DCDanceBlog

this photo is from a performance miss el and i did a couple weeks ago, at the joesphine butler parks house. it was part of “on the eights,” a show curated by nancy havlik.

i felt really great about the performance–it’s so nice to be able to feel that way once in a while. we’d worked on the structured improv for a month or so, trying to get the sections mapped out and develop our sense of what we were doing. it was hard, harder than i thought it’d be. i’m not sure if that was because there were two of us, two strong willed women with very different ways of approaching creativity and performance, or if sometimes it’s just hard to figure out what you’re doing, even as an individual. and can having two creators make the piece doubly strong, if it works at all? just a thought. i felt like there were certain elements that were a little weak, but the strong parts more than made up for them.

one thing i noticed about my own creative process is that i think a lot about overall structure and whether or not the various sections make sense as parts of a whole, and in the way that they flow together. i wonder if that’s partially b/c of my background in writing, where things have to connect and you can’t hide behind the mystery of abstraction. i’m not sure if others view the pieces they’re working on in the same way–or if they aim for a similar result.

i thought about that the other night, watching pearsonwidrig dance theatre at dance place. they did a piece on new orleans and hurricane katrina that, frankly, i wasn’t all that psyched about. i’d done a master class w/ them earlier in the week and it had been quite interesting, but the piece turned out to be surpsringly unsophisticated. there was definitely something still enjoyable about it, but it wasn’t what i’d expected. also, there was remarkably little dance! lots of running, jumping, rolling and posing, but not a lot of dancing–something the washington post’s barbara allen also remarked on in her review yesterday. tzveta kassabova, who was in the piece, did a solo was more dancey than anything else in the show–and was the best part of the night.

all this is to say that i wonder how peason and widrig viewed the separate elements of their piece during rehearsal, whether they entered into it and really gained a sense, or tried to, of the path the audience would travel. and whether they really tried to figure out exactly how the video would complement the dancers. i assume they did–and they’re very accomplished artists. it just shows how hard it is sometimes to really make something come together, especially something that unites a lot of different elements.