Atypical Day

By Sara Nye, Dancer

There is a piece of the Jobs Project that, in rehearsal, we call the Typical Day section. It is an amalgamation of many different interviewees describing snatches of their ‘typical day.’ Thus far we have approached this section choreographically by creating a tight improv structure that governs our movement choices and involves the handful of us taking turns and moving only when a new person in the sound score speaks. We are slowly becoming accustomed to hearing various interviewees talk about what a typical day in their work life entails. We are learning not only what they say but how they say it and matching our movement to their vocal inflections. We try to anticipate when the score will shift to a new speaker. I find this task very satisfying, as it organizes the dancers in a clear way and I love following patterns in dance, both as a watcher and practitioner.

I have begun thinking more about how this section relates to my working life because, in a recent rehearsal, Gina asked us to incorporate movement grounded in tasks from our own jobs. I struggled to find something ‘typical’ because each of my work days is different from the others. This fact will not ultimately matter for the execution of this task: I can choose any work task from any of my jobs and it will work in the context of the piece, but that initial struggle opened up a line of thought that would not stop pestering me. Surely no one has two work days that are exactly the same? There are similarities, but no one does the exact same thing every day. Then I thought, let me think outside the workplace – is there any one thing that I have done every single day for, say, a year?

Bike. No, not when I’m travelling, or when my bike is in the shop. Check my email. No, thank God. Talk to my husband. No, I think there have been small trips we’ve taken apart where we didn’t talk every day. Leave my apartment. No, there have been days where I’ve stayed home. More basic. Eat. Yes – here we go. I have eaten something every day. Walk. Yes, I have walked around my home, at the very least. Breathe, smell, see, sleep. Yes, I am lucky enough to have done all of these things every day. But if I dial back my personal history further, even some of these go away. When I was a baby, I did not walk. When I was in college, there were days I did not sleep.

My journey down this rabbit hole of technicality is mostly an interesting thought experiment I created for my own enjoyment, but it helped me see the Typical Day section, and also my own work days, in a new light. Because compared to what I just learned about myself, most of my days are actually atypical, no matter how typical they seem. Every day is unique. Kind of a refreshing thought.

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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.

“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.