Mary’s Writing about her Piece.

Articulating what my work is about has always been hard for me. It is always so clear in my head, in my body, translating it to words always seems to result in canned imagery and never encapsulates the greatness of what I feel when I think about a piece I have created. But putting the embarrassment aside – here I go to put into words what I am feeling about this piece.

I created the piece wanting it to eventually tie into the last work I did, “Into The Current.” It was set to a Vivaldi piece with nine dancers, all wearing blue. The conceptual spine of this short piece was based on the feeling I get when I am on the brink of moving into something big, something greater than me. Right before you take that step that carries you all the way. That closed throat feeling of anticipation, barreling through obstacles until you feel the cool wash of relief as you head in the chosen direction.

“Into The Current” featured one dancer (referred to as “Lydia” throughout this writing) as a figure fighting through eight other dancers, those representing the “obstacles.” I envision eventually tying these two pieces together by having Lydia from “into the current” being one of the three members of this trio, and being left on the stage while the other two exit. In fact, that is how I see this piece ending – Natalie, you are the Lydia character that would carry through. Leave the exit open right now, once I have seen video of what you all have done, I will make a clear decision on the exit, and try to pick out Natalie as a more forward figure throughout the piece.

I have been working a lot with water imagery – streams, currents, eddies. For this piece have been working with the idea of an eddy:

1.	a current at variance with the main current in a stream of liquid or gas, esp. one having a rotary or whirling motion.

2.	a small whirlpool.

3.	any similar current, as of air, dust, or fog.

4.	a current or trend, as of opinion or events, running counter to the main current.

The three of you are figuratively, “in an eddy.” Your movement takes you back and forth through the space, there are moments of speed, moments of attempted escape, only to get tossed back in. Natalie, you do lots of climbing up and over things, you get stopped by Aaron.

The new title I’m working with is “The Dark Stream,” taken from the Yeats poem “An Image of a Past Life” – part of which is below:

Never until this night have I been stirred.
The elaborate starlight throws a reflection
On the dark stream,
Till all the eddies gleam;
And thereupon there comes that scream
From terrified, invisible beast or bird:
Image of poignant recollection.

The idea here for me is this: the work that is done in the subconscious, the stream of mind, it’s necessary work. A stream is a direction of energy. An eddy refines that work, that direction, the intention – until it finds the path outwards, into the current, traveling to the conscious where dreams/thoughts/ideas can be actualized.

Eventually, in this whole suite of ‘water works,’ I will be adding a solo before ‘The Dark Stream” for the Natalie/Lydia character – one in which the decision is made to jump into this process - another Yeats poem that I have been rereading for years I just now realize is driving this whole suite of works

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea.’

Natalie/Lydia is that crazed girl.

That is all I have for now – I will be sending more soon.

Just the Beginning…

Yes, we have finished learning two magnificent works that will be performed at the Herberger Theater in Phoenix, Az on September 6. We owe choreographers Mark Magruder and Mary Lane many thanks for helping us accomplish this feat. Although the creative process is finished, there is still alot of work that remains. We now have to rehearse the pieces and make them absolutely perfect. Stay tuned for all the sordid details about this process and wish us luck.

Natalie King

Terpsichore Is Smiling…

Natalie King has returned home to Sweet Briar and brought her friend Laura along with her. Together we created a piece for the Flux Dance Company repertoire. I have enjoyed the process and my time with these dancers even they have been bruised and blistered throughout the experience. The piece is a duet about nine minutes long. It begins with a very morphic quality as the dancers slowly roll in from opposite sides of the stage only to meet in the center. Some would call it celestial. A learning experience was had by all. I learned to use GarageBand in order to create the score for the piece. Yes I know this may not seem like great feat. However, I am 55 years old. And yes I can hear the virtual snickers of the young now. Natalie and Laura have promised to work very hard on the piece for their performance. I hope you all will be able to see them perform it live at the Flux dance concert September 6.

Happy Trails,

Mark Magruder

End of the Intensive Week

The intensive is over but the journey has just begun. Natalie and I have finished an intensive week and our now sitting at the airport on our way to our individual distinctions. I am headed back to to Phoenix and she back home to see her family for one last brief visit. Afterwards we will regroup in Phoenix and start our rehearsal process. We have a concert at the Herberger in September and have a lot of work to do to polish, teach and finish. We have gathered more video and that will be posted on the blog soon. Stay tuned to watch more of the process. 

