The Art of Creating

admin — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:23:26 +0000

This is the story of Cynthia Word’s journey to create
Word Dance Theater’s next cross-disciplinary production, “Emerge”.

Project Description: EMERGE (working title)

Through the eyes of Isadora Duncan and her Russian lover, poet Sergei Esenin, audiences will experience the promised glory of a newly communist Russia, and the artistic uprising that coincided with its beginning. The words and works of these seminal artists illustrate perfectly the profound hope and excitement of those years – and the subsequent heartache of lost opportunities. The complexities of Duncan’s story – and of Russia’s – will come to life through the progressive layering of inter-related disciplines: spoken word, dance and music.

“ON THE WAY TO RUSSIA, I HAD THE DETACHED FEELING OF A SOUL AFTER DEATH MAKING ITS WAY TO ANOTHER SPHERE . . . I ACTUALLY BELIEVED THAT THE IDEAL STATE, SUCH AS PLATO, MARX AND LENIN HAD DREAMED IT, HAD NOW, BY SOME MIRACLE, BEEN CREATED ON EARTH.” Isadora Duncan, 1921

May 17: Slide or Not to Slide
I’ve talked some about costumes for the June show. I think we’re in good shape with our costumes right now. Now I need to think about the visual environment. Many dance companies use slides or video, in addition to theater lights to create an environment for the dance. Word Dance Theater hasn’t ever used slides or video. We’ve always depended on the music, the lights, the text and the dances to create the world the audience enters.

But for the June show, we are exploring the possibility of having some slides behind sections of the dance. So, for instance, in the opening section which has to do with Isadora’s decision to go to post-revolutionary Russia, we might have a slide that suggests a journey. Should it be literal? Abstract? I love the one on the left of Odysseus beginning his voyage. But would the one of the morning sky provide a more neutral environment? The costume is white, so I’m leaning toward red sky. Remember the image will be projected across the entire upstage area.

Of course the entire evening is about the emerging of the human spirit unindividuated to individuated consciousness. It’s about rising up…emerging. Here are some possible images that would accompany the section on revolution. I think I like the many fists better, again because it’s more abstract.

I have doubts about using slides at all. I don’t want to be too literal with the audience. I want them to have the opportunity to project their own images onto the scene they see in front of them.

Lastly, here is a beautiful example of a slide creating an environment. The dance is Isadora Duncan’s “Water Study”, the dancer is one of our students, and the photographer is Theo Kossenas:

May 9: Visual and Kinetic

Two weeks ago, when I wrote about “Angel and Spirit Rising”, I included a picture of a sculpture that was said to be Duncan’s inspiration for the piece (see the blog entry from 4/25 at www.worddance.org/blog). Below you will find a fascinating article about an exhibit at the Pompidou Center in Paris that explores the links between the visual arts and Dance. I’ve included the entire introduction for it’s historical perspective. What I’m in awe of is Isadora Duncan’s part in creating a new type of dance that was a harbinger of modern dance and modern art. I propose we all take a field trip to Paris to see this fascinating exhibition. Viva la Isadora!

Presentation of the Exhibition
by Christine Macel and Emma Lavigne, curators at the Musée national d’art moderne

AN UNPRECEDENTED EXHIBITION DEDICATED TO THE LINKS BETWEEN THE VISUAL ARTS AND DANCE FROM THE 1900s UNTIL TODAY.
From November, the Pompidou Centre is showing an unprecedented exhibition on the links between the visual arts and dance, from the 1900s until today. “Danser sa vie shows how they lit the spark of modernity to feed the major movements and figures that have written the history of Modern and Contemporary art. In a space of over two thousand square meters, the exhibition illustrates its theme with works by artistic figures of the 20th century, the founding movements of modernity, as well as the work and research of contemporary artists and dancers. Divided into three parts, the exhibition shows art and dance’s common interest in the moving body. Highlighting this hidden side of the avant-gardes and this vibrant source of inspiration for contemporary art, “Danser sa vie” brings together all disciplines in an enriching dialogue – from the visual arts – up to contemporary video – and choreographic art. A vast selection pf paintings, sculptures, installations, audiovisual works and choreographic pieces testify to their ceaseless exchanges in a sometimes inseparable dialogue.”

“My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. (…) When I was in front of the audiences that flocked to see my performances, I never hesitated. I gave them my soul’s innermost impulses. From the beginning, I have only danced my life.” -Isadora Duncan, My Life, 1928.

