Speaking Eloquently to Non-verbal Creatures
Doug Fox, creator of Great Dance, approached me a few weeks ago at
Dance/NYC's goodbye party for Bob Yesselman. Doug asked what I do and when I informed him that I choreographed performance works for dancers and horses, he was immediately interested. That is not always the reaction I get from people in the dance world.
Puzzlement would better describe the typical response. The various sub texts of that puzzled response might include: "Is this really dance?" "How do you choreograph for horses?" "Where do you rehearse?" "Do you perform in New York City? Where?"
I would like to have my performance work for dancers and horses receive the ear and full attention of the dance world. A blog seemed like a terrific opportunity to talk to the dance world, and other worlds as well. I decided to join forces with Doug Fox and create a blog about my work.
So here is my first post. In it, I would like to give readers some background information about how I started doing this work:
Making
work for dancers and horses began with a commission from Mount Holyoke
College in 1998. I was asked to make a work for the 20th Anniversary of
the Five College Dance Program (Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, UMass
and Hampshire College). The performance would coincide with an alumnae
weekend and the kick-off for a major Mount Holyoke College ( MHC)
capitol campaign. My objective was to bring dance into the foreground
of alumnae and trustees' consciousness, to create a performance work
that would showcase the amazing Five College dancers and the excellent
MHC Equestrian Team. To accomplish this I created a trilogy of works
for three venues on the Mount Holyoke College campus.
The trilogy
In the Landscape: Dancing with Horses featured, in total, 33 dancers and 12 horses.
Hillside was
a work created for a large hillside with a cast of 25 dancers, all in
white and a white horse and rider and dance soloist. The work involved
dancers and non-dancers from the MHC and Five College community.
Hillside was visually spectacular and hugely challenging to create. It
took untold hours of coordination and would have fared better as a
2-hour installation than a performance work for captive audience. The
white horse we planned to use was a dressage horse that did not fare
well when ridden in an outdoor venue. We filled in with a Northampton
friend and her white trail horse. The second work was a dressage piece
for 6 horses and 8 dancers created for the central green at Mount
Holyoke College. For this work my composer, Cam Millar, timed the
equine gaits for horses on the Dressage Team and wrote music that
perfectly suited their movement. The following spring the MHC Dressage
Team used Cam's music for their group ride competition!
The
third work in the trilogy was Body on Body, created for three horses
and riders and five dancers. This was the most successful portion of
the trilogy. Created for the Mount Holyoke indoor equestrian arena,
Body on Body was about women and horses. During the creation of this
piece we spent hours improvising with the riders and their horses. The
dancers developed a feeling for how to guide the horses from the ground
with precisely chiseled phrases that shaped the space. One memorable
afternoon we realized the horses were following the dancers. In that
moment I realized we had stumbled on a movement language that could
speak eloquently to non-verbal creatures. If ridden with a slightly
loose rein, the horses would make their own decisions about gait and
direction. The horses were responding to the dancers. Thus began a
decade of intense choreographic investigation.
Posted by JoAnna Mendl Shaw at 3:47 PM - Permalink
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