-Laura Atwood

Terpsichore Is Smiling

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is the sweetest stomach ache I have ever experienced. Recently I returned back to my dancing queen roots: Sweet Briar College. There, Laura and I are learning a new dance piece set by choreographer Mark Magruder. Mark and consequently his wife Ella were my dance professors in undergrad. The past two days I have had a chance to baske in the familiarity of what I once considered to be home. Unfortunately, I have noticed that despite my absence the place has changed quite a bit. Not that I expected the institution to collapse completely without me, but it certainly reminded me of how that old adage rings all too true. You can never really go home again because your home is more than a physical entity. Rather it is made of individuals, who like their surroundings, evoke change and continue evolving regardless of your presence. The memory of what you cling too as home no longer exists in the the present reality. Nevertheless, I have really enjoyed spending quality time with my dancing parents better known as the Magruders. They live and eat and breath dance. More to the point, they live and eat and breath art. They make a living by actualizing their passions as artists. Just being in the same room is certainly inspiring and motivational to admit the least. The Magruders always know how to stay the uneasy, less traveled course. From their example, I learned how to carve out my niche as dancer. For me, this choreographic experience is not at all about physical innovation as I had previously thought it would be. Now do not be mistaken. I am not saying my body does not scream with blisters, floor burns, muscle aches and so much more. I am simply explaining that it is over shadowed by the memory of not only home but of how much I had forgotten who and what I wanted to be until this project.

Thrown into the Briar Patch

While there has not been as much activity on the blog that has not been the case for the Flux Dancers. Natalie and I have gotten up bright and early these past two mornings to drive an hour over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Sweet Briar College. SBC is where Natalie attended college and toned her dancing technique. There she met Mark and Ella Magruder as professors and has continued on as life long friends.

Mark agreed to set a duet on Natalie and myself. While this process has the same ingredients as the work with Mary: a generous choreographer, three days, and lots of hard work and dancing, the actual process has been different. For this piece Mark is working in a very linear thought process. As soon as we walked in and were ready to go he set us in our starting positions. Once a movement has been set – it is set. There is very little going back to change movement. I have found this piece to not be so heady. Because the work was created in order my mind can stop thinking about where it is going next and let my body just move there. This frees up my mind to focus more on the quality and intent of the movement.

After the first day at Sweet Briar I felt solid with what I had learned and what my body could do. As the 2nd day started, the dynamic of the piece changed slightly and my confidence swung with the change. It is a lot. We have over 7 1/2 mins of strong and innovative choreograph in two days. We even have some of the kinks worked out that you always run into when you are first learning a piece.

Even though this process may be a bit different the Mary’s there still is a strong Common Thread. Mary and Mark do not know each other or where even born in the same decade but both put strong lifts and weight sharing ideas into their choreography. The pieces are completely different but at the same time will both showcase some great partnering work.

On that note, my arms are tired, my legs are sore and I have blisters on the bottom of both feet. I need a shower and in the morning we have to get up and do it all over again. With all of those complaints, I am doing what I love, working hard, and learning a whole lot – I have been thrown in to the sweet sweet briar patch.

-Laura Atwood

Wrapping Up.

This was our last rehearsal with Mary Lane in Lexington, Va. It was certainly bittersweet to be finishing the piece. We still have a lot of work to do in order for the piece to be truly complete. We will concentrate on making the transitions from phrase to phrase more cohesive, on capturing the movement qualities Mary has so brilliantly described and on executing the choreography with the proper technical precision. Unfortunately, we will only have about a month to whip us and the piece into shape. The experience as a whole was challenging, and in turn all the more enjoyable. The Flux Dance Company needed Mary’s vision as a source of innovation. Once you have worked with a dance company for an extended amount of time, you develop preconceived notions about how to work with them. In other words, you know or rather think you know how they are capable of performing. This is the case with Flux; it is such a tight knit community of dancers. We have all been choreographing and performing so much together that we have developed creative rituals. Mary’s vision helped to break the monotony of our own creative habits as a company. She has given us a new movement path to explore. And for that we are most grateful.

Video

Check out the Video page for more Videos. We will try to post some every night.

Working the Process

As a dancer and choreographer one of the main questions at a Q.A after a show is – How did you come up with that? The answer is always  different depending on who the choreographer is. Take an painter for example, they might start with a solid idea and sketch out their lines and then begin to fill in the color. Or the might just put some paint on their brush, touch it to the canvas and see where the paint brush takes them. There is not a right or wrong and the process can change from painting to painting. This is very similar to how a choreographer works. 

As it was mentioned in an earlier post, Mary (the choreographer) is a dreamer. While she is sleeping at night she concocts visions of movements. During this process she knew a few things before she began 1. She had many dream visions she wants to recreate. 2. She wanted lots of partnering, lifts and them to be unique. 3. The final product needs to be a trio.  

So where does one start. In this instance Mary started to experiment and play, in other words she put some paint on her brush and started to stroke the canvas. No outlines, no preconceived ideas of the end product. 

Yesterday we spent the majority of the day exploring with partnering and weight sharing with all three dancers. We climbed all over each other, hung on each other and really explored some interesting shapes that came out of that. Today, we took a slightly different approach and learned movement phrases. Then we connected those movement phrases with  the partnering and shapes we discovered yesterday. 

The dance became a bit more linear today, a rough draft if you will. The sequence will change, the quality of the movement will change, and perhaps even the intent. But we now have a solid base to keep building. And keep building we will regardless of what our bodies are trying to tell us.

-Laura Atwood