Physically, groove is how I identify with home, with the repetition of the beating heart and the ongoing breath. It feeds the work I am creating. What has emerged is an interest in how groove influences my choreographic practice, specifically my knowledge of ballet and movement signature. For the past year, I have been asking myself: How can groove influence ballet language to bring forth movement signature and support new meaning? I aim to uncover how groove can bridge classical form and movement signature by developing a method based on groove, revisiting ballet terminology, and allowing the performers to find their movement signature. Resilience has emerged as an accompanying concept that provides a base when generating movement. Generating movement in my practice means generating set choreographic movement as well as scores, creating moments where the performers react to each other and to the material spontaneously within a set structure. I have chosen to approach this research with varying lenses: my personal experience both in life and in the studio, through poetic writing, relating to thinkers and choreographers, and through the creation of Lost Threads.
The duet I created, Lost Threads, is performed by 2 professional dancers: Julia Headley and Cecilia Ponteprimo and proposes a poetic approach to storytelling through ballet terminology. The narrative is based on a text I’ve written in French and translated into English (and German). I am using ballet terminology to tell a story of uprooting and detachment, of care and cycles. The poetic expression of my research is the source of the piece and allows me to focus on 8 terms: tombé, coupé, effacé, ecarté, développé, attitude, équlibre and porté. The piece is made of what I call capsules that are a reflection of the episodic nature of life, intending to influence the dancer’s experience on stage and beyond.
I research, create, and perform work that is anchored in Western Contemporary Dance. In my practice, I search for connections between the dancers, the concept, the music, the rehearsal process, and the performance. Questions I ask myself are: What are threads that help all involved connect to the work meaningfully? And how do we all come out of the creation with a sense of authorship? I consciously focus on space and time, using these elements to inform the connections between myself, my collaborators, and the work. I practice rituals like checking in, out, and in-between. I bring awareness to time within the time we spend together, but also where we come from before working together. I often invite personal memories of the dancers into the work to make it more relatable, finding that commonalities emerge to connect us. The themes I base my concepts around are identity, finding a place of belonging, home, and womanhood. I question my position in the world and shed light on the darker corners, aiming to give hope and a sense of how the world could be. I like to think that I am proposing alternatives to the way society functions.
Before moving on to the rest of my exposition, I invite you to dive into my world of trees. Throughout my research, I have sketched to visualize the entangled nature of the multiple elements that drive me. This latest sketch demonstrates all the elements that together express the indescribable, the reason why we go see dance: to connect to ourselves, to dive into another world and to connect to others. I’m suggesting that we might be connected by invisible roots simply by sharing space.
I begin with the trunk, my knowledge of ballet technique. Groove is what moves us from within, it is at the roots, feeding, and influencing the process of reworking ballet. Beginning with a ballet term, I analyze the movement principle and the word to work further with the material. Throughout the process of stripping down and making choreographic material, groove elements I have identified relating to music theory emerge and take the foreground. As a result of working with ballet through the lens of groove, movement signature of the performing artists emerges: their unique approach to movement. I foster their personality and experience within the process and on stage. Through this process, I see moments of resilience, moments where the performers give space to the human being dancing, and not just to the technique.
Au début, on tombe. Après avoir été coupé de notre maman, on s’efface et on s'écarte de nos désirs. Puis on développe une attitude pour trouver notre équilibre. Soudainement, on se retrouve à porter et soigner des êtres qui sont eux aussi tombés à leur tour. Et tout recommence.
In the beginning, we fall. After being cut off from our mother, we erase ourselves and move away from our desires. Then we develop an attitude to find our balance. Suddenly, we find ourselves carrying and caring for others who have also fallen. And it all starts again.
I suggest using the tree as a roadmap to navigate the exposition; the design is meant to lead you through a cycle to understand the process of the research. You will begin with groove, then ballet, movement signature, transmission, resilience and the conclusion. Each underlined term or phrase is a link to another section, page, or a pop-up with more information. You can also follow the threads that connect sections of the text. Every video has a pop-up letting you know what the video is. At the end of each page or section, you can find a link to the next page, or use the drop-down table of contents and follow the order. Each page opens up in a new window, allowing you to go back as needed using tabs on your browser.
