Abstract
Imagining and designing choreography can often result in the display of a particular culture, series of relationships or interrogation of an element of human-ness. As an artistic and choreographic challenge, I became intrigued by the idea of creating neutral bodies in the space, without identity rooted in gender, in familiar relationship, in empathy or in community, while seeking to employ dynamic range, virtuosic movement vocabulary or the bodies of the performers (undeniably human).
In the investigation of this work, I became particularly interested in framing the space and creating a machine-like movement vocabulary to unify the performers without prescribing human qualities or interactions. I liked the idea of having an odd number of dancers and also playing with the duets and trios that were created throughout. Falling in and out of synchronization (and then, maybe, the resulting synchronicity) seemed imperative to the discovery of this dance as machine.
Being a dancer in the piece as well as the choreographer I struggled with finding the work from the inside; however, I am pleased with how the process revealed itself.
The addition of music -- “Not a Number,” composed and performed by Apparat -- also really drove our intent and dynamic choices for the piece. I like to imagine us as gears in a machine that run and perform tasks until we are shut down or turned off.
