Opening

After a fast an furious couple of days (and nights) of incorporating all of the elements - dance,  music, costumes, lights and the space - we've arrived at opening night. Our new frame, the Neptune Studio Theatre, gives the piece a whole new look and feel compared to the dance studio - this is something I always forget. The last piece of the puzzle, perhaps the most exciting and most important, arrives tonight. See you there! 

Threnodies at 8:00 pm at Neptune Studio Theatre 

(1593 Argyle Street, Halifax, NS)

Followed by the always enthralling, Granelli, Crofts, Oore and Oore!

Surfacing

Some pictures from the past week's work... What a week it was! Don Rieder joined us in the studio to help us reveal the piece. It was a deeply enriching experience for me - working with Don and the dancers to shape the work,  add texture, enrich the dancer's internal world. Giving focus to the face, hands, breath...working out the kinks, cutting out the extraneous,  unraveling and reconnecting. Underneath the structure of what we built was a whole world that has begun to surface...

Thank you Don, Jacinte, Sara and Rhonda. 

Next week we reconnect with the musicians to weave the whole piece together. 

5 days till the opening!

One week away!

Adria's article in The Coast came out today...

The spine

Two weeks from today we'll be getting ready for our opening night of Threnodies. Yikes! The dancers and I have been on a break from studio work since April, but Geordie has been steadily trucking along - writing, rehearsing, editing, arguing - all the fun stuff of  a great creative process.  I didn't catch today's living room rehearsal in person, but I caught some of the chit chat afterwards. I love hearing the musician's perspective on the process, how it is so similar to a dancer's experience. In fact, I met with a lovely woman today from The Coast, a writer named Adria, and we talked about how creating dance has similarities to writing - especially the (often painful) part of editing. That's where i'm at today.  I went back into the studio today by myself to  review the material we made in our creation period in March-April. It's fascinating going back and looking at what we made - during those four weeks we worked intensely, creating from mostly a subconscious level, trying not to judge or edit the movement, ideas and images that were coming out. And now, having some time and some distance, it's awesome to go back and look at it with some clarity. I love this part of the process -  combing through the material, looking for what fits and what doesn't fit, and beginning to see a logic. I spoke with Don Rieder awhile ago (Don is the dramaturge that we're going to work with next week) he urged me look for the 'spine of the piece' - the spine being the organizing principle that supports everything else. This is a concept from Twyla's Tharp's book on choreography called 'The Creative Habit.' So I'm taking his (and her) advice, working on clarifying the spine, strengthening it and using it to support the body of the work. Next week I meet up with the dancers and Don for our last stretch rehearsals - Yeeha!

Luckily Doug videotaped today's music rehearsal in my absence, so here is a sneak peek at the last of the six music pieces, aptly referred to as Threnody 6.   

the cat's out of the bag!

The TD Halifax Jazz Festival officially launched their 2012 line-up this morning to a festive crowd at La Trinidade and the Listening Room. Geordie and I are thrilled to be part of what looks an amazing array of shows!

Our show, Threnodies, will take place over 3 nights, July 12-14 at 8pm at the Neptune Studio Theatre. We are sharing the night with some incredible local talent - Granelli-Crofts-Oore and Oore on the 12th, Maria Osende Flamenco Company on the 13th and SubTEXT on the 14th.

More details to come!

http://halifaxjazzfestival.ca/

living room preview

I caught the end of yesterday's rehearsal (conveniently taking place in my living room). The boys gave me a preview of their work. The final show will be rooted in 6 musical threnodies - 3 that Geordie has previously written and 3 new ones that he is in the process of writing. Here is a preview of threnody #4. Geordie promises threnody #5 at next week's rehearsal.

The Threnodies Band is very dangerous !!

the band ,Doug Cameron drums,Tim Crofts keys,Ron J Hynes bass and I ,Geordie Haley guitar are about to have our 4th rehearsal ...working on Threnody 4 has been an amazing journey ...Ron has been tearing into the material driving the rest  of us into practice mode ...time changes,feel changes ,yet the under lying premise is still the blues,with 12 bar sections forming with no effort ,as if the muse was trying to tell me to go with the flow ... i have also been able thanks to tim's prowess ,to start building some very large harmonic movement ,employing matrixes i have developed based on three note chords derived from the 9 note blues scale. the harmonies and melodies are coming, trying many strategies  to get more beats for the next piece . Dropped some ideas off to Doug ,who has been providing rehearsal space,chart editing and now transcribing these new ideas to his drum set ,in short Doug saves the day effortlessly ! We are also gearing up for our print promo for the run at neptune,with some interesting acts that we are sharing the bill with,more to come from the Jazz East Festival reveal tomorrow ! Having a production goal for this work is scary but enthralling ! i am over the moon but hovering cannot wait to have this new work up and running !

