designers and have my choreography presented on a main stage!
Rehearsal Eleven
I am now working on developing the dancers as individual characters through discussion of movement quality and stories (and hopefully costumes will help with the creation of clear characters).
One of the adjudicators mentioned that she felt as though she was missing some information and jumped into something that was already happening. I am now trying to develop a clear beginning to introduce the characters and stories a bit more gently. Half of the work is sound editing.
No video from tonight, just a lot of talking and thinking and playing.
I am loading up my dancers plates this week with ideas ideas ideas to present at adjudication (in order to show something that is semi-representative of my longterm plan) so that we can edit clean edit clean after adjudication.
This rehearsal, I taught them the rest of a more full-bodied movement phrase to play with at the end and filled in some holes that I had in the beginning. Here is the new material:
And here is the new material integrated into a rough draft run-thru:
"An idea of "self" is really a story that we tell ourselves. It can change from day to day and it allows the human being to exercise that peculiarly human muscle: to experience stuff and then to abstract it into a story- that's self."
A podcast from Radiolab on the human's unique ability to tell stories and construct selves. Argues that story telling is what differentiates humans from all other animals.
I got helpful feedback from the showing on October 7th. The panel told me that both the music and the choreography was very dense and the combination of the two was sometimes overwhelming but made the moments of reprieve all the more gratifying. I completely agreed with this note; I had been feeling little overwhelmed by the amount of voices I added to the music. Maida also reminded me not to get stuck in center stage. I had not considered spacing very seriously yet so it was good to be have my attention called back. Working with that feedback and my own wishes to make the choreography more relevant to my content, I made the following changes:
-took out the stories in the beginning in favor of a gradual build rather than starting the music and movement with a high level of stimulus and staying high.
-moved the center clump to downstage left.
Here is video:
We have two rehearsals until adjudication (when another panel will decide whether the work will be in DanceWorks of the Choreographer's Concert) and I want to add a large sweeping full bodied movement section on the end, fill some holes/transitions in the beginning and decide on some ideas for how it will end by then. Much to do!
We worked with audio recordings of some of the stories for the first time this rehearsal! Still creating new material... Still have only a faint semblance of a structure...
One person submitted a story online that began with a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "The single story creates STEREOTYPES & the problem with STEREOTYPES isn't that they're UNTRUE but that they're INCOMPLETE. They make one story become the ONLY story." This submission struck me because it posed a question in response to my question. How can one story be the story of a persons life? Of course, it can't... So I am grateful for this submission and I want to use it as an opener or a kind of frame for the piece. The video below is some choreography for that quote.
I also taught my dancers some choreography to the beginning of another story that moved me:
And we practiced the movement we already had to some actual audio recordings:
