electromagnetic pulse

Find Me in Here. Opening segment - notes

It is a challenge for me to work without a concrete overarching structure, and I'm trying different ideas to get into the material a bit more personally. The past two weeks I've been working with the dancers individually to get their specific experiences of themselves as individuals within a group. It helps me respond to their movement more precisely and gives me an entry point for editing their phrases for the piece.

What I learned from them is that groups provide us with parameters. They restrict or release our personalities (or do both simultaneously). It's pretty obvious really, though interesting to hear that all of us make choices about our behavior out of consideration for how others will perceive our intentions. The greatest concern is having one's meaning misconstrued and used to form a inaccurate judgment of one's personality or identity.

After deciding last week that the audience clusters were a nuisance, I nonetheless decided I liked the presence of the chairs in the performance space. I like them as obstructions for the dancers, but also as reminders of place. I am considering other ways to accomplish these effects without using chairs (because they're big and oh so cliché in dance), such as a powder or skin application that could leave a residue on the floor after the dancers move from their starting position. But then you run into safety concerns (slip hazards), and it doesn't answer the obstruction need. I have also been brainstorming on what easily obtainable abstract, stump-like objects I might consider, but finally I remembered that part of my intention with this project was to employ the dancers in place of architectural objects, so I'm working hard to keep that in mind. I might try pairing the dancers, using one as a placeholder and the other to dance through the space. Seems an obvious solution, yes? We'll see how hokey it is.

[caption id="attachment_143" align="alignright" width="202" caption="two performing spaces divided by audience"][/caption]

I'm also stumped on where to put the audience, and have an idea to try next Sunday that creates a boundary for the dancers between two primary spaces, as you can see from my rough sketch.

I worry that this will have the effect of creating two "groups" for the dancers to choose between, which misses the point of examining the effects of the group on the individual. But we'll try it nonetheless.

Thanks for reading!

** And my apologies for posting these notes a week late! It was a hectic stretch for me and I simply forgot that I hadn't done it yet.

Labels: FMiH

posted by e m p @ 11:21 AM