A cross between Dionysian burst of life and Apollonian aspiration, dance played a pivotal role in the modern aesthetic revolution. Thanks to pioneers such as Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan, not to mention the genius of Vaslav Nijinsky, the art of the body in motion, an art of space and time, underwent an unprecedented shift. This upheaval had a decisive influence on the development of the visual arts. “Danser sa vie” retraces this little-known history, highlighting the common themes between the modern era and today, in order to delve back to the sources of dance, recently rekindled by the contemporary art scene. Its aim is to highlight dance as “a hidden face of the avant-gardes” and to weave arabesques in the historical design which links the past to the present : this desire became stronger in the wake of the loss of figures as important as Pina Bausch, Merce Cunninghma or Kazuo Ono.

The exhibition is organized around three sections with a constant to-and-fro between historical works and today, with unprecedented encounters. One of the main challenges was how to “exhibit dance”. Mediums are intermingled to encourage the spectator’s complete immersion, projecting him as close as possible to the body in motion through the use of film. The first room introduces the exhibition’s themes: the modern masterpiece by Henri Matisse “La Danse”, on exceptional loan from the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, faces a work by Tino Sehgal, whilst the artist Daria Martin’s film, with its fixed tableaux where the camera moves in place of the body, represents the great figures of modern dance from Josephine Baker to Oskar Schlemmer and Martha Graham. These intermingled histories are part of a circuit articulated around a statement by Isadora Duncan that opens the 20th century. “My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. (…) From the beginning, I have only danced my life” she wrote in My Life. Duncan announced thus one of the firm convictions of 20th century art, the attempt to link art to life, from the Dadaists to the participative works of current art. As Merce Cunningham also says, dance is “the visible manifestation of life”, and “that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” It places life at the heart of its project. Three sections define the history of modern and postmodern dance with that of the visual arts. The first deals with the dawn of a new subjectivity which is embodied in the work to become its expression, the second deals with the abstraction of the body and its mechanization, and finally the third focuses on performance, born with the Dada avant-garde, which defined itself through dance to the point of merging with it from the 1960s.

“Gesture is the direct agent of the heart”, claimed François Delsarte, a nineteenth century thinker who posthumously influenced the advent of modern dance and its art of expression. The invention of a new subjectivity and expressivity was explored through the emergence of free dance, unfettered by classical ballet and epitomized by the figure of Isadora Duncan. Dancers began to convey a sensual fervour that on occasions caused scandal, as was the case with Nijinsky’s rendition of Afternoon of a Faun which represented a new source of Dionysian inspiration for artists. In Germany, the Expressionist current triggered a wealth of exchanges between painters and dancers. While Laban embodied the new figure of the dancer as educator and theoretician, Mary Wigman, one of his pupils at the free community of Monte Verità, best epitomized the figure of woman beset with life and death urges, as illustrated in her famous Witch’s dance. Wigman, who viewed herself as a dancer of humanity, proved equally fascinating to painters Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, not to mention her pupil Gret Palucca. Following on from this Ausdruckstanz, a reflection of German Expressionism, came the creation of Theatertanz by Pina Bausch, who was herself a descendant of the choreographer Kurt Jooss.

Dancers and artists invent a new repertory of gestures and plastic forms, inviting the body to cross the threshold of modernity.

The history of abstraction would not be what it is without dance. Mirroring the technical innovations of an increasingly industrialized twentieth century, dancers and artists invented a new repertory of gestures and plastic forms, inviting the body to cross the threshold of modernity. At the turn of the century, inspired by the advent of electric lighting, Loïe Fuller’s creative imagination sparked another revolution with her kinetic ballets. The impact of her serpentine dances on artists, from the chromatic, rhythmical symphonies of Sonia Delaunay to the vibrant energy of Gino Severini and Fortunato Depero’s Futurist works, was considerable. “Dance has always drawn on life for its rhythms and forms (…) One must imitate the movements of machines with gestures; pay assiduous court to steering wheels, ordinary wheels, pistons, thereby preparing the fusion of man with the machine, to achieve the metallicity of the Futurist dance”, wrote Filippo Tommasso Marinetti in his “Manifesto of Futurist Dance” in 1917.

