Well into our second week of creation now at FFIN DANCE and Thursdays are fast becoming the highlight of my week – seems to be the day where everything slots into place for me and I leave the studio in rather good spirits!

Our energies this week have been mainly directed towards creating the opening section of the piece for which we have been working on developing solo material. Drawing inspiration from the narrative of ‘Walter Walters’, Sue asked us to develop movement phrases as if to show our individual perspective and journey following the chronology of the story. As a starting point, we were asked to imagine being in an old fashioned railway carriage and have a sense of transient memories flitting along in front of us in sync with the setting. Using this imagery, we each created sections of material to show our individual perspective as a character or observer of events shaping our progression through the story.

Once we had created a basis of movement material, we then had to consider its phrasing in the context of 2/4 bars of music – the challenge being to stop thinking in 8s and to embrace the constant ebbing drive counting in 2s. It was not until this point that, given the content and length in bars of the material we developed,  Sue began to allocate us sections of the accompaniment (Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello: Movement 1) for us to begin to work with. It very much then became a case of trying to recognise music cues as to when we needed to be dancing and working individually with our iPods to figure out when our moments were starting and when we needed to pause. Like a jigsaw puzzle, we rounded off by slotting everybody together and after a few rough runs and missed cues we started to get an idea of the bigger picture!

Today we built upon this, and have looked much more closely at the musical score to inform the dynamic and intention of each of our sections. Where the accompaniment is soft and continuous for one of my sections I am working towards achieving a sinuous, smudging consistency to my movement whereas later where I am working with a much more accented phrase of the music I am  more aware of trying to find the accents in my own material. For me I think, it has been a really compelling process working individually but very much in the presence of the other company dancers and to experience how much more cohesive the section has started to become in only a matter of days.

Here’s to hoping this Thursday feeling continues throughout the rest of rehearsals!

Effie 🙂