First Rehearsal

Hey All! Tonight, my cast met for the first time and it was such a success. I introduced my ideas for the piece and the cast seemed responsive to my ideas. Hopefully, they will feel like this is a piece about themselves and will feel that true commitment will, therefore, come naturally. I have high hopes for this talented group of people.

Tonight, we reviewed the audition phrase and I taught the longer, unedited version of the phrase. They dancers practiced it a few times to get a good rhythm going that made the phrase look good and more feasible. They really paid attention to the details, which made the phrase come to life in a whole new way. I like how it looks performed by all of them all together, so this may become part of the ensemble part that I have envisioned. It will be inspired by an image of women carrying baskets on their heads. This activity of carrying things on one's head isn't a local one, unique only to African women. In fact, both men and women carry things on their heads and backs all over the world. Activities that are universal such as this one are interesting to me and I hope to develop them a little bit more throughout the piece.

The music at this point is just providing us with a background beat and the dancers were told to ignore it for the most part. Here is a video of the group performing together.

The second half of rehearsal, I asked each dancer to create an improvisation of their name. They could:
1. draw the letters with their hands or feet (used like a pen)
2. make the letter-shapes with their bodies (Y-M-C-A style)
3. intellectualize  their names
4. internalize sensations (we didn't have to be able to see them as the audience), etc.

After they created a short piece for themselves, I asked them to partner with someone and put their names together. They were allowed to use only certain letters from each name and to incorporate the word "and" or the symbol "&" in between the names, etc. I wanted moments of physical contact, small lifts (if possible), and personal relation with the other person they were working with. Lots of interesting things materialized. I will upload those videos very soon in my next post.

My "homework" for them was to find a story happening right now and bring it to rehearsal. It could be a story about something happening to them or to someone else they know (or don't). We will do an improvisation using various narration methods.