Choreographic Evening 08/03/2016

Every year, the Opera organizes a choreographic evening where it gives the artists of the company the wonderful opportunity to be creative and choreograph a piece on your fellow dance coworkers. What a great chance to let your imagination flow for once and your  personality to shine through your own choreography. As members of the company we are always expected to follow a certain choreography of the ballet with the acquired style that is required by the era of the ballet, ie. Romantic, new-classical, or the choreographer himself. So to be given this opportunity, you get to create your own rules, your own style and steps. I feel that as an artist, training your imagination and creativity is just as important as picking up choreograph and executing steps. I personally don't feel fulfilled as an artist if I just had to do what I was told, so to get to create a piece for my own company with some beautiful dancers, I feel lucky. I love music. I find that on my spare time if I have my headphones on I will unconsciously be improvising steps in my brain and it's as if I see it happening in real life. I have been asked before 'how do you come up with steps?' , to which I replied, the music makes me feel the way I should move. I imagine the dancers moving as it it was a movie which is why I find sometimes my choroegraphies seem have a theatrical touch. I like to see the dancers personality come through to the audience. A choreography can be simply for pleasure, however, you find that it can be so much more than that. I like the audience to feel something, whether it is joy, confusion, sensitivity or thought. I am also a person that needs to connect with the dancers and make sure they feel comfortable with what they will be bringing up on stage. 

This year I had the great pleasure to choreograph a duet on two dances and friends of mine, Rachelle Bergstrom and Egoitz Segura. the story is about a complicated relationship between a woman and her husband who has forgotten what love means. The woman finds herself obsessing over her invisiblility to him, leading her to foolish madness; to the point that she is forced to test if there is even a drop of care left for her to save her for driving herself crazy. Them dancing together opens up an explosion of memories and emotions that had been left untouched for what it feels like, years. The piece ends with an outburst of laughter from them both reminiscing on the best memories they had shared together, finally leading the woman into tears from the pain realizing what they had lost. 

Creating a story has been a new challenge for me, as I am used to abstract work. However the music had really spoken to me from the moment I very first listened to it. With the score of Alexander Balanescu (a Romanian composer) and the voice of a legendedary singer of Romania called Maria Tanasse, who's story seems to have written down history for the Romanian people. Of course, being a non Romanian, I had no idea how significant to music was to the country and how popular it would be. The lyrics are also Romanian, however I wanted to let the music speak to me and let the emotions direct me in my choreography rather than the direct meaning of the words. Finding out that this piece of music was so well known just a week before the performance, I can't say I wasn't nervous. I was, as I knew that choosing such a popular song with the crowd, I would have to do a good job in making it justice. I believe that perhaps it was better I didn't know as I didn't allow myself to restrictions. 

The process of the creating 'Absent Knights' (that is the name of the piece) and working with the dancers was an absolute delight. Part of the biggest pleasure is seeing how the piece evolves and how the dancers put there hearts in the choreography. It is vital to work with dancers who are open to any suggestions and are willing to try and fail so that then we can all together come up with a good result at the end. I like to connect with the dancers. I like to know that they want to be a part of this and I want them to feel comfortable. Comfortable with me and the choreography. 

So in Monday was the big day of performance, the excitement was present in all the dancers and choreographers and I feel like it was a very successful evening for all of us!! I'm hoping to share some clips with you from the rehearsal process of the choreography and some pictures from performance soon :)