Kedja, Wednesday 3 September - Now with text...

Day 3

“The workshop investigates the choreographic material in relation to compositional and structural strategies of music and develops as a dialogue between the two art-forms (…) A series of challenges and tasks look at the development of structure, rule, improvisation and technique within the choreographic work.10 choreographers and 20 dancers experiment, research and challenge the parameters supplied by the music”.

Wednesday 3 Sep. 11.30-13.00
As I join the workshop, the dancers and choreographers have been working for two days – Kim Brandstrup has been given the participants a daily task, allowing them to work with the musical structure in the choreographic work. This way of working with structure and “rules” is likely to be quite challenging for the modern choreographers, especially if they are used to work within a frame of “free structure” – like developing movements from a feeling/movement/moment/tone/atmosphere – without any specific rules...
When it comes to modern dance, the starting point often tends to be open and “free”, there are not necessarily any given frame – here however, the challenge is to work with a given structure, and within that, explore the opportunities that lies in the relation and connection between music and dance.
The counting part is an important tool this Wednesday morning – it is not the musicality of the music, but the structure of the music that demands attention.

This morning, Kim Brandstrup starts by giving them a task:

The task is to follow and work with the counts:
9 9 1 2 2 7 9 6 6 4 4 4 8 1 2 2 3 5.

They all look a bit tired – some facial expressions seem to be saying – “we have more than enough to think about and work with...”
But given the task and approaching it - energy appears – the body and the (calculating) mind begins working together and with that, the facial expressions loosens up – the body starts moving – the choreographers fingers starts clicking: ” And a one, two, three... ”

The key task – is to follow the exact count – the choreographers counts – the dancers move – the movements somehow becomes secondary in the process – the important thing is to follow the count – The movement itself is very much the dancers task to develop and explore – the choreographers task is to make sure the movement is filling out the count. Somehow the dance material seem to come naturally – the focus is not whether the arm is bend or stretched, but if its follows the structure of the music.

The main challenge for the choreographers seem to bee to abandon their traditional way of working with choreography, or at least the most common one– and to find a whole new angle in approaching the work.

The techniques of modern dance are clearly dominating, but the use of dynamics, tempo and levels is different from group to group. They work - concentrated – for 45 minutes, exploring ways of filling out the counts - without music – then the music comes on... a new challenge seems ahead of them…

After the showing of the individual work, the choreographers are asked to respond on today’s task.

Some would have liked the music on from the beginning. Kim responds that the choices they made in the process where independent of the music. When there where not influenced by the music from the beginning, they explored new ways of working in order to create and develop dance – the structure was clear from the beginning, and thereby the choreographers where given the opportunity to develop material from a different perspective.

Some said they needed more time, some thought of it as a positive thing: No time to think – just work.

As an observer, I was quite impressed by the material they managed to establish in such short time – The level of concentration was high. There where not much time to explore, but it didn’t matter – the task was successfully accomplished, and the relation between dance and music was clearly there – even though they had not been working with the music - the structure itself was enough to create a fulfilled interaction between those components.

The Afternoon
In the afternoon the groups worked separately in different locations. Two days ago Kim Helweg and Kim Brandstrup had given them different pieces of music to choose from, and from those, one piece was picked out.

During the next couple of days the choreographers will be working with the structure of the music as well as the tools and techniques discovered from the morning classes, in order to develop choreography for a final showing on Saturday, of approximately 3-5 minutes each.

The challenge that follows the choreographers differs from person to person – from background to background.
For some, this as a whole new way of working with the interaction between dance and music - others are already familiar with this approach.
Some are very focused on the counting – waiting to put on the music, others are more focusing on trying out movement material that fits the structure, while others uses the music as main tool for getting along with the process. Some work are very specific and technical, others more based on the free movement and improvisation.

It is quite interesting to observe how the 10 choreographers choose to approach the task. Clearly they all have their own individual ways of getting into and ahead of the choreographic work – but for most of them this task demands new ways of thinking in the process of developing dance. The ultimate “freedom” is taken away, and replaced with a set of “rules” which complements their former knowledge and choreographic approach.
How this will grow and hopefully open new doors for each of them, will be revealed over the next couples of days…