The whole gamut of avant-garde movements, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, De Stijl, Dada, Bauhaus or Russian Constructivism, also latched on to dance, all fascinated by the body in motion and by the colours, lines, energy and rhythms of dance. From Francis Picabia to Fernand Léger, from Theo Van Doesburg to Varvara Stepanova, dance generates new abstract rhythms and mechanical ballets. This geometrised, elementarised, mechanised and stylised body also played a fundamental role in the research instigated by Laban, dancer, draughtsman and founder of the choreutic. His icosahedron, a multi-facetted volume encapsulating all the possible movements of the body, proved to have a major influence on dancers such as William Forsythe, and is also echoed in Olafur Eliasson’s more contemporary investigations, including Movement microscope (2011), a work directly inspired by this legacy specially created for the exhibition “Danser sa vie”. Oskar Schlemmer’s humanist thought, firmly anchored on the future of Man in the face of technology, is echoed for its part in the works of many contemporary artists. One of them is Alwin Nikolais, whose aesthetic premise integrates the world of technology and the stage using lighting effects to create a metamorphosis, turning the geometrised bodies of the dancers into phantasmagorical elements of a global composition. The same can be said of Nicolas Schöffer, who, in the multimedia show Kyldex blends his dancers into his cybernetic sculptures, creating a single organism to depict the continuous flow of energy.

“Look at Jasper Johns’ and Robert Rauschenberg’s painting. They use the canvas as I use the stage.”-Merce Cunningham

The last lap of the exhibition explores the exchange between dance and performance art. Ever since the first Dadaist acts at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during the First World War, dance and performance have been inextricably linked. Dancers Mary Wigman, Emmy Hennings, Suzanne Perrottet and Sophie Taueber-Arp all took part in the Dada adventure, and key figures emerged in the Twenties, such as Valeska Gert or Niddy Impekoven. Performance art would not have been the same without dance. Black Mountain College was the hub of intense activity, with dance and performance becoming increasingly intertwined, largely thanks to the contribution of John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, on America’s West Coast, dancer Anna Halprin made an unprecedented foray into the dialogue between art and life, dance and performance, by inventing “tasks”, movements tied to everyday acts, nature and the socio-political arena. The innovations of the Judson Dance Theater in New York in the 1960s and the happenings of Allan Kaprow and Fluxus in the 1950s and 1960s turned the body in motion into a seismograph of the soul-searching of contemporary society. The aesthetic, formal and conceptual to-and-fro between choreographers and artists seemed boundless. Some, like Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris and Trisha Brown, described themselves as plasticians just as readily as choreographers. Merce Cunningham’s frequent encounters with abstract expressionist painters led to his conception of the stage space as a non-figurative painting, or as a non-hierarchical space. He is surrounded by a constellation of artists such as Nam June Paik, Warhol or Rauschenberg who were to renew with him the notion of the total art work and of Wagnerian theatre.

The experimental tendency of post-modern dance, where art and dance merged, rejected traditional stage designs and the stakes of artistic representation. Trisha Brown, both dancer and plastician, was equally at home in a museum venue, on roofs or in the street. Dance was everywhere and anyone could become a dancer, according to the choreographers Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton and Anna Halprin. As philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman recalls “most of the time, we dance to be together”. This invitation to dance your life has a particular resonance in contemporary art and dance, especially through the revival of a new interest in popular dance, a ceaseless source of inspiration for artists, from Sonia Delaunay and the Bal Bullier to Josephine Baker’s frenzied dances for Alexander Calder.

The golden age of disco in the late 1970s with John Travolta’s memorable performance in the film Saturday Night Fever still inspires new versions today.

In the early 1960s, when he was still dreaming of becoming a tap-dancer, Warhol imprinted his Dance Diagrams with foxtrot steps. The club culture he helped to forge inspired many later artists. The golden age of disco in the late 1970s, with John Travolta’s memorable performance in the film Saturday Night Fever is still inspiring Ange Leccia today, who also worked for a show by Merce Cunningham. Bootsy Collin’s funk music formed the basis of Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons and the later Shiva Dances, while bal populaire street parties and go-go dancers were to inspire two unique performance works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an important artist working in the 1990s. Jérôme Bel also draws on great pop music hits for his momentous piece The Show Must Go On … Recent years have witnessed a strong resurgence of dance in contemporary art. Throughout the exhibition, different works by Matthew Barney, Simon Dybbroe Moeller, Olafur Eliasson, Daria Martin, Jeff Mills, Kelly Nipper, Mai-Thu Perret or Tino Sehgal dialogue with modern masterpieces.

