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It has now been a few weeks since the premier of my first full-length solo work, Ankle Deep Water (ADW). I wanted to take a little bit of time to unpack the creative process that went into creating this work. I found that creating a solo on myself was vastly different to creating work on other people. Images, video, and journal notes will be used to assist in understanding the process.
The Opening Section
The start of the work was influenced by the movement of water and how one might move in water. This movement was created by tasking* the phrase "wading through water". I imagined a weight around my ankles that influenced the way I was using my legs. I used movements akin to delicately dipping a toe into the water. I used my arms and upper body to embody a current. I then began to imagine that my lungs were full of water, but I wasn't drowning. This brought a heaviness to the upper body, a struggle, a push and pull. It also brought a sense of desperation; a feeling akin to fighting against a strong current. This set the framework for the movements seen in the opening of ADW.
I originally wrote an exposition to be read in lieu of music for this section. See below.
However, pairing the movement with the text, simply did not feel right. The next step was to consider how to better place the scene. I wanted the audience to be able to envision that I was literally standing with water around my ankles. This lead to the use of a soundscape of a flowing river. The sound of running water also influenced the way that I moved. I felt more fluid in the upper body, simultaneously feeling heavier in the feet and ankles.
*Tasking is when a concept, phrase, or scene is presented by the choreographer, and then the dancer takes these concepts and builds a phrase around them. It is fairly common practice in contemporary dance and makes the process more collaborative.
The Spoken Word Section
After experimenting with the use of text in the opening section, I was inspired to bring it into a different part of the work. I went back to a passage I had written in June of 2020 about my relationship.
I started by memorising the passage and editing out sentences to make it more succinct. I then began to add movements to flow with the words as they were being spoken. I added a rule that whenever a person was speaking directly in the text, that I would not move. This was intended to give quoted language more impact. I broke this self-imposed rule once towards the end of the section; it felt right that way. I have included video footage of rehearsal this section.
As you may have noticed from the video, this section was quite emotional for me. I felt that it revealed just enough personal information that people would be able to tell that it was coming from a true place, whilst also being vague enough that people would be able to place themselves within the narrative. I felt that it perfectly set up the remainder of the show. The trick to performing this section was to not over-rehearse it. I wanted the emotions to feel real, and if I had practiced it too often, I felt the words would lose their punch and I would be forced to dramatise it on stage. The other important thing was to make sure I believed what I was saying, which I think it's clear that I do from the above video.
Wandering Jane Section
This section plays directly off the spoken word section. I started with the piece of music that had originally been paired with the final section of the work. I took the movements that had been generated in the previous section and improvised using those movements as a framework. I have attached another rehearsal video below:
If you observe that video and then go and watch the finished product, you'll notice how similar they are. It rarely happens that moments improvised in rehearsal end up in the finished product so unchanged. I believe the reason it worked so well here, was that I was already in the right emotional headspace from having just rehearsed the spoken section.
The movement that came out in the improvisation felt real and honest. They were an embodiment of the words that had been spoken. I also wanted to show that sometimes moments that feel safe at the time, can be twisted by mental illness into something ugly. Some of the movements became overwhelmed with tension. Even the "I love you" motion (directly influenced by sign language), which in the spoken section has the energy of a hug, of holding something tight, becomes an aggressive beating of the chest that knocks the air out of my lungs. The section ends with an exhausted collapse to the floor, which I feel became a motif throughout the work.
Trauma Dream Section
This was one of the most challenging sections for me to create, because of the large emotional toll it took. Trauma dreams are one of the things that affect me most on a regular basis. In these dreams I am often being attacked by various animals or being betrayed by people I trust. I wanted to capture this and the desperate nature of not being in control, of not being able to wake up from this nightmare.
I originally started creating this section with a task focused on traditionally nightmarish scenes; clowns, haunted dolls, etc. I would create a short phrase for each "creature" and then jump to the next one to represent the distorted nature of dreams. This occurred at the end of a rehearsal. The next week when I went to resume working on this section, what I had created felt disingenuous. It was important to me to represent that often PTSD causes "irrational fears". This meant that the things that people might normally be scared of were not fitting for my journey. Instead I did another improvisation and pulled out the moments that felt the most visceral. I then created an open score for these moments, which would make up the majority of the section. An open score allowed me to decide on which moment would come next based on how I felt. This meant that the performance was slightly different each time. I felt that this helped me include the way that dreams are often random and disconnected. One of the challenges in the way this section was created, was that often I would finish at different times in the music. To combat this, the final part was the embodiment of a panic attack. I would draw this out as needed to fill the music. The longer it went on, the more uncomfortable the audience would become which made the lightheartedness of the next section more effective.
Woke Up From A Dream Section (Aka Boogie)
The defining feature of this section was the relief and reprieve from all of the heaviness of the rest of the work. The motivation here was to show the positive impact that therapy has had on my life. It started with the music pulling me out of the panic attack at the end of the previous section. The piece of music used, Woke Up From A Dream by The Paper Kites, is from an album that I have frequently used to calm myself down. This section was largely improvised, drawing inspiration from different therapy techniques that had helped me; EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), and a tapping technique to help calm anxiety.
After feeling better from therapy, I feel joyful enough to dance around and respond to the music in a positive manner. This is also the section where, with advice from my MA mentor, I engaged the audience by encouraging them to clap along with me. The idea behind this was as follows:
In my studies I had come across a few feminist scholars who suggested that the audience/performer relationship is inherently gendered; that the audience is in a masculine position to accept or reject the performer, while the performer is in a feminine position. I wanted to challenge this power dynamic by making the audience "perform" in a sense. When they joined in, they were no longer passive observers and therefore no longer in an inherently masculine position.
I will be writing more about this throughout my studies, so stay tuned.
The End Section
The final section of the work was the first part I choreographed. It was originally going to be basically the whole work as part of the double bill. As a consequence it felt like it really encapsulated the whole purpose of the work. Again, to create the movement for this section I started with an improvisation:
Then, with the assistance of a friend, we went through and pulled out the "good" bits from this improvisation and created a phrase that became the base for this section.
We used this same process again a few weeks later to continue to develop the choreography. A few things came as a result of this process. Firstly, I found myself explaining what each movement meant to my friend and collaborator, and how it related to my mental health. And secondly, we discovered that the focus on the breath, which later became a motif throughout, without music was an effective way to show the erratic nature of breath in relation to anxiety.
The aim of this section, as the conclusion of the piece, was to show that despite therapy and the fact that my mental health has improved, it is still a struggle. There is a battle against gravity and against my own mind that underpins this section. There are moments of hope and elevation followed by moments of frustration and struggle. The scream originally came from the improvisation and stayed throughout the process. It felt like the release of frustration at my situation. I think it also left the audience with a sense of unease. I hope they understood that there is always more work to be done, and that despite how someone might present on the surface, there is always other things happening on the inside.
That's it. You made it. If you want to read more about this show, you can head to the previous blog post to read the program notes, or head to the video collection to watch the film of the full work.
If you have any questions for me, please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.