We do not create dance in a vacuum, a reflection on open rehearsals

By Sara Nye, Dancer

“It can be to easy to overlook the incredible investment of ideas, time, attention,
creativity, and revision that goes into creating something new, especially when
we’re watching a performance as an audience member. With RealLivePeople(in)
Motion’s current work-in-progress, not only did a number of us have the opportunity
to contribute our stories to the foundation of this work, but Gina invited us to come
to a rehearsal—to observe and participate. I loved the way Gina and the dancers
included us in movement, exploration, and feedback. Watching the dancers
communicate the daily work lives that we had communicated through our spoken
and written words with their bodies provided a glimpse into the unfolding evolution
of a work in progress. Participating in RLPiM’s rehearsal has also made me more
conscious of how we use our whole selves in our work—bodies as well as minds.”

-Beth, Interviewee

Beth and Alya have jobs. They have jobs that are different from ours. They have
jobs that are different from each other’s. Beth works in career services at Penn. Alya
is a freelance photographer/stylist. Our director Gina interviewed Beth and Alya
about their jobs for our upcoming project, and then they came to one of our open
rehearsals. And from this separateness came harmony.

It was so energizing for me to read Beth’s response to being in an open rehearsal of
ours, because it confirmed something I’ve been pondering – when I share something
of myself with you, it affects you. You think about it after the fact. It does not exist in
a vacuum.

I have always been fascinated by the work that people do. I am obsessed with how
people make money, how they make it work, and what those choices do to their daily
lives. But I also want to know if other people ever wonder what I do and how I do
it. I think many of us wonder whether what we do matters. Now I have confirmation
from Beth that when she came to our place of work, participated, and observed,
she left with neurons firing. She wondered about our work afterwards. She thought
about the time it takes to explore a movement idea, change the rules, and try again.
And I love that she is now thinking about how her body works while at work. It’s true
– no matter what a job is, it requires movement of the entire being, body and mind
working in tandem.

Beth and Alya were such giving participants in rehearsal. Their movement
contributions as well as their feedback were honest, and I felt them becoming
invested in the progress we were making that day. And they should feel invested. In
this project, we dancers and our ideas do not exist in a vacuum. We have reached
out into the community, and now the community is reaching back.

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Rehearsal Update: The Jobs Project

By Gina Hoch-Stall, Choreographer

Rehearsing can be such a private experience. It is possible to get together at a set time and location, warm-up and make dances without ever connecting to the outside world and I don’t like it. I would rather have interaction with the people we hope will be coming to our shows and watching the work down-the-line; almost like dance company market-research.

With that in mind we’ve been having open rehearsals for our new evening-length work, “The Jobs Project” and we’ve gotten some excellent feedback–and movement ideas. We’ve also made some brand new material that I’d like to share with those of you who couldn’t stop by and see it in person.

Disclaimer: Molly and David will want me to tell you that this is REHEARSAL FOOTAGE which means that it is a work-in-progress and not all clean, polished and sparkly yet.

Meet David! He has good taste in music.

As a company we spend endless hours rehearsing, giggling and sharing our
lives and we wanted to share a bit of ourselves with you. Rather than posting
tired bios with stats and degrees, each company member created questions for another.

Interviewer: Hedy Wyland (Dancer)

Interviewee: David Konyk (Dancer)

Describe your perfect day

I would wake up clear of mind, energized and be filled with purpose.  The sky would be sunny and blue.  Temperature in the low 70’s with a mild breeze softly blowing.  I would not have any worries this day and flow from place to place doing the things I wanted to do easily and without conflict.  I would be able to make all the people I interacted with laugh or at lease smile.  Someone would tell me I look handsome.  Someone else would tell me that I am really good at what I do.  I would receive a letter from and old friend and a very cute girl I never met before would give me a wink.  I would be happy to arrive wherever I went and be content wherever I was. I would be reminded often throughout the day of how lucky I am and how wonderful it is to be alive in this world.  I would focus out and find beauty in everything I saw. At night, sleep would be there when I wanted it and I would dream beautifully and restfully.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I hope to be putting into practice the lessons I am learning now.  I hope to have found love or a better definition of what it is.  I hope to be closer to the deaf community and have a greater understanding of their language and culture and be interpreting.  I see having many new experiences that I cannot even imagine having now.  I see myself being surprised by where my road has lead me.  Sadly, I do not see my cat being with me five years from now, and that makes me very sad. I see myself having a car. I see myself traveling very far. I see myself furthering and expanding my art making practice. I see myself still not ever being completely satisfied, and that is a good thing.

