Fall Dance Gallery- First Showing
One showing down, one to go! This past weekend marked the first showing for Fall Dance Gallery and it is crazy to me that we are already at this point in the rehearsal process. It feels like we began so recently, but already, both of the pieces I am in for the concert are well underway. I always love to see what everyone has been working on at the showings and it reminds me how lucky I am to be able to work alongside such creative minds and bodies, specifically Cat Chythlook and Emma Bownes, my choreographers this year. While it is fun to dance in my friends’ pieces, getting to know someone as a choreographer first is a very special experience, which is how it is with the pieces I am in this year. It is very interesting to get to know how someone works creatively and how this creative process is influenced by the nuances of their personality.
Emma’s piece is unlike any dance I have ever been a part of before. One of the very first things she said to us in rehearsal was “This piece is going to be really weird,” but she clarified that, of course, it would be a “good weird”. She has definitely delivered on those promises.
The piece is about waking up in the morning. There are ten dancers in the piece, so she was able to create a really cool Rube Goldberg machine-type chain reaction image; each person’s movements cause another person to “wake up.” Since there are so many of us, there’s always a lot going on, almost chaotically, so the audience will have a lot to look at. Another “good weird” thing about this rehearsal process is that almost every week, Emma throws bizarre positions or ways of travelling at us. She tells us that she’ll just be goofing around in her room and accidently fall into a certain position that somehow really works, which causes her to have a light bulb moment and say “I have to put this in my piece!” In this way, we incorporated the products of her playing around in her room. This included, but was not limited to, a crazy yoga-like position wherein you put your weight on your hands and face with your legs up in the air, and also a way of moving in a squatted position while shifting on one hand so that your body, in its balled up squat position, scoots through the air. Gotta love her.
Aside from the zany positions she has us contorting our bodies into, it has been a pleasure so far to work with Emma and the nine other dancers in the piece, and I can’t wait to see what happens in the coming weeks regarding Dance Gallery rehearsals!