The Lioness

©Cheryl Graul 

©Cheryl Graul 

©Cheryl Graul

©Cheryl Graul 

Pictures of Rhonda Baker from our showing at the Osprey Arts Centre, taken by photographer Cheryl Graul. Cheryl is a photographer who lives in Lockport, NS. She brought in a group of students photographers to take pictures of the May 3rd event. These are a few that she took. 

Check out Cheryl's website: www.eemages.com 

late report from the composer
....the drive to shelbourne was lovely but did not prepare me for the vivacious kids at the school where susanne did a workshop ... susanne,with rhonda's assistance, had those kids in the palm of her hand in about 5 seconds, and doug cameron (drums) and i on guitar worked like crazy cats trying to keep up with the endless flow of ideas and energy susanne gave  out for everyone..so amazing i wish every school could be so lucky...
we found great food as susanne mentions in her blog and then off to set up at the the theater...mike the tech and susan hoover our guide ( the heart of the south shore art scene) made sure all our needs were met and in no time we felt at home and we were ready to perform for the shelbournites !
after a supper of nuts and chocolate (our lunch was still with us !) doug rhonda and i warmed up ,me playing scales and long tones, doug breaking up every quarter note into the most microscopic beats and looking over rhonda busting out some awesome yogic flying headstands ! unreal and set us in a perfect space...
we had to arrange the dance and music for one dancer and drum/guitar duo but with the aid of my trusty eventide looper and doug's perfect beats we gave 100% to two threnodies ...i knew we were loud, i knew we were captivating but susanne,being her own outside eye, did have some important notes about the power we brought to the stage...and that was just 3 of us ! we need to harness this stuff,point it in the right direction and wow what a show !
today was the first music run with Ron Hynes,bass,Tim Crofts keys,Doug Cameron drums, and me on guitar. we ran thru the work that susanne had set and it sounded so good.it was the fisrt time ron and tim had played this stuff together and look out...they are both great musicians and bring their creativity to the forefront...we warmed up on threnodie 1,2 and 3 and then the band was patient as we worked through sketches of new ideas....threes and sevens ! tap tap ! ....again holy triple wow this is already sounding wicked and we have only just begun,can' t wait for next week and to bring it to the peeps ! yeeha ....

Making Connections

Yesterday Geordie, Doug, Rhonda and I drove the winding road to Shelburne for a day of outreach. We were greeted by a very lively and willing group of students at Shelburne Regional High School where we rose, fell, rolled, crawled, jumped, turned and overall boogied to Doug and Geordie's fabulous music. One of the best groups of public school students I've ever taught! After some delicious food at the Beandock ('some say the best fish burgers in town') with the lovely Susan Hoover, we arrived at the Osprey Arts Centre - one of my favourite theatres in the province. We were there to help launch their 2012 dance season and give a little preview of our show in preparation for our July 17th performance at the centre.

What a valuable experience this was...


There is something about the theatre and an audience that really reveals and exposes a work. For me the experience was intense on my levels and I am still processing the information. In the small space, framed by black, under the lights,  I really felt the power of Geordie's music. We've been mostly rehearsing in the studio without the musicians, using recordings of the songs, and I didn't fully realise the effect the music would have when played live. It's like working with a light bulb and then standing in front of the sun. The musicians onstage bring a whole other level of energy to the performance. Their presence is both visual, energetic and auditory. And the music at its core is also powerful. We are working with heavy themes - as Geordie reminded us, the word 'Threnody' comes from the Greek words, threnos 'wailing' and oide 'ode'. We are performing laments, which expressed in sound and movement, through the bodies of the performers onstage, has to potential to be powerful. How to direct this power, channel it, shape it to reveal both its strength and its beauty...this is the work we have ahead of us.

Thank you to Rhonda, Doug and Geordie for their fearless performance, to Susan and the Osprey Arts Centre for organising this event and to the audience who shared their thoughts, ideas and experiences with us through the talk back. One of the audience members described his experience of the performance as like peering through a kaleidoscope. I would have to agree.