What three songs sum up your life?

“Unsatisfied” by The Replacements

“Alter Ego” by Tame Impala

“Being Bad Feels Pretty Good” by Does It Offend You, Yeah?

 

Meet Mason! He is night blind.

As a company we spend endless hours rehearsing, giggling and sharing our lives and we wanted to share a bit of ourselves with you. Rather than posting tired bios with stats and degrees each company member created questions for another.

Interviewer: Molly Jackson

Interviewee: Mason Rosenthal

Describe your mindset as you are backstage, preparing yourself to perform.

What I am feeling is always different. Sometimes I am very nervous, sometimes confident, sometimes tired, bored, silly, irritated, ecstatic. But the practice is always the same. Preparing to perform my focus is on increasing my awareness of whatever it is that is happening. Both inside my own body as well as externally in other performers, the audience, the environment.

Describe a moment or two when you felt sublimely happy, or in general, what
makes you experience this feeling?

That performance mindset I described earlier is what makes me happy. It is a kind of
meditative practice for me. I feel very awake. Performing/rehearsing is the #1 place I
tend to experience that feeling, but being outside can trigger it too. Also traveling at
night.

If you were an animal what would you be?

My spirit animal is a Mole. A Mole has poor vision and is quite small, but a Mole is
extraordinarily strong for its size and is sensitive to vibrations. A Mole has a kind of
6th sense that gives it psychic powers.

Write a haiku describing Mason Rosenthal:

Bumping against walls.
Why can’t he see what’s right there?
Mason is night blind.

What was your first performance experience?

I was a Heffalump in a community theater performance of “Winnie the Pooh”. I think I
wore funky pants and sunglasses.

Describe your dream career

What I am doing now just with more money coming in. Creating original performance
pieces, performing in other people’s work, and teaching performance techniques.

Tell me three quirky things about yourself

1. I’m night blind. I have a genetic condition that makes it hard for my eyes to adjust
to low light.
2. I have a tattoo on my right butt cheek.
3. I had a blue tongued skink as a pet. It’s a kind of lizard with a huge blue tongue
that looks like a snake with legs.

 

The journey of the post-its

By Gina Hoch-Stall, Choreographer

Several years ago, just as RLPiM was forming, we created our first evening-length work, “the evolution of this moment.” As a part of the piece we asked audience members to write down their own evolutions, how they came to be here, in this exact second, on a post-it. We then displayed the post-its, turned them into a collage…

…and finally started using them for our next piece, “Backstories.”

At that time all of the company members had at least a little bit of experience with improvisational structures in theater and dance. One day I walked into rehearsal with a Ziploc bag filled with colorful post-its and asked the dancers to pick one and make a short dance out of it. Then another. And another. Soon we were hooked.

We began to develop rules and suggestions depending on the content, length and tone of the post-it. We gradually got better at finding the best articulation of the post-it through movement, text, metaphor and often humor–plus we loved it! So when it came time to decide what was going to be included in “Backstories” it seemed impossible to leave our post-it work out.

It was decided that we would create at least five post-it dances throughout the show as a kind of break for ourselves and the audience from the ‘seriousness’ of modern dance. We even gathered the post-its afresh from the audience each night so they might even recognize their stories coming alive.

They were a hit!

Flash forward eight months to our application for the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (commonly known as PIFA). We applied with our “Jobs Project” in mind, only to be told that it didn’t fit with the festival’s theme which was focused on specific dates in history.

We assumed that would be the end of it.

But the lovely staff at the Kimmel Center were eager to find a way to make it work (insert shout out to Jay Wahl here). After attending one of our rehearsals and hearing about our work with the post-its the name ‘Tongue and Groove Spontaneous Theater’ came up.

