Big thank you to my husband Nick Chappell for coming and taking photos during our rehearsal.
The making of Flood is a process of rescuing, redeeming, and reprioritizing the primacy of the body and lived experience. Through movement research we are considering moments in our lives where our internal landscape radically shifted as a result of external events. Our “rehearsals” are a way of receiving and accepting these moments and giving voice to their significance. The challenge lies in staging this process as a performance. How does one choreograph experience?
Lying on my back with my feet standing on the floor, I close my eyes and begin again. This place is at once familiar yet different. I am practicing my daily ritual of “dropping in”, “tuning-in”, reconnecting with the self. Yet instead of following my impulses I am embarking on a journey of repetition. Over the course of many sessions I have “set” my movement based on patterns that continuously reappear and satisfy. The gestures transport me to a state of flow, narrowing my attention to a single point. This moving with eyes closed is the beginning of the dance. It is a practice that is deeply familiar to all five dancers, a way of working that focuses the attention on one’s internal landscape, prioritizing the experience of moving and the desires of the body. Yet in the context of performance, the practice shifts. Movements that normally stem from the impulse of the present have been crafted and while they were birthed from this form, they carry the responsibility of performance. As we contend with tapping into our felt sense and sensations, we are also aware of the demands the choreography is making on us. I want to stay in this section much longer; I want to indulge in the idiosyncrasies of the day. I want to roll, pour, wiggle, sigh, and wait. The choreographer part of me knows that I cannot humor this desire. As I shape my own experience, I must also consider the other participants in the room. We will all “drop-in” at different rates; it could take me five minutes one day and two hours the next. Due to the framework of this dance concert, we have a limited time for this journey to take place. I am giving us two minutes, three at most to enter the work. The limited time demands immediacy, a quick shift of consciousness and awareness, an intensity of concentration. I am asking the performers to reach into their inner life and access a state of openness and vulnerability. In order for this to happen with consistency I have carefully considered how to craft the opening experience by evoking a familiar ritual and transforming it for the context of the performance. As a performer it feels the best, "right" to ignore the audience, to drop in completely to my own world. The audience is there as a witness. I am being seen but not seeing their presence. In not seeing, I feel empowered to be committed to the experience. I am not enacting, not displaying; I am completely focused on the task at hand, living through performance. But what does it mean to see the audience, to have a visual exchange? How does that shift the temporal and spacial distance?
In my work I utilize distance. Performance is stepping into another world, a sacred space, a space that is separate from the rest. Regardless of actual physical space, there is a performative distance. When I become aware of the presence of the audience are they in this world with me or are they looking in on my world? This matters immensely with focus and direction. If they are here in this world with me, I can't ignore them. But if they are not, then how does/should one engage the vision? What is the role of suspending belief in performance? As an audience member I have a hard time doing this. Why? I was once told that I was a good actress on stage. My eyes were expressive. Acting to me has always meant a putting on, a playing, a pretend, make-believe, a character, that you are somehow being someone you are not. Acting was stepping outside of oneself and becoming someone else. This compliment offend me, it asserted that somehow what I did on stage was not real, that what I had experienced on stage was make-believe. That the intimacy, empathy was with and for a character and not me as the performer. I don't work that way. I can't separate myself from the work. I am living. I am negotiating. I am entering a feeling stage. I go somewhere else but that place is still inside of me. It is still somewhere within the realm of my reality. Performers who inhabit roles, who become and in doing so transform produce/create new knowledge. This is so important to me. There is something so vulnerable in posting these unfinished, unorganized thoughts.... Sigh.
It is raining and I am alone for the first time in weeks and I know that I am holding onto so much and I know that I need time to be still and quiet and just tune into the sound of the rain hitting the ground and the house. To relish in being here with all this space and all this possibility.... Knowing how to fall without bracing for impact, how to be soft, fluid, malleable, permeable and to be able to shift, morph, be open and receptive. How do I take the pressure off? How do I be in the body? How do I really tune in without feeling over stimulated? I know how to drop into the work. I know how to reside in the movement, the place where my attention narrows and I am not in two places but my whole self is working as one, body tuned, "being moved". But how do I teach that commitment and focus? What am I afraid of? Never pushing far enough. Never taking a big enough risk. These thoughts represent the pull I feel in my roles as performer and choreographer in this work. The dance is research into living, on how to attend to the body and listen to its need. I am learning how to take care of myself, how to recover, how to recharge, rewiring my desire to attend to others before I tend to myself. But I am not alone in this performance. I am sharing the stage with four other movers with their own histories and habits, needs and desires. How do I balance the individual and collective? How do I organize the ideas swirling around in both my writing and the dancing? When do I edit? |
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