The idea

I have always been interested in stories: the stories we tell about ourselves, the ones that tell us who we are, what we enjoy, what we value. But what affect do these stories have on our present selves at this very moment? This is the question I am exploring with my choreographic project, "the evolution of this moment." This question was inspired by "The Encyclopedia of Ordinary Life" a wonderful book written by the talented Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and I first explored it by tracing my own journey to becoming a dancer and choreographer in Philadelphia. The story begins with the hug, kiss and flip that my father gave me everyday before daycare and continues with the first time I felt a Martha Graham contraction, then to the bench I shared with Peter, my boyfriend of five years, on the first day we met. All of these memories, or stories, have contributed to my present self in a profound way. The goal of this project is to use these stories to facilitate a larger exploration of how a human life unfolds by creating pieces of dance and short films that will share experiences and raise questions.

The process

 The stories we tell will not only be mine, but also those of my dancers. Each dancer will each trace her own path to this present work and select seven clear experiences that have contributed to her presence in this moment. When each dancer has identified the key moments, we will collaborate to distill the stories into the phrases of movement that will be the vocabulary of the dances. The goal is not to mime the experiences in a literal way but to capture their essence in the gesture of a finger, the softening of a kneecap or the whipping of a torso through space. The dancer and I will work together to create the movements because I want them to be both internally satisfying for the performer and also aesthetically interesting and accessible for the audience. While I pursue the dance side my collaborator, filmmaker Price Campbell, will be creating several short films that explore similar themes in the exploration of stories and their effects on evolution but, rather than focusing on humans, his films will explore how a place, an object or an idea can evolve daily based upon its exposure to the world.  Thus this small idea, initially explored by me, has become a highly collaborative effort

The product

On September 9th and 11th we will be premiering 'the evolution of this moment,' which is made up of four dances and three short films, not presented simultaneously. These performances will mark the premier of our work we have created over past four months but, hopefully, this project itself will continue to evolve every time we present it in the future.
 
For more information about the shows please click on this link: http://www.livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=14162