(In this video: Rhonda Baker, Doug Cameron & Geordie Haley)


Check out the Osprey Arts Centre:
http://ospreyartscentre.com/

having fun exploring fresh new sounds in composition land inspired by susanne and company knocking my brains about but  meanwhile:
 HAPPY INTERNATIONAL DANCE DAY ! time to bust a move !

 From Wednesday...

on Wednesday April 18th  we had our 2nd ensemble rehearsal...Susanne's  choreography and improv strategies gave a renewed focus to the parts and  big energy to the band's improvising ,just a wee taste of what is shaping up to be a joyous and exhilarating joining of forces . looking forward to our next ensemble dates and rehearsing the new material.
Susanne's nuanced approach to the music, learning all the "counts" and her amazing ability to compliment and contrast with cutting edge phrases in the dance lifts our playing of the music to new levels !
triple quadruple wowed ! yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeha !

Week 3 (in hindsight)

The energy and excitement of beginning (and it's accompanying sleepless nights) that I experienced in the first 2 weeks has evolved into a quieter, introspection  (and early morning risings) as we entered the world of Threnody 2 this past week. This piece does feel like a world, an aftermath, in contrast to the high energy, density and speed of Threnody 1. Threnody 2 is one of my favourite songs of Geordie's, it's the one that inspired me to want to create dance to Geordie's music, so I hold it with a different kind of attention and attachment than the other 2 pieces. Funny enough I spent the first two weeks creating material for Threnody 2 but at the last minute, in the rehearsal with the musicians, I switched it all to Threnody 1. Thank goodness most of the material also worked with Threnody 1. (I think at this point I better start abbreviating to T1 & T2). So this past week we pushed forward to T2 which, as I said,  has a very different feel than T1. T1 has an intensity, a falling through space, fight or flight feeling. With T2 the sense of unravelling that I was exploring in the earlier weeks has surfaced, along with the animals....deer, elephants, lions, squirrels and birds. (While teaching my young students this week I asked if anyone has a 'sprit animal'  - and they all looked at me as if I had two  heads. Little do they know, I have more than 2 heads!). Where T1 seems to be about holding on, T2 is more about letting go... or at least loosening. Choreography has become improvisation. Direction has become collaboration. Ideas have become instinct. Trust is our new best friend. Another fun (and scary) place to be.

What's better than dance & music?

I agree with Geo - I wish we could do this more often.
A snippet from our first date with the musicians:

In this video: Dancers: Jacinte Armstrong, Rhonda Baker & Sara Coffin. Musicians: Doug Cameron, Tim Crofts, Jamie Gatti & Geordie Haley (and me watching from the chairs!).

Thanks to all our collaborators for their amazing work so far. 

Monday at 10 am April 9th , the band loads in for our first rehearsal with the dancers and all i can think of is why can't this be an everyday event ?  the "groupo" or artist compound is a method of survival for many of my fave "world music " artists .....
Susanne's choreography is hard to describe in words ,which i guess is what modern dance is to me, the language that informs us, narrates for us , exposes  paths  to and from any point on any map be it internal or external.... could you say i am excited ! YEAHHHHH! the rehearsal went really well and we were all getting used to the idea of collaborating : in tempo ! in and out of synch !
cannot wait for the next rehearsal !
Thanks to Tim Crofts ,keys,Doug Cameron, drums and Jamie Gatti bass !

choose something shapeless....find ways..... to give it form
choose something fragile.....strengthen it
choose something hard.....soften it

the forming of bone, the forming of experience

(source: widening field, pg . 198)

Well... after some work (and some sleepless nights) the deconstruction/re-working/cutting and pasting brought us to a new order for one of the pieces. We are ready to bring in the band - phew! I forgot how consuming choreographing can be - a friend described it as like being in a new relationship. For me it feels like that and also like trying to solve a mystery,  like being Tom Hanks in the Divinci Code! The ensemble meets tomorrow for the first time. It's going to be great to hear the music live as we have been, up to this point, working with  recordings that were done in my living room.


