This is me, saying hello for the first time in ages.

How is everyone? I hope your summers have been a long parade of beautiful, sunshine-full, happy days (cue some Beach Boys music here… “Do You Want to Dance,” maybe?).

My summer has been FANTASTIC, but very, very hard. I’ve just finished ten weeks of a workshop at SFCD. Most of our days were very long, sometimes going from eight in the morning ‘til nine at night, so I’m only now getting to appreciate the gorgeous summer sun. We spent so much time inside that I started getting vampire eyes and had to shield my poor, light-sensitive eyeballs from the sunlight any time I emerged from the studios.

The work was entirely worth it though. For the first six weeks, we concentrated on the choreography, and improvisation techniques that inform the choreography, of two ballets by William Forsythe. Thomas McManus, who is an incredible dancer and a lovely, lovely person, worked with us. On our first day he taught us a long and tricky phrase inexplicably called “tuna”. The movement is difficult and extreme, but really satisfying to work with. As a base phrase, even without any improvisational filters or tasks applied to it, it is full of material to chew on and it’s ridiculously satisfying to simply punch through the whole phrase. It made me feel wonderfully three-dimensional.

Then Thomas asked us to apply different tasks to the movement. “Change your floor,” for example. Or “isometrize the movement” or “extend everything” or “make illogical transitions”. We had a big piece of paper tacked to the wall with, eventually, 22 improvisational tasks we could use to explore the phrases. I’ve always been a little afraid of improvisation. I thought that doing an improvisation-based work would be a little like a nightmare in which you are dropped, naked, into the middle of a play you don’t know in a language you don’t understand. After working with Thomas, I still think improvising is a little frightening, but it’s also fascinating, and I can see how it can be thrilling and how it can nudge you away from getting stuck in the same habits of expression. Thomas described it as “real time choreography.” He said that it gives you the responsibility to create in that moment and that sometimes you might do amazing and wonderful things you could never think of ahead of time (he also said that sometimes you might feel like you’re making the worst choices and mucking everything up, though it might not be apparent to the audience).

We learned and performed excerpts from two pieces: The Questioning of Robert Scott (which was the improv-based piece) and Enemy in the Figure (which is much more set choreography). Robert Scott was really intimidating to me. There’s a set structure and you get phrases of movement to work with (“tuna” and “the hundreds”), but within the structure you have all these choices to make. I also had to read text into a microphone, a loud, belligerent speech that happens just as the music is ramping up. “And then we said, do you know what you are doing? And then we said, I do what works. And then we said, I use what I know.” On and on like that. It was a bit weird getting coached on how to say something, but after I got over being embarrassed about shouting in rehearsal, it was fun.

I loved Enemy as well. After Robert Scott, it seemed much less frightening and more a rollercoaster ride on really amazing, really challenging movement.

We also danced a movement from Jiri Kylian’s Whereabouts Unknown. It’s the allegro movement so it’s like ten minutes of non-stop big jumps at breakneck speed. Glenn Edgerton, who is one of my favourite people in the world, set the choreography on us. He and Thomas are both so generous with their knowledge and clear about how they express it. Actually, all the teachers at the Conservatory are like that, which is part of why it is such a great place.

Glenn and Chi rehearsing Psalms with Cameo, Kyle, and Victoria.

In the second four weeks we learned part of Kylian’s Symphony of Psalms (a ballet which I am in love with) and worked on new pieces with Alex Ketley and Christian Burns. I feel like the four week session helped me absorb all the information we were submersed in for the first six weeks. In particular, Alex made a very free-form piece with one section leading to the next based on cues that we gave each other and I felt much more comfortable and fluent after having done all the Forsythe work. Instead of being worried about what was going to happen next, I actually got excited about seeing how my choice to do such and such might effect someone else’s dancing. For Psalms we got thorough coaching from Glenn, Chiharu Shibata (ballet wonderwoman!), Alex, and Christian. It was interesting to see how much detail there is to carve out of a completely set piece of choreography… Extreme gear shift! As Christian said though, it’s a masterpiece of choreography set to a masterpiece of music, and the experience of dancing something like that is indescribable.

I feel like I’m exhausting my vocabulary of superlatives.

All this choreographic work came on top of very hard ballet classes (Summer’s, I think, were the hardest. By far. There was a combination she gave that had about 64 temps leves on ONE foot. I wanted to cry!). We even had a technique class that lasted three hours. Hard hard hard. By the end of the program, I was definitely tired out. It got so that every time I sat still for more than five minutes, I started to suffer from narcolepsy. But now that it’s over and I recuperated by spending almost a whole day sleeping, I’m already starting to miss it.

My friend Miguele took this photo. Our running joke was that I should save time and just sleep in some odd corner at the studios.

Anyway, that is what I have been up to lately. And now I’m going to go catch up on all the Winger activities that I’ve missed reading about.