This area is devoted to sharing the process of creating the dances in this project and on choreographic practice in general. I am trying to present an index of what it is like to go through the process of making a dance. This is a site for anyone who is interested in making or viewing dance. I hope it will be attractive to audience members to experience the ways in which making a dance parallels the process of watching a dance where the continual erasure of fixed moments is a method of construction. I will try to track the choreographic actions and thinking around making these four works and the permutations of the material as it progresses. I will also delve into some larger thoughts around process in general. Please know that this is not a project to canonize myself as an artist by making my journal public, but rather an attempt to reveal some of the ways in which choreographic process functions. I am committed to contributing what I can to mitigate the “I don’t get it” response to dance. You do get it. You just need a place to validate that. I hope to explore how choreography acts outside the directives of language. For me a common misunderstanding in dance is created through an imbalanced relationship between the surface material of a dance—its visual information, stylistic references, even mimetic inclinations—and the internal networks and processes that churn these into ever evolving relational constellations. Each image or “sign” in a dance is shaped by the presences that precede and follow it. The force of this inevitable temporal onslaught disarms images from any hope for singularity of meaning. The desire to name things is overwhelmed by a river of shifting moments. Images are only readable relative to each other in the forward push of time. By trying to share the internal motors of the process I would like to make these ideas more vivid.
I hope this site will help dispel some of the unknowns around how dances progress from ideation to embodiment with some specific applications of daily practice and scientific research methods applied to poetics. I really welcome requests for clarification. I am not a writer and can get muddled but between us perhaps we can come to some understandings. I also hope other artists might share processes that do or do not align with mine. And, people who don’t identify as artists might be able to look at and share the nature of any creative act they are engaged in as a lens for us all.
So do respond. I will be posting through January 2014.
I’m thrilled to learn of this blog and its purposes. Tere, you ARE a writer. And you’re one of the artists who can illuminate a lot about process.
It would be great if these two last lines in the first long graph could be pulled apart a bit–I follow the thinking (brilliant) until this point.
Hey Bill, Thanks for this request, I agree. I have taken a crack at it and hope that it is clearer. Let me know and thanks for that.
I hope you might help spread the word in Philly as I would love to get some chit-chat started here with people.
Have a bon jour and merci !!!
I am very interested in this log and excited to read and watch all the permutations demonstrated. What you’ve raised up so far for me is:
Will you “track the choreographic actions and thinking around making” as different actions? and
Will you then track them differently (i.e. intellectual process as blog/journal and action as dance rehearsal video)?
In light of people ‘getting it’, it could be great to see that where those two lines cross is actually one byte closer to getting it.
I very much like that “ideation to embodiment” is progress. Look forward to seeing this teased out if its relevant.
Hi Maria, So happy you responded. As I move forward here, I am hoping to track these elements both separately and together. Not to be evasive but these ideas of thought and action sometimes run parallel to each other, often blindly at first. Sometimes converge and sometimes they reject each other. I want to show examples in video of how the thought actualized something in the studio. And I guess sometimes in the process notes I will try to understand the ramifications of my thinking and how initial actions faded , changing into unexpected avenues of exploration. But I will keep your query in mind. Thanks so much.
Yes, and your reworking helped me to be closer to the process you are translating from the studio into words in order to share with us.