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I'm going solo. I'm interested in choreographing a series of self-portraits for my next project. The last two works I've choreographed and performed have been solos. And they've felt like the tip of the iceberg. Do you know how that goes? Making a dance, or a work of art, that, once performed, shared, feels like it's just the beginning. It feels like there are many other dances underneath it, ready to emerge, each one a bird in a flock of something vast and so fleeting that one knows they have to tap into it before it leaves them.
Whew.
So yeah, I'm interested in self-portraits in the visual arts and how that translates in dance. As a painter, say, one usually at some point in their career paints a self-portrait. And oftentimes they paint more than one. I was struck by the Rembrandt self-portrait a few weeks ago. His eyes held so much of what he'd seen in his life, and perhaps in other lives. {For me, there was a depth in the painting that felt connected to a spirit world.}
I started out making solos when I decided I wanted to be a choreographer. It's when I arrived at the Ohio State University to pursue my M.F.A. in dance that I took on group work. I'd made group works before, but always in a collaborative way. To choreograph "on" other dancers had never been an interest of mine. But I suppose that lack is related to the fact that dancing "for" other choreographers has never been an interest of mine, either. {Well, to be fair, it's been a lot of fun dancing in Set/Reset by Trisha Brown, Bebe Miller's Hendrix and some other fabulous dances.}
But back to the solo form. I believed that you were not a real choreographer if you didn't choreograph on a group of dancers. Someone, somewhere told me that and I believed it. I came to OSU thinking I had to make dances "on" dancers to be a legitimate choreographer. And I did. And it has been good.
Now, however, I'm writing more and more, working on poems and stories again, and I'm gathering much inspiration from female artists, particularly visual artists, and females as portrayed in art. I'm not sure why, and I don't want to know why, nor write about why here.
What I did want to share is the notion of the solo in dance and how it can often be perceived as just the self dancing around, or how it can be perceived as so hard to choreograph because it's just you. And I'm curious about that because for me solo dances have always felt like a way to not have to be myself in performance. They've allowed me to be something else more universal, a character-based figure of a woman, an old man, a child - whatever I'm exploring. They've been a way for me to call on the spirit world, I suppose, in some way and channel voices not my own, in the same way a writer waits and listen for the voices of his/her characters to come through onto the page.
This is what I'm interested in exploring these days as a choreographer.
And you? Solo to group, self-portrait to landscape - which do you prefer and why?
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