doubt in the process

The rehearsal process for inscription has taken an interesting turn.  I started out boldly asking the dancers to work outside of their usual performance habits.  We went out in public and roamed around, and worked on performance improvisation in public places that did not make use of stony, impassive performance faces.  I wanted them to play with how they could see each other, and see the people outside of the dance as people walking around, and to remain very human and open in the performance.  I asked them to limit their movement vocabulary to things that would be unremarkable in a public place like an airport.  I wanted to take all the dancer out of them that I could, and yet to retain their attention to the composition they were creating with each other and the site as they moved.

By last week, they had really gotten good at this naturalness and openness. At times, they were too ordinary, too much like people hanging out in a public place to even be noticed in the performance. But when i’d ask them to heighten their awareness to their own body movements and increase the range of those, the results were beautiful.

For a moment I was so happy with this, then I started to worry that it was too simple.  As a choreographer I am doing nothing but talking to these women about some ideas and saying “go” in a particular space.  I’m hoping the ideas, the space, and the people will make something that is something, but maybe it is all just too thin?  I feel this pull to make up some amazing steps, to create surface structure for us all to hang on to, and to lock it all down. my advisor for this project identified this as a desire to “show my wares”.  I am pulled to say “LOOK what I can do with dance, and look at all we know”, and this pull is clearly in conflict with the whole direction I intentionally went from the beginning of the process.

For now, I have decided to ignore the voice telling me to build in more and more fixity and complexity to this piece.  After all, the ideas, and the place, the people and the objects are all quite specific.  I am going to try to just let them be.  The performance is on Tuesday June 1 at Knowlton Hall from 10:30 am to 2pm.  If you walk by and see four dancers doing the dance of the little swans or something, know that I merely succumbed to normal human fear.  Until then, I will keep delightedly stumbling along.