As I work with the dancers on creating Sixty, I’m constantly reminded how fortunate I am to have such incredible talent in the studio with me. I wrote last month about a dilemma we faced with a section that involved Paul taking photographs of Eun Jung. Nothing we tried removed the sense that Paul was a voyeur. The other day in rehearsal, Eun Jung made the simple suggestion of turning the duet around, so that Paul faced downstage and Eun Jung faced upstage. It completely changed it. It made Paul the protagonist in the duet. We can see him clearly while Eun Jung is facing upstage away from the audience most of the time. I think we’ve finally solved it.
We showed this new version of that duet at the Ailey Studios on June 3rd. One of the new sections we showed alongside it is working titled “Anagram/Fairytale,” and is based on an ingenious challenge sent to me by my nephew and his wife, two incredible young people. They started with my name, which they turned into as many anagrams as they could. Then they went to a thesaurus and found synonyms for the anagrams. They each took the list of synonyms and wrote a story. They took the two stories and combined them into one. Finally, they illustrated the combined story. It was an intricate puzzle that both dazzled and challenged me. How could I make a dance that mirrored that process?
To create “Anagram/Fairytale,” we began by assigning movements for each letter in our names, and spelling them out. We worked that vocabulary into a unison section where the vowels repeat often, giving it a certain rhythm. Then each dancer made a list of anagrams from the whole 12 letters, wrote a very short story using those words, and made a solo based on the story. We worked together to weave those stories into a series of duets. The movement that emerged was zany and quirky – very much like a fairy tale.
We had a wonderfully generous audience at the Ailey showing. One man approached me afterwards and declared, “this is why I live in New York!” The access to audience members like him, and the others that came that night, made me remember why I continue to make work in New York. Each time I show Sixty in process, I find new insight and challenges through the eyes of audience members. I’m very much enjoying the dialogue.
Click here to visit Risa’s website.
