Alison Krause - Good Women Dance Collective : high impact performance
Alison Krause (choreographer)
Ainsley Hillyard, Kate Stashko, Alida Nyquist-Schultz (interpreters)
GoodWomenDanceCollective, Edmonton, Alberta
Beginning: 20 minutes of technical dance had already been developed through improvisation, some of it interpretations of drawings. Desires:
To uncover "meaning" in what had been created.
To experiment with refining high impact athleticism into performative movement.
Questions:
What do I (choreographer) see in each section?
What do we (interpreters) feel and perceive in each section?
Does the action suggest story?
How are the sections related?
What other movement vocabulary can keep the strength and adrenalin punch of Mac3 athleticism?
What structure will best support the simultaneous interaction of the pure movment and the human interactions?
Challenges:
To go creatively beyond mix-and-match, cut-and-paste
To stay true to bold approaches and not slip into skill-sets that may be easier solutions, but not advancing the research.
To decide if the relationships in the dance are abstract, pure-movement relationships or story-driven. If the goal is both, then in rehearsal, when to concentrate on one or the other, and ultimately how to have material that supports their co-existence.
More Questions:
What is it that makes Alison go “yes!” in the athletic performance modes?
Can the artists identify the essential aspects that give that adrenaline satisfaction, e.g. rhythm, time, surprise, etc?
and find other ways of moving in performance that will satisfy in those ways?
Challenge for the group/collective:
Remember that ultimately dancers and choreographer have different jobs.
Development/skills:
Clarified the role of “conventions” to help audience flip between sections and not get lost.
The choreographer developed the movement relationships in trios, simultaneous duets/solos, etc.
The dancers clarified what they were doing physically by identifying the social relationships between them in the different sections.
To practice:
How to go beyond learned skills?
To make what is being imagined the same as what is actually going on. (Are you seeing what is actually going on?) If actual “Mac40” (i.e. real high velocity) is not possible on stage, how to use performance to give the audience the experience?
To link being realistic (i.e. understanding what is really being performed) with the best creative choices.
“Finding meaning” ..a tall order that will be different from one creation to another.