I've been sick this weekend but the upside is that I've had some time to do some internet research and I finally discovered the name of the sculptures that have be in my mind. In September I was in Ottawa with Mocean Dance and we took a trip to the National Art Gallery. I was inspired by a series of sculptures that I saw and I wanted to use the images as source material for this process but I couldn't remember who the artist was until now - Louise Bourgeois. A French-born, American artist who recently passed away. The sculptures I saw were from her Echo series. They are pieces of her own clothing that had come in contact with her body and contained memories of people, places and relationships. She stretched, manipulated then cast the pieces of clothing in bronze and then painted them white. With regards the the connection of clothing and memory, Bourgeois wrote: “Time – time lived, time forgotten, time shared. What does time inflict — dust and disintegration? My reminiscences help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you.” 


Many crossovers to what I'm exploring... Here's a video of Jacinte improvising with my sweater during the first week of rehearsal:

Here's a link to some photos of Louise Bourgeois' sculptures:
http://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/2008-09-09_louise-bourgeois/

Construction - Deconstruction

The past few days we've spent constructing a big section of choreography, but I started getting this gut feeling that it's not quite right. I've been choreographing mostly without the music, trying to give the movement  some autonomy from the music, but I see now that I can't go any further without consideration towards how the two are ultimately going to relate. The music has it's own rhythm and phrasing and so does the movement - when should the two align and when is contrast the better choice? How much 'visual music' (i.e dance) is too much against the complexity of the music? Many questions are floating around in my head. So... I've created a plan (the chicken scratches in the photo below) and tomorrow I'm going to deconstruct (or possibly reconstruct) what we have so far. It's scary to destroy what we've built, but who knows what's on the other side. 

Week 2

Today we played with unravelling. My Graham training was awakened as this translated often into spirals for me. 


I'm inspired over and over again by this text from the a short story, Clarence, by Johanna Skibsrud from her recent book, This Will be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (pgs. 91-92): 

A beginning to...unravel somehow, break away. Until, finally, all the small and disconnected pieces that had somehow, inside of you, mysteriously, and for so long, conjoined, began to slowly disentangle themselves from one another, be sent---spinning---away...

super natural twists and lifts totally inspired by susanne and dancers ,what phrases and skill,yeeha !

Dark Harmony

On Friday we had a visit from Geordie. He scribbled down some notes as we reviewed the week's material and worked on some of the sections. On Easter Monday the rest of the band will join us for the first time. After the first week of play - getting out the raw ideas, getting used to working together - I look forward to digging deeper and seeing where that brings us...

Day Off

Today is a day off from studio work. It's nice to take a breather and have some time to process the material we've created so far. Up to this point I haven't been working directly with Geordie's music. Having listened to it a lot leading up to these rehearsals it's in my subconscious and in my body but I haven’t been directly choreographing to the music. One of my favourite things to do is videotape movement phrases and watch them with a bunch of different kinds of music to see how they meet up by chance and notice what combinations peak my interest. I like this movement phrase, danced here by Rhonda, combined with the opening of one of Geordie's tunes. 

Day Two

Inside the studio. The dancers, Jacinte Armstrong, Rhonda Baker & Sara Coffin (the ABC team) play with a new movement phrase. Becoming more relaxed, trying not to judge my impulses, not to follow a plan but to follow my curiosity instead.

holy gosh i feel just a little behind susanne in this early part of the creation process but the new tunes are coming and we plan to visit with the band soon ....i will be joining in on friday wow i can hardly wait...for me live dance and live music are the ultimate combination  in a performance ,a chance to make a statement on our culture the way people have been doing in other societies for 10000 years ...i am honored to have the chance to work with these amazing artists ! in a word yeeha !!!

Day One - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Where to begin? Three dancers, three different bodies, three ways of moving, even three hair colours. Space and breath are the starting points (thank you Sasha). Re-discovering the magic of the grid, the power of space. Falling and re-coiling. Pushing through. Magnetic pull and imaginary elastic bands. I feel inspired and terrified.

Saturday

Sat. March 24 - Geordie and I work to meet half-way. We only understand about 60% of what each other is talking about. I talk themes, movement ideas. He talks scales, melodies, time signatures. (I wish I had stuck with those piano lessons as a kid). Together ideas are hashed out, we find points of departure and points of convergence. At the heart is perpetual motion.

From now until mid-July Geordie and I are working together to create Threnodies, a live music and dance performance based on a series of songs that Geordie is in the process of writing. I'm creating dance pieces relating to the first three songs in the series, while Geordie works to write the rest. This blog is a meeting place - a space for Geordie and I to continue this dialogue with each other, with the work, with our collaborators and with you.