This week, we get another peek into the collaborative process of 4 idiosynCratz and 9 Swarthmore students.  idiosynCrazy’s Danielle Currica shares with us some of the goings-on at Swarthmore from the first rehearsal post-Winter break.

Upon entering the room, for the first time I could sense hesitation among the mentees. There was a definite withdrawn and removed sense of self while stretching and making small talk before diving in to the first rehearsal in the spring semester.

I’m sure all the mentors were aware of it.

We began rehearsal with a talk. I started by stating the obvious. “We all want to know where the piece is going, yes?” This cracked a laugh in all of the mentees, which opened the room up a bit. All the mentors began to take turns discussing our plan of action for the semester, and how we hope to guide but more importantly collaborate on creating a piece, based on the movement practices, games, and experiments used during last semester.

The shape of the piece would be created through the method of the “exquisite corpse”. Each rehearsal is an addition to the rehearsal before. We’ll start at a proposed beginning, and work our way through a ‘body’ of movement, asking ourselves “what’s next” and “why”. Closer to April we will have a cut off point where new movement is no longer generated and we will start to clean and edit.

With that discussed, along with the students concerns and questions, we started warm up with a viewing of last weeks idiosynCrazy’s vlog. It surprised the mentees to see how much had been done and explored.  We moved into a warmp up with an exercise led by Greg that dealt with direction and breaking habbits. Two partners, one giving one word or simple phrase directions in succession so that the other had no choice but to move one form extreme to the other. It loosened up everyone, and really ate the space. We then blended the groups into pods of four. One person was to be directed, and the other three took on directing either the eyes (open or close), mouth (to speak or be silent), or body (to free move or to be still).

This generated great discussion about movement habits, feeling like one has to move when talking, or the discomfort of dancing with one’s eyes closed. Also, thoughts on the role of the director. Why as director we purposefully wanted to break certain habits, or let other habits remain. How does a director’s role in dictating movement affect the over all image of what is being seen, versus what what a dancer does naturally.
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stay tuned in weeks to come for more from inside this process…

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