Choreographic Process

I think it is interesting the way artists think about and articulate their work. With the ever-increasing difficulty in describing "modern" & "post-modern" dance, I'm becoming less and less interested in carbon copy aesthetics and more interested in the depth of work it takes to come to significant dance work. I know, I know, "significant" is up for debate, but whatever it is, I consider it the "stuff" that perpetuates the field rather than the "stuff" that sedates it. Upon request for a lecture I was giving in a Dance Studies course a few weeks ago, one of my own professors, Sarah Gamblin, wrote about her process is creating her work entitled Terrible Angels.

Sarah Gamblin: Terrible Angels

"All I knew before the process began is that I wanted to work in a way that is similar to Bebe Miller's process, which is doing lab/workshops using improvisation and reflection to locate and create a world collaboratively with dancers. I also wanted to work with detailed, complex movement. We began the weekend of Katrina and I was listening to Cocorosie, which has a mournful, strange, hyper feminine and subversive feeling, this made me think of NO and it's cultural history, it's national bad girl status; death, femininity, sexuality, poetry, failure. These images just kept swirling around and I did not try to make narrative sense of any of it, nor did I try to distill anything into one coherent metaphor.

We worked with improvisations that I have been working on for a while. One is called, "docking and permission" or sometimes "pause and undo" or also "pause and permit". Basically you work on feeling your kinesthetic impulses without acting on them. You pause in stillness for a long time and then allow, permit an impulse to move you, but only until you pause again. You try not to let the movement carry you too far, try not to fall back on kinesthetic habits but instead pause and observe what you would do if you could, and then allow the impulse to emerge out of the blackness of not knowing; inviting surprise, incoherence so as to find mystery. This is an improv mode, not a way of setting material. It is a sensibility, always trying to subvert itself.After that we set material from this improv mode but through opposite means- by just repeating movements with a partner, without counting, analysing, singing, editing or correcting, until the movement became learned.

I am an improviser and I tend to privilege presence and the freshness of a moment over formal coherence. The choreographer in me is still trying to figure out how best to dialogue with this part. The improviser in me likes things that unwind, rather than wind-up, as classical aesthetics tend to privilege. I would like to learn how to make this improviser’s sensibility more meaningful to audiences. The feedback at ACDFA taught me how irritating departures from classical formal development can be for viewers. Incomprehension, mild contempt and dismissal seemed to dominate the responses from the adjudicators. In my process I had been trying to create an authentic universe lived in as if for the first time, I did use my own sensibility for form to make coherent this universe but my sense of form is not classical. What is development? Do we just know it when we see it? When someone says, you need to develop that, what is it we are supposed to do? I can see now that it is a matter of asking questions, dealing with feedback. There is no prescription for development, just a process that eventually teaches everyone; choreographer, dancers, audience, what development means in that world being created.
Also collaborated with a wonderful electro-acoustic musician named Dave Gedosh whose ultra strange music completely subverted my privilege of being strange. What I like was how over the top wierd the whole thing became, what I don't like is how jittery and uncomfortable and ultimately inaccessible the world became, witout any pay-off. I think the music was almost too intense for my work, which perhaps did not slap back enough, formally speaking, the musical wierdness.Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions.

I also collaborated with a wonderful electro-acoustic musician named Dave Gedosh whose ultra strange music completely subverted my privilege of being strange. What I like was how over the top weird the whole thing became, what I don't like is how jittery and uncomfortable and ultimately inaccessible the world became, without any pay-off. I think the music was almost too intense for my work, which perhaps did not slap back enough, formally speaking, and the musical weirdness.