After 10 years of making trapeze works in collaboration with dancers it never ceases to amaze me how many ways new material emerges. Some of my favorite movement sequences come from accidents. By this I mean a dancer misunderstands what I've asked for and does something else I hadn't thought of or, a dancer tries to do what I asked but flubs it up and does something even better. This season our dancer Summer Tennyson had a finger injury so she couldn't grasp well with her strong hand. The result was 2-fold: she gained strength in her weaker hand and she came up with some amazing material that utilized elbow hangs instead of hand grips. So my favorite move from our new Streams piece is derived from her injury, not something from me at all.
Since the world just lost Merce Cunningham it is wonderful to find ways to continue his legacy of creating moves and movement sequences through random events. I will look for more random events that happen in our rehearsal process this summer and report on what we discover. Do you have random events that deliver wonderful surprises?
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