Ivy Boudreau

Ivy Boudreau Spring 2015 CO-CREATORS OF A MOVING WORLD: Co-Choreographing at a Collegiate Level Welcome to Dance 301: Group Composition course Group Composition is a highly interactive course designed to give us a “toolbox” from which we can draw in our work as young choreographers creating new dances. Much of the class time is spent in hands-on experiences designed to bring choreographic theories and concepts alive - for example, we did an exercise at the beginning of the semester that was meant both to illustrate the importance of using “motifs” (short phrases or gestures repeated throughout a dance) and to give us a strategy for choreographing new material. In this exercise, we each mimed a familiar, everyday activity such as brushing hair, applying makeup, or getting out of bed, and then abstracted the movement into danced phrases over the course of the nest few class periods. Giving us the information and then telling us, “Okay, you have ten minutes to come up with a phrase - go!” was an extremely effective way to get us to forget our trepidation and self-conscious tendencies and just go for it. Dance is such a kinesthetic experience that, although we had some assigned readings from textbooks, to truly learn the material we needed to actually do it and experience it in our own bodies, working through our own trial-and-error processes. Another important component of our Group Composition classes is feedback sessions, which involve watching our peers’ choreographic work and then sharing thoughts, ideas, and constructive criticism. These happened at almost every class period, and were a wonderful time to share ideas, learn whether our ideas were being transmitted effectively through our choreography, and, if they were not, what changes we could make to clarify the message. Documentary Toward the beginning of the semester, our professors showed us a documentary by Werner Herzog called “From One Second to the Next”. We watched the documentary together in class and later worked on short choreography projects inspired by what we had seen, and the entire process was probably the most honest, soul-baring experience we had as a class. We’re all aware of the statistics surrounding texting and driving, but coming face-to-face with the real horrors it has brought to the lives of real people was earth-shattering. Additionally, even though not all of us had lost people to car crashes, we could all connect in some way to the pain and loss of the people featured in the documentary. Many memories of losing or almost losing someone important were brought up that day, and the vulnerability we all felt in that very emotional place was tangible. However, so was the trust we all feel for one another. For me personally, one of the most powerful aspects of the film was the inclusion of interviews with the people who had caused the accidents. There is a tendency to demonize these people, dismiss them as heartless and careless individuals who thoughtlessly ruin others’ lives, but the reality is that most of them are everyday people just like you and I who made a small, simple decision that could have affected no one, but ended up destroying multiple lives in both the literal and figurative senses of the phrase - including their own. Herzog’s film showed the pain, heartbreak, and guilt of those who had caused the accidents - they are fully aware that they made a terrible choice to text and drive, and the knowledge that they killed another person, took another person’s beloved parent, child, spouse, friend, is an awful, heartrending reality they have to live with every day. This aspect of the film was the part that Claire and I chose to focus on when we received our concert dance assignment. For this assignment, the class was divided into pairs with a few people working individually, and we were given the option of coming up with a new concept or continuing to work with ideas we had gleaned from the documentary to explore in a longer choreographic work. Beginning of process (song choice, class feedback, etc) In all of my previous choreographic work I (we?) had worked directly from a specific piece of music, and that was how we began our process. We selected our music - “Car Radio” by twentyone pilots, and had no intention to change until the class showing and the discussion that followed. Even though we both enjoy working with music that has lyrics and can see the artistic value in it, we decided to take a risk and place our choreography against music that had an entirely different sound from our original selection. After we made that choice, ideas really began to flow and the piece began to take form. ​ ​It was so interesting to me that the same choreography took on an even deeper meaning when paired with different music, and I realized that this is something I would like to explore further.​ ​We both agreed that we probably could not have come up with the choreography and concepts that we did without the original music, so that choice became a very integral part of our creative process. Process of collaboration - struggles, compromises, rewards Collaborating on a piece of choreography was an interesting, sometimes challenging, and ultimately very rewarding experience. It definitely helped me learn that I can’t become too attached to any part of my choreography, and that something that made perfect sense to me wasn’t always going to make sense to everybody else. Again, these were things I knew in my mind but didn’t actually sink in until I experienced them in a situation where I was working closely with another person and couldn’t avoid addressing them. One of the greatest challenges for us was figuring out which parts of the piece were literal and which were abstract. We agreed that we wanted both viewpoints present, as the world is full of that sort of duality, but for a time neither of us were clear on which specific parts of the piece were literal and which were abstract. Hearing feedback from our peers and professors after revisiting the piece toward the end of the semester was incredibly helpful in clarifying these questions. We had been away from the piece for such a long time, and learning more and more information from our later work in class, that returning to it was somewhat daunting. However, we were able to work through our newfound information, disagreements, and input from our peers to create a piece that I think we’re both pretty happy with. It’s far from being a perfect piece of choreography, and I know that both of us would have had a completely different approach if we were choreographing it now after completing the course, but that’s okay. The important thing was the process of working together in a place of sometimes extreme vulnerability to create a piece of art that no one else could have created. We put our souls into it, we cared deeply enough about the piece to argue for our own vision, and we learned a little more about working together and becoming mature, open-minded artists. It was a difficult, emotionally vulnerable, and ultimately incredibly rewarding experience that will continue to inform my artistic choices in the years to come, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to share it with all of you.