Reflecting on reworking solo & solo bis

The reworking of my solo and solo bis was turbulent for me. Firstly, because there were only four weeks between the presentation of solo bis and solo trits, so I felt stressed by the limited time. Secondly, my grandma died just one and a half week before the solo trits presentation, and this had a huge impact on the meaning of the solo for me. My grandma passing away made me feel totally ungrounded, I felt super energetic in a bit too intense way, I could not sleep well and I was very emotional. I channelled this state of being into the solo. It was still based on the props from my room, but this time I organised them in a chaotic way, and I imagined that they were inside my grandma’s house. There had been an imaginary storm in her house, causing the furniture to fall into a messy order, and she herself had fallen down the outdoor stone stairs. She ended up lying on the ground, and in that position of an accident, I started the solo.

I would say that I was both embodying her in her situation after the accident of falling and rolling down the stairs, and being myself commenting on what had happened. I can imagine that from the outside, this was not visible. However, it provided me with structure and a storyline, and I think it came across that I was very much in my own world. It made no sense, but it didn’t have to. Being in my own world, my own head, was another strong link back to the first solo. Now I was even deeper in there, and it came across mostly in my voice. There was more nonsense talking, sound making, and talking about actual events that didn’t seem to belong together. The way thoughts and dreams sometimes come one after the other in a strange order.

Evaluation and conclusions

Due to the time pressure and my emotional state, I relied a lot on my improvisation skills when I created and performed the solo. As a conclusion I would say, that I can do this very well and it works, but it could work even better if I went deeper into details and timing, and set it for myself. In that way, I could make my performance more consistent. A danger for me with relying on my own ability to improvise and perform, is that the performance depends on how I am feeling before each performance. For example, before the performance at 15.00, I was feeling great. I had warmed up for a long time, I was completely connected to the character and performative state I needed, and consequently, the performance was strong. But then, when I was about to perform at 19,00, I was way more nervous because many of my friends would come to watch. I also had less time to warm up and prepare. When I was performing, I felt way less connected compared to the first performance, and I fought my way through it. I believe, that if I would have had a more detailed structure to fall back on, the performance might have been closer to the first performance in terms of performative strength. It would also be easier to reproduce the solo again and again.

Feedforward towards the duet

In connection to what I wrote above, I would say that for the duet, I want to set the material more. I will still start from improvisation, and with an emotional intention as a base, but I want to work more on deepening the physical material. Interestingly enough, I have noticed that this is in general easier for me when I am choreographing only. Because then, I have the opportunity to see everything from the outside, that the performers do, and that makes me more critical. I believe that sometimes when I perform my own work, there is a disconnection between what I feel and what it looks like. Sometimes, I keep material and choices because they feel good in my body, with less consideration of how it looks from the outside. But when other people are performing my work, I cannot feel what they feel, and I can definitely not avoid to see what it looks like.
Furthermore, I want to delve deeper into comical timing, especially in the relationship between two people on stage.