Tere O'Connor has been working with Headlong Dance Theater for the past year or so. Tere is a choreographer in NYC. I have taken a week workshop a few summers ago with him, but have sadly not seen any of his works. He has very thought-out views/theories/ideas about what dancing is and what choreography is. Headlong shared some of these working theories with us in this weekend's workshop. This is my attempt to make some sense of it all for myself as I reiterate what I think I may have learned/become interested in on Saturday.
Choreography is like science in that we use something/anything as a starting point. Then we do research on it. We ask questions that have yet to be asked, or that we think have yet to be asked, or that have been asked already but we hope that they will manifest new truths or untruths or truth-looking things that as a culture and as a generation we can put some faith into and believe in.
Choreographers, like scientists, should be honest in their researching process. Tere seems to be saying that maybe we don't need preconcieved notions of dances or concepts for dances or themes for dances...that all of these things are better left unknown and un-worried about at the begining of a dance making process. We shouldn't worry about what is good, or what people will get or not get, or what is strong or what works. We should simply worry about asking questions to delve deeper into what interests us. Our explorations of those questions doesn't have to be good or interesting or ground-breaking either; it just has to be curious and real. Through this we can figure out what the "it-ness" of what we are making is and ask more questions to explore that It-ness. He calls these repeated bouts of research "it-erations".
With all this said: this is not the be all and end all of the choreographic process. It is one tool that can be used very strictly or could work to simply get a choreographer on a certain track with the creation of movement and to help him/her resist imposing qualitative judgment on his/her process and to resist his/her urge to "make a dance" instead of simply being curious enough to let the dance "make itself".
I want to use these ideas to keep going with Ashley and my duet, SomeAnyOverItch. It actually relates quite nicely to my original concept of adding layers to Nothing. There again though, notice that I actually did go into the dance with a "concept" that ended up censoring/influencing/pressuring the movement that emerged as the duet. There was always the question of "How does this movement or this section relate to my concept???" But why am I so precious about my concept anyway? I am not in sales or marketing or advertising...I am not selling chocolate ice cream cones to lactose intolerant kids! I am not selling anything because believe me...if I was, I wouldn't be sitting at the gym at work right now, I'd be home counting my millions of dollars (all in 20's) (packed neatly into 3 black briefcases). So why do I cling onto a concept? Probably because I don't trust that at the "end" of the process, I will know what the heck is going on if I don't have some kind of starting point. Ash and I have many starting points though. We have been playing since september with contact and giving and taking impulses, and improvising, and being sincere in a performance, and creating imagined space, and charging fictitious imaginations.
I'd like to think of an assignment for rehearsal tonight...something to slow us down and make us take the time to do some research. Maybe do a strict it-eration thing individually like we did in the workshop but then add something. We have so much duet/contact stuff to play with. Maybe we start with that and one person does research on a sliver of some aspect that interests them. The other person's score is simply to react. The researcher can give the reactor some physical or verbal cues. If they use verbal it must be loud, resolute, and brief. something like "Press into me harder" "Keep pressing" "STOP" "DO THAT AGAIN".
Or maybe we should do the strict iteration thing and see ..."hey what is leading us into contact anyway? Maybe there is nothing there...maybe that is forced. Hmm...I guess we will have to wait and see!
