We welcome Sarah Lehman to our group as we start in working on “identity” solos. A taste of where we’re headed!
Teaching phrase March 23, 2009
Hsiao-Ting made up this phrase and the group is doing their best to sort out the details without being able to confer with HT verbally.
See how well they do!
Group Effort. March 23, 2009
In this video, you'll see the dancers assisting each other through their movement sequences. It's a hoot.
changing gears… a little March 23, 2009
For the past several weeks I have been avoiding and being frustrated by this nagging that I am going about choreographing Find Me in Here in the wrong way (for me). I set up a process for myself – to choreograph a group dance – a “dancey” dance, a “traditional” “just dance” dance, something I haven’t done since college and am not sure I know how to do anymore. What I have learned in the past two months is that if I wanted to, I could create a “dancey” dance, but I don’t want to. The things I find intriguing just don’t fall into that category. The material isn’t stimulating enough to stay with long enough to create a work of more than a minute or so. Recognizing this, I am liberated to work again with ideas and structures and organization.
So with this little breakthrough, I have been thinking and making notes upon notes to change course for the piece. I am transcribing some of them here straight from my notebook (to preserve my thought pattern sometimes at the expense of clarity).
Creating the Group
Premise: they each tell a story about navigating “alone” through a group
What brings them together?
Chelsea + Anna both have “story-like” sequences already.
Task: show the dancers a short segment of movement and have them learn it without verbal communication between us. They can help each other figure it out.
The movement sequences should be visually complex so that it is difficult to imitate.
Do this task and then have them perform the opening again to see how their connections are different.
What’s the story of this group?
Story –> event –> experience —>
- Feeling smaller (small with its many associated meanings)
- Feeling smaller because of feeling bound
- Creating boundary – but a 360 degree, web-like boundary? Or in your face?
Red Rover
You have to play but it hurts. And you know it hurts. When do you just refuse? Or fight the expectation?
I don’t want the dancers to play RR on stage, but what variation on it? Something that creates the same tension.
Two kinds of groups
- Being forced into a group
- Forming a group
Go back to A/B performance space? And then who is the individual in these settings? Within the group? What am I trying to show? Wait. Remember, process, exploring… Questions rather than answers.
What are the questions?
Who am I, in a group?
This question assumes that who I am is defined without the group, i.e. True identity exists in the individual and is lost/obscured/changed/
affected/released in/by the group. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Opening segment – take 3 March 16, 2009
One more day working on the opening segment. I tried out the new audience set up, where the chairs create a box with a usable perimeter as performing space. It wasn’t doing much for me, so we’ll scrap it when we come back to this section in a few weeks. But we made some great progress on each of the dancers’ “stories” for this opening sequence.
Next week: We move on from the opening segment (we will revisit later, as it is far from “done”) to work on the big picture (I like working within a big picture, more room to play).
Here’s an idea for a basic structure:
- Opening chaos moves into formation of a group
- Time spent as a group
- What the group does to the person
- The individual
- The group again (why? how’d we get here?)
What would these sections looks like? There’s the bigger challenge. I am very drawn to this idea that groups limit and enable our personalities. So I’m working on different ways to bring boundaries into the movement and the relationship between the dancers. Check in next week to see what I came up with!
Opening segment – notes March 9, 2009
It is a challenge for me to work without a concrete overarching structure, and I’m trying different ideas to get into the material a bit more personally. The past two weeks I’ve been working with the dancers individually to get their specific experiences of themselves as individuals within a group. It helps me respond to their movement more precisely and gives me an entry point for editing their phrases for the piece.
What I learned from them is that groups provide us with parameters. They restrict or release our personalities (or do both simultaneously). It’s pretty obvious really, though interesting to hear that all of us make choices about our behavior out of consideration for how others will perceive our intentions. The greatest concern is having one’s meaning misconstrued and used to form a inaccurate judgment of one’s personality or identity.
After deciding last week that the audience clusters were a nuisance, I nonetheless decided I liked the presence of the chairs in the performance space. I like them as obstructions for the dancers, but also as reminders of place. I am considering other ways to accomplish these effects without using chairs (because they’re big and oh so cliché in dance), such as a powder or skin application that could leave a residue on the floor after the dancers move from their starting position. But then you run into safety concerns (slip hazards), and it doesn’t answer the obstruction need. I have also been brainstorming on what easily obtainable abstract, stump-like objects I might consider, but finally I remembered that part of my intention with this project was to employ the dancers in place of architectural objects, so I’m working hard to keep that in mind. I might try pairing the dancers, using one as a placeholder and the other to dance through the space. Seems an obvious solution, yes? We’ll see how hokey it is.
two performing spaces divided by audience
I’m also stumped on where to put the audience, and have an idea to try next Sunday that creates a boundary for the dancers between two primary spaces, as you can see from my rough sketch.
I worry that this will have the effect of creating two “groups” for the dancers to choose between, which misses the point of examining the effects of the group on the individual. But we’ll try it nonetheless.
Thanks for reading!
** And my apologies for posting these notes a week late! It was a hectic stretch for me and I simply forgot that I hadn’t done it yet.