I had never heard of T&G but I went on their website and read this:

Tongue & Groove is a critically acclaimed theater ensemble that spontaneously performs unscripted scenes and monologues inspired by personal information anonymously submitted by the audience.

I was intrigued.

Fast forward again to my meeting with Bobbi Block, Artistic Director of T&G. She is interested but skeptical. How can we make this work? Share a bill? Collaborate? By this time I have seen one of her shows but she has yet to see any of our post-it work. We realize that nothing can be decided until she has seen our work–however at this point we are leaning toward an all post-it show.

In advance of Bobbi’s visit we schedule a few extra rehearsals to run through the post-it question we’d be using for the PIFA show, “If you could travel back in time to any point in your own life, where would you go and why?”

We flesh out some kinks, come up with some new rules and ideas and cross our fingers that we won’t blow it…

And we didn’t! After a somewhat rocky start we quickly hit our groove and began to bring the post-its to life as small dances, similar to Tongue and Groove’s work but different enough to be interesting.

Which brings us to the present: Tongue and Groove and RealLivePeople(in)Motion present ‘That Time’–co-produced by the Kimmel Center as part of PIFA. It was a long process but we’re excited to get into the studio and practice creating this production–because it will never be remotely the same twice.

You can learn more about the show, and Tongue and Groove, HERE.

And keep your eyes peeled for more posts about the post-it rehearsal process.

“The Third Shift” Preview

We are excited to have been offered an opportunity to perform “The Third Shift” again at the Arden Theatre as part of their First Friday Performance Series. If it was difficult for you to make it out to Kensington for our Philadlephia Fringe performance in early September we hope you can join us this Friday (details below).

To get you pumped about the piece we’ve also created a short preview from some footage shot of the warehouse version. Remember that we were dancing in and around paintings, sculptures and installations created by 25 artists and it was pretty hard to keep us all in the frame so I apologize for the few shaky camera moments.

Performance Information:

Arden Theatre: 40 N. 2nd, Old City Philadelphia

Performing on Friday October 5th at 6:30pm, 7:00pm and 7:30pm

Reflections on “The Third Shift”

By Sara Nye, Dancer

Looking back on our first performance of “The Third Shift” as part of the Make it. Break it. Rebuild it. Philly Fringe series this past Saturday, I can’t help but wonder in how many professions one is expected to create something and then destroy it, or forget about it, or make it different, or save it for later.

As a dance-maker, and in many other creative pursuits – theater, music, writing – that kind of thing happens all the time during the creation process. The first thing you make is not necessarily the best thing for that particular moment. Revision often makes the best work. However, much of the work we explored in “The Third Shift” was work that took place in factories. Physical tasks that people would commit to for their shift, at the end of which would be a product that would then go out into the world, a whole thing, a built object. Why then approach this kind of work during a performance series with the theme of rebuilding, of change?

When we learned that the venue was formerly Pieri Creations, a lamp designer at Front and Oxford Streets, Gina was interested in what else the factory had housed. We knew it would eventually be turned into apartments, but what did it used to be? The answer? A glue manufacturer, dye manufacturer, hosiery mill, and wool mill. And for a short time, it will be a performance venue and art gallery. We started to think about ways to represent how people had rebuilt this warehouse space over the years.

In “The Third Shift” we are always changing our definition of work. At times we are helpful to each other, fully supporting each others’ weight in order to traverse the space as a group. At other points we move together but separately, each taking responsibility for his or her own body and how it moves through space, unencumbered, unassisted. There is even a section where three dancers walk forward at an unrelenting pace, challenging a fourth dancer to keep the bodies at bay. In doing so, we imagine the lives of the people who have worked in the space, people who did some heavy lifting, got lost in repetitive specific individual tasks, were tired by goals that challenged the amount of work they could complete in one hour, in one day. We try to look like many people at once. Though we are indeed dancers, and must therefore look like people who are dancing, we want to pay homage to the history of workers who passed through these doors and be honest with what we would look like doing physical work, without too much flourish or embellishment.

