OK.  Welcome to the Windfall Dancers blog!  Here we will be documenting the creative process for our upcoming show “DancE=mc2.”  As we prepare for the performances in March (10-12 at the Waldron Center’s Rose Firebay), we will be posting our thoughts, photos, videos, links, and whatever seems relevant/interesting.  We hope that this will serve as a useful way of documenting our experience and demystifying the choreographic process.  We also hope to engage in an open dialogue with those of you who will not be present in our rehearsals.  So feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

As of today, November 4, we have no show.  None of the pieces exist yet.  The entire program will be new material inspired, in part, by science in all its wondrous forms and phenomena.

So what do dance and science have in common? Hmmm…

Curiosity, for starters.  Scientists and choreographers alike begin their process by asking questions.  As a choreographer, I’ve begun work on pieces by asking questions such as:

-What quality of movement best fits this moment in the music?

-What are the necessary body mechanics for one dancer to lift another off the floor while leaving their arms free to be expressive, rather than holding weight?

-Does the picture in my head still look good when performed by actual dancers?  Is it even humanly possible to execute?

-How many ways can we spin in this piece (upright, seated, lying down, individually or paired, etc.)?  Will we just get nauseous?

-How can I fit 30 dancers on a small stage and prevent personal injury?

Often the rehearsal process raises many more questions, leading us in different directions.  We may begin with a fairly clear idea of how the finished piece may look (our hypothesis, if you will), but we are likely to find ourselves in uncharted territory before creative possibility becomes certainty.  While the culmination of our inquiry (i.e. public performance) yields remarkably different results from the manner in which scientists make their findings public, we are unified in our desire to answer questions through experimentation and discovery.

-Neil