Caged Catharsis

the setting:

This work was inspired by a BANFF residency I partook in called Creative Practice for Contemporary Dance: Choreographic Thinking in Making/Performing. It is the second experiment in my choreographic-compositional series Pas de deux sans un, highlighting being deprived of moving with humans in the COVID era of isolation/one-sidedness, and instead turning to partnering inanimate - and intangible - things. In this piece, I partner a wooden chair, set to a stark yet cavernous solo piano piece by Morton Feldman titled Triadic Memories. Though I was not at all sonically familiar with this piece (I had never heard it before), I found my body aligning with random transitions amidst endless repetitive phrases in scarily spot-on ways as I improvised. This was the beginning of my psychological-choreographic obsession with Feldman, and my series of improvisations to his music.

the story:

In this virtual residency, one of the prompts involved us being matched with another choreographer participant, and writing out a text score for each other to perform. The only instruction was that it had to embody three qualities: serene, visceral, impossible. This was my score:

“Partnering someone you once loved who is no longer in your life, for the millions of reasons that could be. Serene because there was at one time a sense of peace with the person, and a kind of blank numbness after they are gone, like a defeated serenity. Visceral because of past-shared physical touch and intimacy as well as emotional connection that is so strong it is practically physical; an ingrained corporeal history of etches invisible to the eye yet tactile to the heart-charged body. Impossible because they are no longer in your life, so they are not tangibly there to be partnered. This figure is “still”, a point of stasis; explore them, carve out space with them, get entangled with them.”

After the choreographer performed it, I received a touching message from him in the private zoom chat that stuck: “Your score brought up a very personal story for me. I can only wonder what yours is.”

Something that’s so humbling and beyond beautiful to me in each individual’s art is how it reminds us everyone has their story, their own threads through life...we’re used to the art and altruism of movement being so social, but throughout this virtual residency, every choreographer’s visceral vulnerability and collective investment bridged the distance. It was so moving, cultivating these somatic connections in this ever-exploratory time of corporeally-absent creation.