After Rehearsal

I met with the Choreo dancers last night for a little over an hour. I brought in the poem I posted yesterday to rehearsal. I talked a little about what I saw as the consistent ideas in the poem and how their movement to the idea helped bring me to this stage. I read the first section and talked about what I saw as the center action for the other three sections and just talked about Jenkins's story in general.

The only section I didn't "see" yet was section 2, so they did some movement in response to that section, simultaneously, but separately. I was amazed again at how much it helped. Section 2 is about his crossing over to North Korea and 2 of their movements really struck me. One was a dancer lying on her back on the floor, but doing occasional 180 degree spins by crossing her left leg over her right and pulling herself in a slow half-circle. The other was a sort of dis/un- jointed movement with the left arm while the dancer was standing. The first movement helped me think about crossing boundaries, the importance we place on this type of change (or not), while the second helped me focus on the process that boundary crossing requires, whether enforced by an outside agency or by the self, the steps we take in decision making.

Thinking about these aspects for the second section helped me also see how they re-emerge differently in the 4th section and I feel much more hopeful about the whole poem now, both finishing it and making it good. I also started thinking about the poem less as a poem that lives on the page and more as a part of a performance. Not a spoken word piece exactly, but as a section of a performance. That seemed to free me as a writer a little as well.

We ended by talking about how we would move from this to performance in June. The dancers recreated one movement from the earlier exercise alone on stage and then paired themselves according to those movements. They then did those movements again with the other person/people on stage, which brought out entirely different aspects. These group movements were filmed.

We also talked about how we envisioned the piece, whether there would be a reader, would the reading and the movement happen simultaneously or separately, how many dancers would be on the stage at one time, would they all be moving, would they move together or separately, etc.

The thing that shocked me the most was how many opinions I had about the choreography and what the final performance should look like. This is exactly the kind of work that Choreo does and they are very good at it, helping people who aren't dancers see and work with the dance that is already present in their own life. They jokingly suggested that they could offer a writer's block service, but it's actually very true. Not only does it help you "see" the poem's possibilities, but it also helps you "see" movement on the page and off and how that shapes the poem.

It was really tremendous and my job now is to work on the poem, get it to a draft stage.