Thursday, May 3: Emerging

We had our showing with DanceEthos last Sunday from 6pm to 10pm. It was really good to see the other choreographers’ pieces, it gives Tiffany and I a better understanding of how to program the evening.

Another unique thing about this concert, entitled “Part and Parcel”, is that we are asking audience to provide feedback for the choreographers and thus be more engaged in the process. While the dances presented will be at performance level with costumes, music, excellent choreography and dancing, we are asking for audience engagement in the artistic process and are willing to receive observations that might affect the choreography or some aspect of the production in future performances. This “feedback loop” between the audience and the dancers has always existed implicitly through reviews, and comments from those who see the production, but in this show we’re trying to include feedback as part of the evening. Exciting!!!

At this point, the mechanism for gathering this information is twofold: a question/answer session after each show, and an opportunity for written response. Audience will be given questions from each choreographer and pencils with their programs. They can answer questions between dances, at intermission or after the show and return them to the ushers who will give them to Tiffany and me.

So Word Dance Theater needs to come up with two or three clear questions that yield the information we want. And that leads me to ask myself “what do we want to know”? Where are our questions? Here are some ideas. If anyone wants to chime in, please do!

Share one or two images from the WDT dances that have stayed with you.
Circle three emotions you felt OR name ones that aren’t on the list.

Joy
Depression
Anger
Serenity
Love
Sadness
Anxiety
All of the above
Other

Is it of interest to present contemporary choreography created in the Duncan philosophy with the classic Duncan dances? Yes no other

Now on to rehearsal last Wednesday 5/2. We’re totally focusing on preparations for the June show. For Word Dance Theater’s section of the show, I want to create an arc of dances that portray different aspects of individual emergence from bondage to the fight for freedom. In keeping with our tradition, there will be some text, also original music, new dances, and live music. On Wednesday we worked on transitions and weaving all these strands of music, theater and dance into a whole. If you aren’t in the world of theater you might be surprised to learn that transitions are an art unto themselves, they help the audience to relax and allow the 35 minutes to unfold without having to “re-calibrate” after each dance. I always hope it allows the audience to enter a different state of mind, more akin to FLOW.

Anyway, in addition to working on all the transitions, we also began the reconstruction of Duncan’s dance entitled “Dubynishka”. It was created in 1924 to a traditional Russian folk song. The song is sung by a Russian chorus and orchestra in our rendition. The dance is a series of group responses based on a leader’s call. The dance combines “dance” movements with the mimed pulling of heavy barge ropes. The text to the traditional song was changed slightly by the Bolsheviks to conform to the Russian revolution. This is a verse in English:

“But the time is at hand and the people arise
And erect are the heads that were bowed
And the yoke of the ages they cast to the ground
And with cudgels in hand shout aloud.”

Here is a short rehearsal video excerpt of just the chorus without the leader. This is the first time we put it together so there is much work to be done. Mush you dancers!

Wednesday, April 25: “The Angel and Spirit Rising”

Today we had a busy rehearsal preparing for our showing this Sunday night with DanceEthos. This is an informal gathering of all the choreographers to share dances they think will be in our June 22-24 show at Dance Place, visit our website for a link to that concert! The dances are all in process, not finished, so it is a good time to receive feedback from the other choreographers, discuss questions that arise, decide on program order, and see the over-all look of the evening.

Our morning begins with our Duncan colleague, Valerie Durham, teaching us the beautiful Duncan dance called “Angel and Spirit Rising”. The music is Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 no. 2. It was created by Isadora circa 1915. Both Irma Duncan and Maria Theresa Duncan (two of Isadora’s six adopted daughters, sometimes called “the Isadorables”) taught it as both a solo and a duet to some of their students. Our mentor, Jeanne Bresciani, learned it from Maria Theresa Duncan. Jeanne taught it to Ingrid as a solo and she has performed it many times in our salons and performances. However we never learned the duet version, so that is what Valerie is here to do today. Valerie learned this dance from Jeanne Bresciani in its duet form. The dance involves someone who is either mortally wounded or dying and a spirit that comes to minister to that person. It is thought that the inspiration for this dance came from a Hellenistic work from ca. 225 BC- The Dying Gaul in Rome’s Capitoline Museum.

Even though this dance was created in 1915, it is timeless in its portrayal of despair and hope. This is a photo of The Dying Gaul.

Here is a short video of us learning “Angel and Spirit Rising”. It is an exquisite dance. I’m eager to share it with audiences.

