I miss choreography.
Throughout this quarantine I’ve been trying different strategies for making work. Creating movement from my own body, making a video, sending it to collaborators. Working from scores, looking at old work and reimagining it, relearning it. None of this feels like being in a studio, and none of this felt like I was making or experiencing anything, the best way I can describe it is that anything I’ve made in in the past three months doesn’t feel like it’s been made “in real time” but like I was making it later, or before, not now.
I came back to my house after being away for almost three months. The first thing I did was to purge objects in my room, clothes from my drawers and books from my shelves. I thought of this as more of a time filling activity rather than a space making one. But also I’d felt a kind of energetic weight fall towards me walking into my little Brooklyn bedroom for the first time in ten weeks. I knew that after being absent for so long my intuition as to what needed to stay and what was carrying a bad charge would be good, and I put it to work. I realized I hang on to a lot of gifts I don’t like.
After I purged I started making these little object ikebana. I wanted to touch and see the things I kept and to know their secrets. I asked them how they wanted to be or fall, and then I nudged them into lines and waves or blew on them so they would turn or scatter. I realized that this was the part of making dances that I missed, the part where you put your body in conversation. I thought this might be an exercise in composition, and it is partly. I’ve been struggling to articulate to myself lately how I want myself and my dancers to relate to space/spacing literally stuck on the simple question: where do the bodies go?
In 1000 Moves for Back Up Dancers one of many questions I’m asking is what fades away or recedes from the eye? What about that kind of movement or gesture fundamentally changes when it’s foregrounded.
I’m not sure what these are telling me yet. Maybe I’ll post more later. As I worked these out I realized I remembered going to see Camille Henrot’s The Pale Fox at the New Museum, and how excited I was meeting her work. Maybe this is a reminder that once it helped me to think about choreography as installation, and that I should return to that mode.
