Presented at the University of California, Irvine, February 2002.
I had been invited as head of jazz dance for the Glenda Brown Choreography Project in Austin, TX in 2001. This workshop was dedicated to helping young choreographers to improve their choreographic skills.
At one informal showing, a choreographer presented a very minimal movement, but with about five dancers performing the movement randomly, and not in sync. The resulting look jarred me, as it was so simple, yet reminded me of the beauty of nature patterns where the wind will blow through trees branches in sequence. This simple pattern stayed in my mind.
I decided to use this new choreographic method but with jazz and lyrical dance movements. Normally we look for perfection in dancers unison and synchronicity, yet here I was counting on their skills in keeping in slight dis-order rather than order.
The result was an impressionistic display - actually an eight minute solo dance, performed by eight dancers, all starting about one count apart, yet never counting to music. They had to feel, the same way a flock of birds feels their mass in flight and instantly change directions in mid air.
Near the end of the piece, the dancers slowly morphed into perfect unison. They danced a long phrase in perfect harmony. The music by Jean Luc Ponty encouraged this. FInally, the dancers broke again into disorder. It asked the question, where does beauty lie? In perfection, or in random impressionistic patterns?
This piece was a huge leap for me in terms of choreographic method, and I have used ideas learned here in many pieces since then.
