So here we are just about to start our final week of rehearsals – time has literally flown by, I can’t believe that 2 weeks have gone already, we’re on the cusp of entering March and we’ve gone from snow to some beautiful spring sunshine in the valleys – feels like someone must have accidently pressed the fast forward button while we’ve been in the studio! With it being a Sunday evening, I think it’s a good time to slow down a bit and take a moment to reflect and share what’s been going on so far while we’ve been working with Gary on creating a new piece.

Week 1 was very much a time for material generation – first individually and then in partners. From the offset we have all learnt and shared each other’s material to create a kind of universal movement vocabulary from which to draw when piecing sections together. It’s always exciting to learn other people’s material as everyone is so individual in the movement choices that they are making – the challenge comes in fulfilling another person’s material in your own body and making sure you retain their articulation and detail. From the other side, seeing how other people adapt to material which you have created is also interesting and the questions that they ask really reinforce details not only for them but yourself as well. I suppose it’s like trying to teach someone how to impersonate your handwriting – it’s something which is completely personal, innate and natural for you but trying to transfer that over to someone else is where the challenge lies!

In opposition to this idea of working with great detail and articulation, Gary has also emphasised the need for vagueness in the creative process – he says that dancers do really interesting things by chance when they don’t have all the details! Indeed, there is a moment in one of the final sections where 3 of us were asked to go straight into one phrase of material from another and we were all slightly thrown and each instinctively chose different facings for the second phrase of the material as we had not had time to establish the ‘correct’ directions before we started. By chance though, this is something that actually worked quite well so we kept it in the piece and had to go back and remember our own directional choices!

This attitude of just going ahead and doing things without feeling like you perhaps have all of the information is something that Gary has pushed for us to do both weeks not only in rehearsal but also when he has led company class – he’ll spend two minutes teaching a phrase, then give us ten minutes to dance it… rather than the other way round. That way we learn to deal with the movement in our bodies rather than getting stuck thinking about how a movement should be done in the ‘paralysis of analysis’. This has been particularly useful (for me at least) when learning another couple’s duet or contact work as it is so easy to get stuck discussing with a partner what isn’t working and why you think that is without actually physically attempting the material – the key has been to practise short snippets until they feel comfortable – after all when we perform we have to dance not talk the material!

Looking forward to getting back in the studio again tomorrow – after all time flies when you’re having fun (and working hard, of course!)

Effie