Thursday April 19: “Deep Song
One of the goals of Word Dance Theater is to preserve and perform the original Duncan choreographies. AND another is to carry her technique and philosophy into contemporary creations. Isadora often commented that she wasn’t interested in other dancers repeating her work. She was investing her energy in facilitating each student in recognizing their own creative voice and having the healthy body (a dancer’s medium) and spirit to manifest their ideas in dance. Isadora felt that to have the freedom to express oneself through dance/movement was the birthright of all people.

So, in creating and producing evenings of work that have both traditional Duncan choreography and contemporary dances in the spirit of Duncan, we are very much following in Isadora’s path. The challenge becomes DO WE DARE. Do we dare use the elegant, expressive, supremely HUMAN Duncan movement vocabulary in era that encourages the spectacular? Do we dare create dances that are made from normal movements and gestures, and that are not so pyrotechnic that only a few highly trained people can do them? Are general audiences so jaded by extreme behavior in reality shows and sensation-glutted media that they would not “have eyes for” a more subtle experience of what it means to be human? Do we dare dance in costumes that celebrate the unencumbered body? A body that has its feet on the ground and open to the earth, a costume that allows total freedom of movement, revealing the dancing body, not as a sexual object, or fashion statement, but as the pinnacle of classic human beauty? Do we dare use classical and contemporary classical music instead of popular music?

We do, fully realizing that this is the minority perspective. If pop culture is the loud song blasting in our ears 24/7, our more humanistic perspective, is the deep song that sings quietly beneath our everyday bombardment of stimulation. We believe that, in our dances.. motivated from the solar plexus, the breath, the heart and undulating outward in waves of movement, clad in our simple tunics… we touch on that deep song, something uniquely human that binds our divisions. We hope that when people experience our performances they are awash in that “deep song”, refreshed, renewed, and reinvigorated.

And for those reasons, we take the risk…we dare.

Thursday April 12: “Varshavianka”
Saturday 4/7 was an exciting day because we had our first rehearsal for the two big Russian dances that involve 7 to 10 dancers. The one we began on Saturday is titled “Varshavianka”. It was choreographed by Duncan in about 1924 on the children of her post-revolutionary Russian school. When I say “school” you have to realize that this wasn’t a dance studio like we have today. Duncan’s vision was to provide a home to children ages 7 to 17 in which they would be fed, clothed, and educated in the most advanced fashion in the arts and sciences. She believed that “every child has the right to a heritage of beauty”. She felt that dance, as she envisioned it, was the most natural and beautiful aid to the development of a growing child. She didn’t desire to create performing artists but rather to create more beautiful, more educated and conscious citizens of the world. Auditions for Duncan’s schools were announced broadly and open to the public. She refused to take the children of the wealthy, but sought children of the workers. This education was offered free! Isadora paid for all expenses related to the children’s well-being and education through her own funds raised by her performances. She established her first school in Grunewald, Germany when she was about 25 years old. Think of it…what young star can you think of today who chooses to put all of her earnings into a school for children, a labor of love, in which she hoped to help create a more beautiful, kind, dignified world? The motto of the school was “The highest intelligence in the freest body”. Contrast that with this blurb I just received from an organization called Americans for the Arts:

Triple Threat: Music, Dance, and Theater Instruction in U.S. Public Schools
A recent study released by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics shares the latest figures regarding arts education in public elementary and secondary schools. According to the report, 6 percent of the nation’s public elementary schools do not offer specific music instruction, and 17 percent do not offer visual arts instruction. In secondary schools, 9 percent do not offer music and 11 percent do not offer visual arts. Dance and theater instruction are severely lacking, as only 3 percent of elementary schools offer dance and 4 percent offer theatre.

But back to “Varshavianka”. It is a revolutionary song said to have originated about 1831 among Polish prisoners being held in Tzarist Russia. It was a very popular song among the Russians in their revolutionary days. The dance portrays a shock-troop brigade, whose members rescue the flag from fallen standard bearers and bring the battle to a victorious conclusion. Isadora dedicated the dance to the victims of the St. Petersburg massacre and all who are fighting for liberty. We spent the first rehearsal improvising with the themes of the dance: a strong, victorious run and leap; different ways of showing a soldier receiving a mortal wound and collapsing; passing the flag from fallen soldier to another soldier; the resurrection of the indomitable human spirit to fight for liberty until a victory is achieved. The dancers rehearsed with such passion! These dances portray themes that are being experienced NOW, and I think all of us know someone who had died to protect their country’s liberty.

