Rehearsals week of 3-29

Rehearsals week of 3-15

Playing with miniture objects as representations of a place or event, using them to map a memory, versions of that memory, planes of view/movement, projection/shadow

Discussion with dancers about collections, souvenirs. An object representing a special place or memory. Go to Disney Land, buy a Mickey Mouse, bring home. What if we did this with our daily lives? Go to dinner at my parents’ house, and a small little house figurine represents it on my mantle. Beth asked, is it because Disney Land was special, a thing you only do once or a few times? Places you go only once? That makes we question how we define special: that dinner at my parents’ house only happens once, may be special, but we look at differently and it doesn’t seem as special (though it’s just as fleeting an event as the day at Disney Land...). Also brings up that people that do collect many things. My parents and grandparents have houses full of stuff. My grandma more so, though she is passing things along to my parents! Do people accumulate those things because they are tied to memories, physical representations of things that otherwise exist in trace/memory only? We are trying this mapping (as in Invisible Cities -- a place that exists only in the order in which it is experienced: my house on the left, across the street a church, then the dry cleaner...) and placing of objects as a physicalization of that concept. The dancers document the events with the figurines, then collect as many as possible. Different configurations of the figurines represent their different memories, different perceptions/versions of the same place. They try to accumulate as many as possible so they can keep the memory as theirs. Something doesn’t work about this but can’t pinpoint what. Will keep playing.

Some rehearsals and thoughts

Heading into rehearsal (March 12):

Thinking about specific choreographic questions. This is always the hardest place for me to start: I have clear images, but I’m not sure of how to create the movement vocabulary that will support them. For this, I imagine two bodies both apart and together. Together, they are sometimes close, intimate, and sometimes in the same space in close proximity but operating independently. They are clothed in white – the off-white of a sepia print, actually -- and their attire suggests an old-fashioned time. It’s tailored and pleated. Fitted coats or vests, almost tuxedo-like-tails. I know they are not childish or feminine (both risks with the pleats I think), and I'd like for them no not quite be able to be placed in a certain time. As if saying “Long ago,” but when? I imagine the white will contrast with the darkness of shadow, and will also allow projections to be very visible on the dancers. I think the material will be thick, not flimsy. I think the costumes will have layers.

But again, back to movement. So they are in close proximity, sometimes intimate and sometimes independent. I am curious to set up a physical relationship, which may suggest narrative but is not derived from one, so that I’ll have SOMETHING to work with and manipulate. I am thrilled to have five dancers to work with in the coming weeks. I will work with them in every possible permutation of duet and trio, and will sometimes step in myself. This is mostly a result of their schedules, but I plan to use this as an intentional mechanism for creating trace-duets.

I plan to have Beth and Dawn improvise together for one minute, with moments of contact [I need to be more specific about this request], and then immediately re-create their memory of that one minute but on their own, with a gap where the other person had been. Then I plan to have one of them do this again, while the other watches. Then switch. Then repeat, based on their memory, the first minute, together. This will total five minutes. I plan to tape the improvisation so we can be in the moment together but so if something I absolutely love comes out it could be re-created later. I plan to follow this several times, with the dancers doing a new improv. for that first minute of material each time and the next four minutes building upon that.

Tomorrow, and subsequent days, I plan to work the next variable dancer into an existing duet. For example, Beth will start with what she remembers from the day before, and the new dancers, Denisse, will fit into it, altering Beth’s movment. They will build on this for a new five minute improv. Then Denisse and Grady will do this. Etc.

I have been playing with partnered-movement and its pulling apart into a mover and watcher in several classes I taught recently. I taught an adagio phrase, which everyone learned. One person did the phrase while a partner found moments of contact with them. Then, the person repeated the phrase but this time the partner stood at a slight distance and watched. I asked both dancers about their experience of residual or trace – what lingered after that first experience? I found their responses were mostly physical – a heightened feeling of suspension after having had a partner touch the top of their head the first time – but I also experienced and witnessed it as extremely narrative. When I was with a partner, then stood back and watched them do the phrase, I felt a sense of loss and emptiness where I had been. I saw this in other couples too. This relates to my question of “what stays behind?” so I think it will be useful to generate material from this place and fit it in somehow.

I am receptive to the comments I received about looking at spatial pattern-heavy dances. I am drawn to these and think this may be a good starting point for material, though I am not sure what I will do with it once we have these patterns. I can picture playing with and manipulating them, but am not yet sure how this will interweave with the image described above. So I also think that in the next few days I will generate a phrase – possibly with movements discovered in the duets – which all will learn and which we can manipulate. This might turn into a carousel-like movement to go with the shadows (below).

I’ve got several lights, the project-a-scope, an old Christmas card photo of my mom and her siblings from the 50’s, the miniatures from my solo, the projector, and a nice big space to play with. I am searching for more lights and a record player. The pieces would sit on the turn table of the record player and go around, like a carousel, and their shadow would rotate on the wall and intersect with the dancers. I am also searching for music. I have some accordion sounds and some recording of me reading Invisible Cities in a whisper I will play with but I don’t think this will be part of the final sound. I like the crank-music box idea – I want to find a place where I can order my own tune on one – I am sure it exists. I think it would be interesting to have two cranked at once, in counter point. Perhaps I can order the counter-point music box too. I think the dancers would do this on stage as part of the piece and that it would have to do with miniature and shadow.

I have been reading On Longing (by Susan Stewart). It definitely has to do with language. In the introduction, she talks a lot about the body, and how scale (miniature, gigantic) are relative to the body and how we perceive the body. Not yet sure what I will agree/disagree with but this is a key source, and interweaves narrative, nostalgia, the collection, memory, miniatures, the gigantic – all things I am concerned with.

Adrienne Adrienne

Another version

First try at final cut pro

This was fun. Star bellies.

A sketch from my journal

I made this sketch a few weeks ago, as I tried to map and to envision how my shadow and the shadow of the blocks would interact with the projections....