On a recent cold evening, I went as an observer to a rehearsal for a Project: Motion
dance performance. My knowledge of dance is mostly limited to liking
Fred Astaire movies, so this had the potential to be a bona fide
learning experience.
Project: Motion has been an
often-overlooked bright light of the Memphis dance scene for 24 years.
One of the troupe's two founders, Judith Tribo Wombwell (rhymes with
"Cromwell"), is a former Memphian now living in Boston who came home to
choreograph a piece called "Integral." She was inspired to create the
piece four years ago when she returned to Memphis for Project: Motion's
20th anniversary. While Project: Motion dancers typically rehearse a
piece twice weekly for two to three months, this group had three, 3-hour
rehearsals to learn "Integral."
The five dancers—Rebecca Cochran, Louisa
Koeppel, Jenni Nettleton, Marquita Redd, and Erin D. H. Williams—all
showed up a few minutes early and began stretching. The dancers
chatted about Christmas food and argued over the pronunciation of
"poinsettia." The practice room, upstairs at the First Congo Church,
was comfortably warm, and everyone seemed relaxed.
Wombwell announced that it was time to
begin. The room went quiet as they all sat on the floor and she
demonstrated a complicated series of moves. To be honest, I wasn't
sure if this was a stretching exercise or the beginning of the actual
rehearsal. She went through the forty or so steps once, then said,
“OK, let's run through that.” She started some music, and the dancers
executed every single move. I was impressed; I'd lost track of the
sequence after about step two.
Wombwell watched them run through the
sequence of steps, then went around the group fine-tuning their moves
and giving pointers. There was a lot of rolling around on the floor; my
inner germophobe wanted to vicariously wash my hands.
I was struck by how aware the dancers
were of their bodies. “Think about your sitz bones relative to your
heels,” Wombwell said, sounding like a yoga instructor. ("Sitz bones"
are the bones in your butt that you sit on, I later learned.) "Spread
your toes on the floor.... Center on your belly button.... Drop your
pelvis...."
I'm not sure how to drop my pelvis, but I
found myself unconsciously trying to do what she said. For a moment I
thought it might be fun to try to do the moves along with the dancers,
but then I realized I have no desire to look that stupid in front of a
bunch of attractive women. I stayed in my corner, taking notes.
The dancers, unsurprisingly, had amazing
body control. They'd be doing some simple-looking moves, then someone
would do something that made me think for a moment the laws of physics
had stopped applying to her. I felt oafish and clumsy, a Labrador among
Greyhounds.
The dancers were very serious when the
rehearsal started, but before long they began to loosen up, smiling and
laughing and clearly enjoying themselves. The rehearsal consisted of
learning a bunch of different parts in non-sequential order, which will
be strung together later to create the final piece.
Falling was clearly a recurring motif of
the piece; at one point they did some trust-fall stuff, in which a
dancer lets herself fall over and another catches her. A few had some
trouble with it at first, and it was interesting to watch as they got
more comfortable with it, doing some fairly complicated interbalancing
work. Some seemed to find it a lot of fun, others less so.
The dancers were completely professional
throughout; even when they did some more vigorous work and were getting
flushed and sweaty, none complained or mentioned that it was difficult,
though I was getting tired just watching them. I got the feeling that
for one of them to complain would be a bit of a faux pas. The only
gripes I heard were a few dancers mentioning that the floor was a bit
sticky; they were all barefoot and I could occasionally hear a
painful-sounding squeak of skin on polished wood as they spun.
After an hour or so, they all got in
formation on the floor and ran through the opening of the piece. They
only did the first minute or two, and only an abridged version, but it
was neat to suddenly glimpse how the moves I'd been seeing out of
context were supposed to interact as the group worked in concert.
The whole thing was a lot more free-form
than I'd expected; I was surprised at how much leeway the dancers had
with their moves. Having seen A Chorus Line once, I'd figured
all choreographers were remote, demanding perfectionists, ruling by
intimidation and ready to erupt into emotional violence at any moment.
Everyone in the room was focused but having fun, talking and adapting
the work as they went. Wombwell circled the room, giving gentle
pointers along the lines of "try to keep this arm straight" or "take the
momentum of the turn into the leap, like this." Even to my untrained
eye, the changes she suggested were obvious aesthetic improvements.
I noticed that most of the dancers had bruises on their feet. I wondered briefly if Black Swan is going to be like this.
At one point Wombwell announced that they
were going to start working on “the crazy stuff” and I perked up. The
crazy stuff is really cool; the five dancers are arrayed around the
room, and various pairs of dancers do parallel steps for a bit, then
one of the pair freezes and another picks up where the frozen one left
off. In this way the movement gets gradually passed around the group: a
modern-dance version of Slacker. It's kind of dizzying and hyperkinetic, and it's really, really cool to watch.
While I was enjoying the work, I confess I
didn't really understand it at all until Wombwell said, "The concept
here is that you're all one person. You break up and come back
together. Whenever one of you leaves the group, it's confusing and
maybe a little scary." Breakthrough: The whole thing suddenly made
sense. They did one more run-through, and when they were finished
Wombwell shouted gleefully and clapped her hands. Everyone had smiles
all around as it came together. I'm pretty sure this was nothing like Black Swan.
The final production promises to be fascinating, and I definitely plan to see it. It will run February 18-20 at the Evergreen Theater on Poplar.