Nika Stein : story in body

Nika Stein (choreographer)

Fabiola Ugarte, Deepali Lindblom, Yui Ugai (interpreters)

Montreal and Baie Comeau, Quebec, India, Japan

Beginning:

Each brought personal improvisations and stories on the theme "water"

Desires:

To explore the theme through Deepali’s dance genre and cultural understanding.
To experiment with Fabiola's sound interpretations as accompaniment and as a motivating force for development.

Challenges:

To find the intersection between Nika's way of finding dance through internal impulse and Deepali’s way of first ordering known movement and then discovering the internal life.
To interpret transcultural responses to the theme and to link them.
To devise a sample performance in a short timeframe through a process that is usually done in a long timeframe.
To develop the movement and sound past “descriptive”.

Development/skills

Created tangible imaginary environments on land and in water.
Found strong balance and interactions between sound and movement.
Presented a strong narrative and seamlessly integrated 2 dancers into one role.
As director: practised when to be implicit and when to be explicit with collaborators.
As interpreters, to allow instinct to to participate in the work.

Next Steps:

Develop skill of making sophisticated movement and sound even when generated from internal impulse.
Consider what can be gleaned from this CM work to move forward with the project.
Continue to investigate how to work within and how to draw the person/self out of the known form, and how to work with what emerges when the known and discovered world connects or disconnect.