By Ashley Ferro-Murray, doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
It has been one full week since I flew from New York, NY to meet my dancers in person in Berkeley, California. As I discussed in my first post, everything from our auditions to rehearsals was conducted remotely until last week.
Our first live moments were quite awkward. We had awaited the meeting for so long and felt such intimacy online, but when I approached the dancers for the first time in person we weren’t sure what to do. There were some forced smiles and big hugs, but we weren’t quite sure how to move together in the same physical space. The awkwardness fell away quite quickly, but I’ve allowed for that initial moment to linger. The in person awkwardness was so representative of our practice, which had worked quite well online. We had planned for the online process to fail, but it never really did. It was only fitting that the long awaited live meeting – that which would undoubtedly make everything even better – would also let down some of our high expectations.
What I found when I arrived in Berkeley last week was a dance that I structured, but one that my performers had choreographed. They had taken all that we worked on over the computer and filled it with their movement personalities. Since I wasn’t in Berkeley to dictate intricate details that were invisible to the online eye, each dancer had taken the liberty to fill in the gaps. This led to delicate distinctions between each dancers’ movements and created a personal texture in the dance. I could have never choreographed this work if I had been here, physically, and I think that the dancers learned a great deal about their own individual movement styles that they may not have discovered otherwise.
MOOCing? premieres this Thursday, April 17 at the UC Berkeley Zellerbach Playhouse at 8:00 pm. For tickets, visit: http://tdps.berkeley.edu/events/berkeley-dance-project-2014-intimate-distance/
There will also be a pre-show conversation on Thursday, April 17 in Zellerbach Hall 170 at 5:30 pm.
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