In the new duet that Gina and I made we attempt to mechanize ourselves in an effort to access a memory of the pulsing, churning, machinery that used to live in this old factory. This was not often an easy task, for we didn’t want to look too hard or alien, our faces blank and cold. We merely wanted to look less like humans using machinery and more like the machines themselves, things with a clear purpose that communicate in a different way than humans do. We asked ourselves what a bottle filler looked like, a dyer, a hosiery weaver, a wool stretcher. As the duet progresses, we become more and more human as we create a machine of our own that combines all of these processes. In doing so, we ultimately make something that makes our jobs obsolete, and we bow out, leaving the building to be whatever it will be next.

My hope is that by physicalizing jobs that have disappeared from this building in particular and the Kensington neighborhood in general, we will help create a memory that will linger in the space, no matter what kind of condos fill it it in the future.

We have one more FREE performance of “The Third Shift” on Saturday 9/15 at 7:00pm. For directions and more information click here.

“The Third Shift” Update

First performance this past Saturday went even better than expected. The space was as huge as I remembered but this time it was filled with wonderful art for us to dance through and an audience who thoughtfully gave us their full attention.

A quick picture to whet your appetite:

Gina (left) and Sara performing their new duet in “The Third Shift”

Remember the show is FREE FREE FREE and we are next performing on Saturday 9/15 at 7pm at Pieri Creations, a warehouse at Oxford and Front.

Summer Inspiration #2: Joe Goode Performance Group

This summer took me (Gina Hoch-Stall, choreographer) all across the country for dance conferences, workshops and performances. Here are a few of the things that most inspired me.

Joe Goode Performance Group: Also while in San Francisco at the Dance/USA Conference I was lucky enough to see a dance company that I have been hearing about for years: Joe Goode Performance Group.

“You use text? Have you seen Joe Goode?”

“You do interviews? Have you seen Joe Goode?”

I felt like it was definitely time to see what this modern dance innovator has been doing on the West Coast for so many years. I booked my ticket, ran from my twenty-minute-late bus and sat down just in time to watch one of the most gripping, evolving, enlightening dance performances I have ever seen. Original set design, multimedia, use of text, original music–composed and designed–but none of that mattered compared to the content: stories of people falling apart.

I giggled, I teared up, I was ready to jump on stage and join the performers and, best of all, I remembered that modern dance can be a truly remarkable experience.

Click the picture above for more information about Joe Goode Performance Group.

“The Third Shift” or “How we made a dance in 16 hours”

By Gina Hoch-Stall, choreographer

“The Third Shift” is a brand spanking new piece by RLPiM for a FREE Philadelphia Fringe Festival performance in a raw warehouse space in Kensington. The performance is called “Make it. Break it. Rebuild it.” and it focuses on the process of creation, demolition and reconstruction in all of its forms.

There are a lot of art makers involved (over 20) and the majority are material-based artists but seven of us are choreographers/dancers and each performance will showcase three of our site specific pieces.

If you think this sounds intriguing, so did I when I was approached about participating in mid-July. Since I was out of town at the time (down in D.C. doing the Dance Exchange Intensive) we essentially had one month to make a brand new dance that would:

a) Fit the theme of the show.

b) Be appropriate for a raw warehouse space with a hard concrete floor, minimum lighting and an audience that could get up and go to the bar at any time.

c) Represent our own choreographic explorations (currently centered on jobs/work).

d) Not look like a hot mess.

Did I mention that of the four dancers involved (myself included) two were going on vacation/work related travel for most of the month? Whew!

But the good news is that we have done it! We have made an athletic quartet that focuses on the warehouse as a place of work (glue, wool, stockings, lamps and dye have all been made in this space in the past 200 years). Interviews and stories from the book, “Voices of Kensington” Vanishing Mills, Vanishing Neighborhoods,” by Jean Seder have inspired our movement creation: incorporating heavy lifting, gestures honed by the precision of repetition and echoes of workers who once used the space to feed their families and fill their days.

We are excited to share what we’ve created and get some helpful feedback as we plan to incorporate some of this material into our ‘Jobs Project’ moving forward. All the details about the show are below, hope to see you there!

“The Third Shift” part of Make it. Break it. Rebuild it.

Where: Pieri Creations, Oxford and Front Street

When: Saturday Sept 8 @ 6:30pm AND Saturday Sept 15 @ 7pm

How much: FREE!