Come to Rehearsal

Have you ever seen a group of young people work together with such commitment and generosity you think they were out to change the world?
Come to rehearsal.
Have you ever seen anyone throw her entire body, mind and spirit into action in service of someone else’s expression?
Come to rehearsal.
Have you ever thought dance was just “fun?”
Come to rehearsal.
Have you ever thought that only the best “shows” are onstage?
Come to rehearsal.
It is always so much more than you think it is.
Chad Hall Intensive Fall 09.

Crystal Valdez

In her collaborative modern piece, Crystal is exploring the natural transitions and connections between movement inspired by the very connections we have in life. From the bonds that hold atoms together to the connections that we make on telephone calls and electronic mail, to the non-vocalized interactions that create the formations birds fly together in the sky to the communication that occurs on public transportation, all these come together in their unique connections to form the continuum of our life experiences in our world.

Photo: Prem Ananda

Kathleen Helm

It wasn’t a question of whether or not I wanted to choreograph again this year. I knew that I had to; for myself, that is. Something would be missing if my mind weren’t busy working on that one combination that wasn’t quite right. My class notes would be empty if there weren’t stage patterns and formations scribbled in the corner. The challenge of choreographing another piece for Orchesis was something I wasn’t about to pass up. My brain needed that artistic stimulus.
The piece that I choreographed last year, “The Kingdom of Enticement”, was very enjoyable to work on, so I decided to travel down that same path again and create a contemporary ballet. I’m a perfectionist (especially when it comes to choreographing), so once I find my strengths, I try not to stray from what I know I can achieve. However, every choreographer needs to take risks, so this year, I decided to test myself in the concept of time. The music I chose is the truly breathtaking “Runaway Horses”, composed by Philip Glass, and not only is this piece over 9 minutes long, but it is very complicated as well. I have already had to call my brother (who is a music student in New York) to help me with the rhythms!
Maybe now I should actually describe what my piece is about! Well, it is a profile of the Seven Deadly Sins. While I was studying abroad in Thailand, I visited an exhibit in Bangkok, in which students from a local art institute had created works around the sins. This had been the start of my thought process. The Seven Deadly Sins are so prevalent in pop culture (“America’s Next Top Model” and “Top Chef” centered challenges around them!), and I knew that they had inspired many works of art. However, I found it odd that I had never seen a dance inspired by this concept.
The intent of my dance is to portray each of the Seven Deadly Sins tastefully and somewhat ambiguously. Even though each of my seven dancers are going to be the “characters” of pride, anger, jealousy, gluttony, greed, lust, and sloth, the audience must determine who the dancers are, based on the movement. I hope to incorporate a variety of solos, duets, and trios in order to combine different interactions between the sins. I’m thankful to have seven extremely talented dancers, who have been wonderful to work with so far! The piece will succeed if there is a chaotic nature embedded with an intense focus, and this will be up to the dedication of my dancers.

Dancers at Work

Dancers hard at work in class.

Photos: Sara Tollefson

Alexandra Thomsen Wolfe

For the first time, I am choreographing a dance piece. That is, for the first time I am choreographing a work of art. I am feeling so excited, intimidated, anxious, overwhelmed, and overjoyed about this experience. The choreography I have done in the past has been about the movement and had no real purpose other than looking good. This piece is about me and about everyone and has a specific idea that I want to convey. Will it work out? I have no idea. Will people like it? I hope so, but does it matter? Will it be challenging? More than I probably know. Rewarding? Definitely. So here it is, my idea for choreography:
My concept for this piece began when I realized over summer that I was easily becoming distracted from the things that really matter most in life. I felt like I was losing a sense of purpose and meaning in my life while being preoccupied with things that were just trifles. I am Catholic, and it became evident that part of this disconnect was stemming from the fact that I was not attending Mass regularly during the summer. Once I started attending Mass again I felt a sense of direction and ease and my life was just put back in order. By ‘finding God’ again, my life made sense again. My aim is to represent this idea of having lost sight of what is important in life, and finding the path back to a journey that is ultimately fulfilling. For me, a fulfilling life involves my religion, and this is what my concept is stemming from; however, I want the piece to be representative of what helps people in general to find meaning in their lives. Everyone has a different idea of what it means to lead a fulfilling life; we know that what we need is within us, yet we still have to take a journey to uncover it.
There is a quote I have from Catholic Catechism – the essential data of the Catholic faith – that is the impetus for the various movement motifs I want to have in the piece. It says, “Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness. But this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, ‘an upright heart,’ as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God.” My plan is to have different dancers representing ‘will,’ ‘intellect,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘others,’ each with a specific movement motif. These dancers will affect another dancer who is representing the soul of a person that is disconnected and is on the path to discovering the journey that is right for her. She will incorporate the various dance motifs into her own movement as if she is learning what they have to teach her and applying it to her life. I plan to use my dancers as inspiration for movement as well as have their own raw movement be the basis for their motifs. I am asking each of them to bring their own life story to the piece and use it as motivation for movement. I hope to learn a lot from the dancers in my piece who I will rely on so much and a lot from this journey that we are embarking on together.