In our Wednesday 4/10 company rehearsal we continued refining a quartet based on group identity and the emergence of personal identity within that. Here is a photo of a section called, among us, “the wall” . It explores movement in which one runs into an obstacle, rebounds, re-groups, re-approaches. In the photo above, the dancer in front is Eris Jo, a beautiful young dancer that recently graduated from Skidmore. We are so happy to have her working with Word Dance Theater.

Thursday April 6: The Creative Habit

Any of you who engage in “making stuff” know that when one is in the creative mode, inspiration and ideas can and do come from anywhere…yes other art, but also isolated images, something you read in the newspaper, casual conversation, a trip to the storage unit. And often I find that when I’m in a creative period images, snippets of music, phrases of poetry, etc surface from my unconscious. Perhaps they’ve been there, dormant and totally forgotten for a long time, but the churn of creativity stirs them and they emerge to my consciousness. For example, Tuesday night I was working by myself on the ending to the new duet with Ingrid and Hannah for Wednesday’s rehearsal. If someone were to walk in and see me at such times it would look like I’m day dreaming or zoning out, but I’m seeing things on the screen of my mind. I’m trying out ideas and watching them, and that’s often when stored material from my unconscious shows up. So Tuesday night I was “seeing” different endings and then an idea came with great clarity. I know it’s origin was something I saw years ago which left a strong impression. I had forgotten about that image. In addition, I had been thinking about our theme of EMERGE earlier in the day. My image was of one dancer emerging from underneath another. That piece of imagery gave me enough to visualize how I want the ending to look. The next step is to create movement studies that provide a way for the dancers to improvise with the imagery I have for the ending. In rehearsal, while we’re improvising with these ideas, I might be surprised by and love something one of the dancers is doing that I wouldn’t have seen in my imagination. So the creative process is not just me alone imagining what’s next, but a movement conversation between the impetus of my ideas and then how the dancers play with my ideas, how they interpret them. That’s when I begin to pick, choose, edit, expand and ultimately create a sequence that becomes choreography. It’s unpredictable and very exciting! What it means for me is that I live my days and nights with a heightened awareness and openess, taking stuff in. Then, like a sieve, my mind filters, stores, eliminates, creating a stock of raw material and I must trust that if I am in the creative habit, this rich material will be accessible to me.

And what does the creative habit look like? First off, it’s called a habit because it’s a way of living your life that you choose over and over again. It involves being open, like I wrote about above. For many of us it requires solitude and a place to imagine without being interupted, and we need to go to that place regularly. It’s possible for the “place” to be inside you, but if the environment is chaotic, I find it almost impossible to access the mental quietness I need to envision. As you see, for me, ideas most often appear in images. My composer friends hear sound/music. An idea can show up in many ways. Whenever an idea, no matter how absurd, presents itself, acknowledge it by noting it in some way…a voice memo to yourself, a note, a picture or drawing. Just note it and if you don’t have occasion to use it in the present then put it somewhere with other ideas. In the end, although there are some common attributes, I think each person defines the details of their creative habit, and yes, I think we all have a creative voice. We must make a habit of listening for it.

By the way, I didn’t get to work on the new ending for the duet on Wednesday! We spent the entire rehearsal on another dance I’ve been imagining. But my idea for the duet ending will keep. It’s all there in my notebook.

Friday March 30: Onward We Go
Are any of you watching Smash on TV? Ok, that’s a MUCH larger scale, but has some resemblance to the creative process. Of course they’re condensing a months-long organic process down into short segments, so there’s that. But there it does show the internal dramas and tensions that are inherent in making a new piece of art, especially when it is a collaboration between four creators.

Dom was at rehearsal on Wednesday with two mostly finished compositions and two that are well on their way. He’s not going to compose anything else until we get the fuller treatment from Norman. That’s when we begin to understand where dances and music are layered into the story. It isn’t the role of the dance and music to show the literal aspects of the story. Rather the dance and music address the emotions of the story in a more archetypal and transpersonal way. The product (what a wierd word) will be layered, textured, almost surreal but with a strong story that holds it all together. So back to Norman…when the story is clear, we will finalize the music and dance. For the music that means we will hire the musicians needed, rehearse them and make a professional recording. I think that for the performances the piano music will be played live (Scriabin, Chopin, etc) and the contemporary music will be the recording. This will help to keep the logistics of performing EMERGE simpler.

