Why do I make dances?
For a long time I couldn’t answer this. I just do. It’s who I am.
I tried to stop dancing a few times but it is one of the few things in
my life that I’ve always gravitated toward without question. But its important to question
it.
I started dancing for my own pleasure. To sooth my loneliness and channel my
manic energy. Moving in unison
with the other children was a ritual that lifted my spirits. Working hard to learn new things,
challenging my physical memory, working together to solve problems. At the end of the year there was a
performance. The adrenalin rush
that pumped through my veins as I prepared to step before all the people, the
dizzy ease I felt once I stood on stage, the palpable exchange of energy I
could feel between everyone in the room, performers and watchers, these things
sealed my deep commitment to the form.
Everything about it.
I made dances with the neighborhood kids. I made dances in the school
playground. I made dances when I
was alone. I made dances in the
living room during my parent’s grown-up parties, often to drunken
applause.
As I grew older I studied many forms of live performance,
gathering training and professional experiences that gave me
a range of tools to continue expressing myself and took me further into the
world of the arts.
I started making dances to work out my own questions. My own desires and my own fears.
I made dances about being alone. I made dances about discovery: of the world and of
one’s self.
I made a lot of dances that weren’t “about” anything but
sprung from my awe of the complexity of human exchanges, a celebration of the
absurdity and the sadness of our basic human quests and the awkwardness and
beauty in our attempts to connect.
As a performer I discovered humor and reveled in the ways it
highlighted the exchange between performer and the audience. I spent a good amount of time in the
training and creation of physical theater and clown work.
I then moved my dances out of the theater to give the
audience more agency. I focused
significant energy on creating a world that the audience could literally step
into, where the discoveries were theirs to make, sculpting a journey that they
could follow and be followed by.
I opened my process to include the voices of the design
collaborators at the onset of each project, reaching out to a range of artistic
minds as relevant to the project at hand.
Sustained relationships with a pool of collaborators allowed each
project to build on the next. I
built up the skills to helm large-scale projects and manage complex
investigations (the mathematical love of organizing patterns combined with my
dreamy idealistic sense of things)
After several years of focusing on the exchange between
audience and performer, between collaborators and dancers, I am wondering what
would I make if I returned to a less elaborate process?
With this year of research and discovery I wanted to ask
myself:
What would I make if I weren’t collaborating with
designers?
What happens if I stand alone?
Why do I make dances?
Really truly, why?
What are the questions that I myself am wrestling with and
how can I share that with an audience?
How can I make those questions relevant to wider circle? What is the cultural context that my questions
sit within? How can I play with
formal structure to support the weight of personal content?
And how do the stories of the dancers fit in with my own?
So I don’t have the answers.
I don’t want to make dances that appear to be statements.
I want to make dances that honor the questions. But give you a window in.
On Monday night I’ll be sharing my process as it sits thus
far. Flinging the door open to
share these discussions with people other than Wendy and the dancers I’ve been
working with this year.
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