Dance piece December

December (now a bit outdated I know but we had technical difficulties...) We have been making good progress on our piece. Some evolution has occurred in our effort to get inspired by a topic that we find sometimes a bit challenging. The topic of Canada is so colored, for us, by it’s often ugly colonial history, so we’ve had to really discuss the things that DO make Canada a special place. We thought about people- immigrants and visitors – that we’ve been friends with and what they’ve said really stands out about Canada: a vast amount of physical space, an abundance of clean water and personal and political freedom. These not only resonated with us, but provided a fertile ground for dance inspiration. So we decided to start with our “where are feet our” beginning and move into a celebration of water, space and freedom. This seems to have helped Laurel musically as well. We also decided to add guitar to round out the sound a bit more, so brought in Lynn’s partner Byron, with whom we worked on our last CVAC piece. Our weekly meetings have been a combination of technique class, followed by choreography review, improvisation to gather ideas, and then working out new choreography. Some sessions have been simply discussion and clarification. We plan to bring in Chris O’Connor to help us work out a contact floor part and to be an outside eye, and we may do a session of ariel movement using a fabric, though we’re unsure of the technicalities of incorporating that. We have learned that it’s unlikely we’ll be able to use the theatre space to perform in, and so are trying to envision what our performance space will be and to work with what we will have. We still feel like we have a luxury of time to move slowly and be able to have a really polished piece at the end. We’ve got about 4 or 5 minutes choreographed (I think) so are well on our way.