Kelli Edwards, 09 CPF, Week 2

The showing on Sunday afternoon was very helpful and a little excruciating. After a week of rehearsals I had a lot of stuff--messy, disjointed stuff. After helpful feedback I realized that I needed to work on the quality of my movement with the dancers so that I could start to see what they would look like doing it. Up to this point, I had been solely focused on making and manipulating material, waiting to work on quality later. Well, later is now. I took a deeper look at the accumulation phrase. It was either fix it or chuck it and I chose to stick with the challenge of making it work. Taking it down to eight dancers and keeping a strict formation, it is starting to build more gradually and take shape. It is also starting to have a tension that it didn’t have before. I also think I have found some music (Branca, thanks, Richard) that will work nicely with it, propelling the dancers into more visceral energy which it needs. Last night I started to put all of the pieces together into an order. It was helpful to see material strung together but right now it just seems like a string and I want more of a weave. The dancers were excited by the music (Nico Muhly) that I tried with it. I still don’t have a definitive take on the music, but the Muhly was great because it doesn’t dominate but it provides energy and flow and a frame for the dance. We’ll see. I have been wanting to see an image in this piece and just today I began to understand one way to do it. The image is of two people dance partially hidden by trees. I have come up with a gestural phrase that can be performed extremely slowly and I think having all the dancers standing scattered like a forest doing this phrase will be a nice frame for duet material. I feel like this dance is unfolding slowly, that the movement material is leading me down a certain path rather than my choosing a path to take. I discovered a nice moment with Marissa and Mitch in their duet material in which Marissa tries to grab at Mitch’s head while it bobs and I want to find more moments like that, surprising human moments.