Going into this process I found myself nervous and scared to even attempt to go through the whole experience. I had a million ideas and concepts in my head and not many ideas of how to put it all together, which posses a problem sometimes. My experience last year was a difficult one because there were obstacles that just didn’t get solved as smoothly or as fully as I wanted. Working with a partner during the choreographic process made it necessary that we needed to know a good majority of what we were going to do before rehearsal. There was a lot of good communication and a lot of not so good communication and so there was an overall frustration with the process. It wasn’t as enjoyable as we had expected. Many of these frustrated feelings were what I had in my mind when I thought about choreographing again, though I moved forward and challenged myself anyway; knots in my stomach and all. I had my first rehearsal this last Saturday and I honestly came to rehearsal with less in my head than I wanted to; approximately 10 or so seconds of choreography. At this point I thought to myself, this isn’t going to be a very long rehearsal since I have practically nothing! On the contrary, I ended up experimenting and refining movements I already had and came up with a good chunk of really interesting movements and compositions. I was not expecting success and it turned out way better than I expected. My architecture class is working in teams right now and we’re learning how to work together with the concept of “Learning to fly on the way down” and I think that applies to this process for me because it really is the first time in a long time that I’m working off the cusp like this. I’ll probably prepare a little more for the future just to have some sort of plan but it was exhilarating to learn how to fly on the way down. In a way, this process is helping to support the idea that is behind this whole dance. The concept of this piece is a lot of what I have been dealing with the last few months. I am exploring the rise and fall of how people survive through the challenges of life and I’m focusing in on how dealing with these challenges can be smooth and successful or harsh and destructive. The structure of it will drive the path in how, in concept, life should go but the variation off this path will be where the interest and struggle with become its own story. I’m eager to see what I come up with but I have a good sense of where I want it to go and my goal is for this to be a therapeutic process for the dancers, the audience, and myself.
Photo: Keith Mosher