After Dom left, the next task was to get video recordings of all the solos for Norman to have. We videoed the Duncan solos. Then we worked on the new duet, which I’m really energized about. It’s getting deeper, with more texture and tension and resolution. I don’t think it’s finished yet, but will be in the next few weeks. I love creating new, contemporary dances based on the Duncan technique and philosophy. And what is that philosophy? In a nutshell, Duncan believed in the dignity of the human, she respected the body and always danced within the natural framework of the body. She didn’t want distortion or contortion that would damage a dancer’s body…either through the dancing or through the costuming, such as point shoes. She fought against the prevalent view of the female body, on stage, as a sexual object. She was totally organic in her approach to movement, insisting on “steps” that were within the normal range of human motion. She used her observations of nature as her guidelines. Also, she initiated movement from the solar plexus, which she called “the motor” and from the breath. She famously stated that “the dancer of the future would have the highest intelligence in the freest body”. If you want to learn more about Isadora, read her autobiography “My Life”. She wrote this book under financial duress and her publisher was more interested in her lovers than in her dance, but it does give you her voice talking about aspects of her life.

Here are pics of Hannah rehearsing on of the solos last Wednesday. The image on the left shows Hannah at peak of an inhale. The image on the right shows Hannah at the end of an exhale. These are examples of how the movement is driven by the breath. The largest most expansive movement is with the inhale and the resolution of the movement is with the exhale.

Wednesday March 21: Treatment

Missing one dancer today. We are definitely needing to move to two rehearsals a week, one on Wednesday and the other on a weekend day, so that we can have the Word Dance Theater company dancers along with 7 guest artists who will be performing with us for our June show at Dance Place. That show is shared with our friends at DanceEthos. In the June show we’ll be presenting some of the dances that will be in EMERGE, but there won’t be the story/theatrical component. We ARE excited to show 3 new dances created this Winter/Spring and some of the fabulous Duncan Russian dances.

But yesterday was exciting because Norman came in with the first treatment of the play. A treatment, as I have learned, is a short synopsis of the story that the playwright is imagining. Yesterday Norman had about 2 pages of the storyline. As I listened to him read it aloud I could see clearly the way the show will begin, who the main characters will be and what the driving tensions will be. I had chills from the visions I conjured as he read. Right at the end of the reading Dom, our composer, called to ask us to listen to some music he was working on. So he sent us an email with the music attached. We could listen and then email him back with our comments. I love technology!!! I’m so happy to be in such a rich process! I feel inspired and lucky!

After the rehearsal Ingrid and I met with our musical director, Carlos Rodriguez. We’re discussing the logistics of him playing live for the June show. All of our lives are very complicated! Just getting performances into our calendars isn’t simple. But knowing I’ll be dancing with Carlos at the piano just fills me up. We’ve had many hours together dancing and playing. There is something that happens when a dancer and pianist are in sync with each other in performance. The music and dance become one living, breathing thing. I think the audience feels that too, and it is transportive.

What goes up must come down . Right after the meeting with Carlos I received an email from someone who was going to present our show Preludes: Duncan, Sand & Chopin next Fall. She cancelled the date due to lack of funding. And this is the otherside of the Art of Creating, and that is the Art of Getting It Seen. Funding is very tight right now, and it’s a constant job to be seeking people to present our shows. I so don’t want to be the person in my company to act as a booking agent and yet who else will do it? And if I don’t do it how will our work be seen, be reviewed, be presented by many different venues? And isn’t the point of making Art for it to be seen, enjoyed, incorporated into the weave of our lives? These questions and others about the “business” of making and presenting dance/theater vex me. They seem like a wheel that I can’t get off of. The saving grace is all the wonderful people, like my husband, and our board of directors, and friends who believe in this, and give me advice and support. Also the Art itself saves me. Just giving myself a class using the deeply re-newing Duncan technique, or imagining choreography for rehearsals, or dancing in rehearsals with wonderful dancers is a huge grace in my life and more than balances out all the rest.

I haven’t got new photos for today, but next time…I promise! I might even figure out how to upload a short video of new work from my Flip!

Wednesday March 14: Rehearsal

Again we worked on the duet. Today we were at Dumbarton Church where we have access to a piano. It’s a beautiful space with huge stained glass windows and lots of room to move. We are at Dumbarton two weeks out of each month. The other weeks we rehearse at National Cathedral School. There is a lack of dance rehearsal space in Washington, so it is always a challenge to find a good space that we can afford. One day Word Dance Theater will have its own studio!