Photo: Prem Ananda

Rebecca Jensen

It’s 10:48pm on a Wednesday night, just got home from the studio, and despite all the homework, dessert, friends, bickering at the boyfriend, Facebook, Gossip Girl and other mundane distractions that normally consume my life- nothing demands my attention more than my delightfully sore body.
These muscles are tired. My stomach from all the contractions, my toes from Michelle’s pointe class, my neck from the head rolls, my hamstrings from the leaps, my arms from…I don’t even know! It’s amazing, isn’t it? This is what I call living life. Vicki Baum famously quotes “There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.” I would agree; when I am dancing, I am happiest.
In Orchesis this year, I am choreographing two pieces, granted both Darren and I will choreograph the second piece. My first piece is a feminine jazz with a focus on women and temptation. As I described to my dancers, women will always give into and participate with temptation. Chocolate, carbs, the “bad” boys, flirting…it’s all too familiar. For example, society often places a negative stereotype on women proud of their womanly curves, labeling them as too promiscuous, immoral, or even slutty. This piece’s concept originally rooted from the story of Adam and Eve, which made me realize, this is simply part of human nature. Why so bad if we flirt with a boy or slip a piece of chocolate? Embrace it. Of course I’ve added my own flirty twist to mix, or as Darren likes to call it, tranny style! I’m thinking chandeliers, luscious apples, and six tempting women…
After studying abroad for an entire year last year, I’ve had a plethora of revelations—one being that most humans are selfish…which motivated Darren and I to choreograph a dance together. It happens everyday; most things we do are for ourselves, even when we don’t realize it. We donate money to the poor (so that we feel good about ourselves knowing that we did something to help the world). We stay with our boyfriends/girlfriends despite the unhappy relationship (only because we don’t want to be alone yet). We do and don’t commit to activities (because it’s based around our own schedule). This dance will hopefully demonstrate that it’s a good to take a step back to seriously question your intentions. Are you honestly doing this for someone else, or for yourself?
Stylistically, this will be a raw, contemporary modern dance. After seeing Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company last weekend, all Darren and I could think about is movement quality and commitment. The style is very awkward (warning, don’t get mad at us when our dancers ask you for massages), and it will definitely be tough, but as long as we see commitment to the movements, down to every fingernail, we will be happy choreographers.

Photo: Coming soon

Heidi Vigario

The inspiration for my piece came to me while I was driving in the car. It was probably not the safest ride home, but I was filled with so many ideas that I didn't want to forget! My dance is based on the ocean and the creatures that live in it. I want to explore the essence, the core, of these animals.
I want to take the audience on a journey. I want them to experience another world. We will start at the waves and descend to the deep sea before coming back up to the surface.
I am excited to begin working on my piece with my dancers. I spent all summer creating phrases, exploring ideas, structuring the dance, and more. I couldn't wait for Orchesis to begin because I was so excited to start! And now that rehearsals have begun, I can't wait to see where the piece will go!

Photo: Prem Ananda

Jessica Thoma

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

More Trip Photos

Here are a couple more photos of the trip to San Francisco.

Rachel Saalsaa

So someone asked me the other day if I am excited to be choreographing? I looked at them and said, “Honestly, I’m terrified!” And that’s the truth. Don’t get me wrong I am super excited, but I think terrified better explains how I feel. This is going to be a new experience for me and it is something that I know I will grow so much from. Also, in the end I know that I won’t regret it and probably want to do it again.
Over this past summer I spent a lot of time trying to find inspiration or some idea that I would just love to dance about, but when that never came I decided to just throw in the towel. Then at the last minute, actually two days before it was due, I was sitting in an anthropology lecture and bam it hit me! I had my idea and I began to discover what story I wanted to tell. Being the nerd that I am, I decided that my dance will be based off of the real story of human evolution, a monkeys to man kind of tale. It will be about everything including our closest ancestors, natural selection, discovering “Lucy”, man coming out of Africa, the features that define us from apes, and maybe even some knuckle walking. For choreographing, I like to draw movement ideas from all kinds of places, and recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos on primitive tribes and the great apes, especially chimpanzees! I also like to ‘play games’ and work collaboratively with my dancers to create movement sequences out of nothing. So in the end I’m planning on this piece being a big hodge-podge of movement that randomly assembles into the story of how humans came to be. Mainly, I look forward to making this a fun process for both me and all the dancers in my piece!

