The Birth

[This photo is of Bryn Mawr College's newly renovated Goodhart Hall where we rehearsed.]

As of yesterday, “Red Thread” has a whole fleshed-out form! Following the October work in New York, our strategy has been to take the 35-minute trio made for me, Eva, and Vicky and teach/transpose/re-interpret it in a new version for all six of us. Adding Michele, Meg and Gabi into the mix has had us looking at particular sections and thinking ‘no way’ for any kind of straight repeat. Instead some parts are represented with one fleeting image or layered now with something else or omitted altogether. A few are run with the older dancers doing the original and the younger ones having interconnected newly-built parts. The overall plan – to make a new dance out of our trio, like fashioning a second quilt with the same materials and basic pattern as the first- has held.

The three younger dancers, dubbed MGM, bring freshness. Their presence feels lighter, more playful. They have been game to try anything and we even asked them to keep in a little tossing-movement moment that arose when they were goofing around.

We asked Meg if she would be willing to throw in some scraps from her piece “Cookie” and there’s a great floor phrase of hers now. Her beginning for “Cookie” – having dancers appear and disappear from behind doors, partitions, etc. - is something we played with and it morphed into a “Line Up” homage. Just a simple way of introducing the new dancers within the piece. A fresh start.

In yesterday’s first run of the whole thing, Eva’s friends Susan and George watched and didn’t recognize the three solos that Eva, Vicky and I do as having been taught to the younger dancers. That’s great! Maybe it’s because they’re not ‘dance people’ and aren’t oriented to looking at movement so specifically. But maybe the energy and quality with which the material is done has individualized them enough now that they read as different. That’s a good thing. Clones are definitely not the idea.

Both George and Susan spoke about the essentialness of having each moment be alive, not as anything that could have been taken from another context, or from history. Risk, precariousness, and the emotional edge in relationships that aren’t stable or easy are things George wanted to see us move toward.

We drove over to show Vick and Eva the Performance Garage. They love it (with good reason) and we spoke about how the scale is perfect, how it’s both intimate and formal, and will focus the eye on the intricacies of the piece.

To cap off the day we watched the videotape of rehearsal and got into a heated debate about whether to make cuts in order not to have it be too draggy or long. The consensus is that in March we will trim any possible fat but for now we’ll just tighten transitions and feel what it is we’ve got: this newborn dance.