Ingrid and Hannah are such wonderful pros and make a great “palette” upon which I can create. Ingrid is a beautiful, experienced dancer who has performed with companies all over the world. She is a native of Washington DC but was in Germany several years while studying with famed German choreographer, Pina Bausch. Ingrid is the Associatae Director of Word Dance Theater. Hannah is a recent graduate from the dance program at William and Mary. She is a dancer, chreographer and writer. She is dancing with several DC-based companies as well as Word Dance Theater. I’m so gratified that she loves the Duncan technique, it’s unusual to find dancers her age who even know who Isadora Duncan was! But I digress. Today I combed through the existing structure to find places for “opening up” the dance. For example, I added a moment where Ingrid and Hannah seem to accidentally catch hands, they face off and Ingrid pulls Hannah toward her, Hannah rolls across Ingrid’s body and melts down Ing’s leg to roll onto the floor.

Here’s a photo of that moment. This duet is emerging as a study of power shifting between two people. The imaginery environment isn’t a friendly one. Perhaps these people are in a war zone? At first they don’t even know each other is there. Later they know but see each other as adversaries. Later still that changes…to what? That’s still revealing itself.

Wednesday March 7: Rehearsal

Today it was Ingrid, Hannah, and myself. In some ways we’re “marking time” until the larger cast can join us and also until we have a treatment from the playwright. But I did start working on a new duet for Hannah and Ingrid. We experimented with manipulating movement themes from Duncan’s “The Crossing”, to create something more textured and perhaps contemporary. The original work was a solo, so even adding another body immediately changes the feeling of the dance. We also worked with contemporary music instead of the classic Scriabin that the original is set to. So it is really an adaptation. It felt good to be working, making decisions, trying ideas. Last night I played around with ideas for the program we share with DanceEthos June 23 thru 24. It will be straight music and dance, almost no text I think. We are creating an evening where there will be an opportunity for structured feedback from the audience. This will be at a perfect time in the development of the dances to get some feedback, so that’s great. What should I do about costumes for that show? Traditional Duncan tunics? Contemporary clothes? I’m thinking that all costumes for our dances will be one color family so that there’s a continuity between the six or seven dances. I think the program starts with the dances about hope and aspiriation, move into dances of loss and despair, and end with dances of victory. It will have a cast of 8 dancers and at least a live pianist if not a cellist and clarinet player. Here are some photos from yesterday’s rehearsal. Ingrid and Hannah are in tunics but that may not be what the costuming will be and definitely not those colors.

Wednesday February 29th – The Beginning

Today was so exciting because we finally had the entire creative team for EMERGE in the room, myself, Ingrid, Norman Allen and Dominik Maican. We showed all of the Russian dances as well as two new works-in-progress with music composition by Dom. I liken a new big project like this to a pregnancy. If that’s the anaolgy, then we heard the heartbeat and saw a small shape!! So even though the day was cold and rainy, and it was impossibly clammy, cold, and damp in the rehearsal space, I felt on fire. And we have some deadlines! Dom will get the cd’s of completed music to Norman and myself next week. Norman will have a treatment of the play by April 21st. We’re moving along!

From the rehearsal I drove out to Annapolis, east toward the Chesapeake Bay, to my home perched over water. I had a deadline to finish the grant that I’m hoping will give us some working capital for this project. So I move from the sublime to the mundane, and this is very like my life…art and how to pay for art. I will need a lot of money for this project. if I think about it too much I get really anxious. Instead, I just hold it in my heart, aggressively pursue financial possibilities, and believe in this work. Impossible things happen all the time. I don’t let myself think negatively, I just stay on the course and never stop believing in the value of what we are doing, why it is needed, and let things unfold.

After four hours I finished the grant. I pushed the “submit” button and it went winging into cyberspace with all my hopes and prayers. My head was spinning and felt like it might explode. By this time it’s 6PM, time to feed the dogs and take a break. Time to walk away from Word Dance Theater and EMERGE for a while.

Cynthia Word is the founder and Artistic Director for Washington, DC based Word Dance Theater.

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Preludes: Duncan, Sand & Chopin World Premier, November 4, 2010

Word Dance Theater at Piccolo Spoleto Festival: REVOLUTIONARY! Isadora Duncan, June 2010

Revolutionary! Isadora Duncanat Dance Place June 26 & 27

WDT at the 2010 DC Dance Share