Photo: Prem Ananda

Meghan Hudson

I am attempting to explore the relationships between mothers, daughters, and grandmothers through movement. I got the idea on a camping trip this past summer. I was camping with my fiancés family, which expands three healthy generations of women. I guess knowing I would become a part of that family soon made me notice the family’s interactions and think more about a woman’s role in the family. In just a few years the daughters will become mothers, making the mothers grandmothers and so on. It is such a quick step up but those three generations will always exist even as we move through them.
I am also experimenting with Merce Cunnginham technique, both movement and choreographic. I appreciate his emphasis on movement and taking chances. As a dancer I get more involved in dances that use me in the choreographic process. I feel like I can invest more of myself into the dance and choreographer. I want the same from my dancers. I want to use their ideas and let movement come by surprise.
We will see how it goes!

Photo: Prem Ananda

McKenna Friend

I draw much of my inspiration for dance from the Classic Age in Hollywood. MGM films have been playing on my worn out VCR since I was an infant. The women from that time had a different kind of beauty. The aura of Ginger Rogers, Vera Ellen, Ann Miller, and Eleanor Powell and the style of the Zeigfeld Follies always intrigued me. I've spent years mimicking their dancing.
When many people hear Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue they initially think New York City. I didn't want to cater to that tradition for my piece but I didn't want to disappoint the audience by abstracting the classic too much. The nighttime and moonlit theme seemed to fit perfectly.
As of now, I want the style of the piece to be reminiscent of the ballet from An American in Paris. Full of character and class...taking the audience on a flirty midnight adventure.
When choreographing, the music is in charge of me. I'll spend hours just listening to the melody building on images that the song calls to mind: trains, bumblebees, a marching band, a newspaper hat. Once I have some of those images, I attempt to develop movement inspired by those images. Sometimes it works. :)

Photo: Prem Ananda

Continuum - Orchesis 2010

Oct 12, 2009

Well, yes, we have already started. It seems amazing that we are now heading into the fourth week of classes, and I am just instigating our Blog. So much has happened for Orchesis already this quarter, and I must say we have a wonderful company and are well on our way.
The officers: Kathleen Helm, President; Jessica Thoma, Vice President; Alexandra Thomsen Wolfe, Treasurer; Meghan Hudson and Megan Butala, Publicity, are more mature, self motivated, and creative than I could have ever imagined. These are inspiring business women, creative professionals, and also charming young ladies. All of them have set the tone and generated the enthusiasm needed to create not only what looks like it will be a great performance, but also a very enriching process along the way.
The company of 26 was selected from about 60 dancers who auditioned for Orchesis this year. Each of the company members has something unique to offer, and I look forward to learning more about them and watching them grow. The student choreographers presented some strikingly mature choreographic proposals, and the content of the dances promises to be provocative and deeply explored. Rehearsals are finally underway and I cannot wait to see what transpires.
The dancers have been nothing short of professional in class and activities so far. Some of the younger, newer members are clearly being taken under the gentle caring wings of previous members. All seem extremely committed to excellence. What else would they be other than excellent?
Any creative process is not without risk, and we have plenty of that happening this year. We will collaborate on our Finale this year for the first time, rather than having the dance set and learned. This finale dance will hopefully contain a little bit of everyone; it will have movement from each dancer and each teacher that we experience along the way.
Our trip this year was again to San Francisco and included wonderful classes at the San Francisco Dance Center. It was great to have classical dance techniques fused with contemporary urban styles. Even the old lady – me, Diana – provided the students with some fodder for laughter as I put my 44 year old butt into Hip Hop class with Dexandro also known as “D.” I am so glad Michelle Walter, our Assistant Director was with us for the trip this year. The Bill T. Jones Performance we saw was an amazing Multi Media Dance Theatre experience. The performers were stunning, and the creativity and technological elements blended flawlessly to create a very compelling evening.
We are still breathless from the trip, and have sore muscles to remind us we are back in action. We are at work, it is now time to dig the soil and sow the seeds. We’ll let you know how it grows.