Words, words, words

This has been a season of firsts for me and the company: our first gallery installation in May, our first time at CounterPULSE, my first truly whimsical, comic dance—and now my first time out blogging. I’m the kind of person who re-writes and re-punctuates texts messages before sending them, so the idea of publishing my thoughts “casually” on a blog feels like a bigger deal than it probably actually is. And it’s not like I don’t have a lot to say…

As I’m writing this, the company and I are on our way to NY to perform at the 19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference at Fordham University in New York City. I’ve been making dances inspired by Woolf use of language for many years. I like words and many, if not most, of my dances have had some kind of literary antecedent.

So what’s particularly interesting about this year’s season, Dances for the Next Depression, June 11-14 at CounterPULSE, is that the words we’re working off of are my own. Or at least they were, once…

For the past twenty years or so, I have been saving my own rehearsal notes, throwing them into the top drawer of my filing cabinet and then putting them in plastic bags when they started to leave room for not much else. These are the notes that we all take in rehearsal, most of which are written in the kind of coded language that arises when you are making a dance—a certain move gets called “butt shimmer”, something else is called “late waltz”, or “hieroglyphs”, “hallucination hips” or “sleeping blind hand, leaf focus memory”. Many of these only make sense during the time that one was working on the dance its self—twenty years later, they could mean anything.

Some notes are obviously corrections like “don’t look down” or “not too much.” Others are more general choreographic ideas for sections like “tangled-three person waltz” or “working out their desperation on each other.”

At some point I decided that rather than use some literary point of departure for a new work, I would use these notes themselves and start not from any thematic or narrative point of view, but from these relics of dances long forgotten. The only guiding principle that I wanted to bring to the beginning of the process of creating this new piece, now called Sugarfoot Stomp, was that it should be fun, up-beat, and, yes, happy. My work has often tended to be quite dark and the challenge of making a happy piece would be just that: very challenging.

I brought in music by Larry Clinton & His Orchestra, a big band from the 30s and 40s that really knew how to swing—it’s music that you just can’t be sad to. And I brought in page after page of these notes. The dancers set about generating movement from them, and our playwright-in-residence Brian Thorstenson set about adapting the absurdity of their language into a series of scenes that are woven throughout the dance.

The results?? Well, see the show and you decide. Just keep an eye out for a “woman pursued by a bird” and “the churning collapse of that karate spiral thing.” Not to mention the “groove that will divide you from sanity”!!

Stephen Pelton Dance Theater in Dances for the Next Depression