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 !
a music and dance collaboration between geordie haley and susanne chui with dance artists, jacinte armstrong, rhonda baker and sara coffin and musicians, doug cameron, tim crofts and ron hynes. thoughts, questions, reflections and other tidbits from our creative process.
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Sunday, 8 April 2012
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/
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/
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
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.
Monday, 2 April 2012
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):
Sunday, 1 April 2012
Dark Harmony
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