Last Thursday, our class watched John Jasperse’s dance rehearsal. I am really grateful for this unique opportunity that we may not have had outside of this class. Although the dancers are “vulnerable”, like Prof. Uchizono mentioned, because they make mistakes, they really allowed me to see the process behind making a dance. There was no imaginary “fourth wall” which separates the audience and the performers like in show.
Reading the syllabus beforehand which said “John Jasperse’s dance rehearsal”, somehow I imagined in my mind that we would just be watching one person. Instead, we watched three people working together: Simone and Stuart, the two dancers, and Jasperse, the choreographer. I saw how important communication and collaboration was. Jasperse paid much attention to detail, correcting Simone and Stuart on little things such as moving the head counterclockwise/clockwise or a part where they were out of sync. He also demonstrated, for example, the specific movement and shape of the hand, and the placement of the foot. Although I didn’t notice these small things until they were pointed out, I did notice the difference between the subsequent and previous practice. Each time, Simone and Stuart would have better timing and would parallel each other even more smoothly. At the same time, Jasperse asked the dancers how to make the performance better and was really open to their ideas. For example, sometimes he let them explore and try new moves that could be incorporated into the dance.
Seeing this rehearsal, even though it could end up totally different from the real performance in May, helped put an image to the words of the project description. By just reading the project description, I had really no idea what the dance would look like. Although this was a proposal for a grant written many months ago, I still saw many of the themes he discussed in the rehearsal. The main focus was on emergence, how “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. This really clicked for me when he made the analogy he made in the project description about 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen combining to form water. He mentions that he wanted to work with people with different experiences and perspectives from each other and himself. From hearing them talk, we could tell that Simone had more traditional training, i.e. ballet, whereas Stuart had more modern training. Perhaps this is the “native vs foreign contrast” he refers to. Also on that note, he boils the dance down to its simple movements, such as assigning them to different letters of the alphabet. I thought it really interesting how he adds some randomness by using the first sentence of his contract to shape the dance.
Jasperse also discusses how the composer for his pieces, Jonathan Bepler, is able to combine many different sounds into one composition. The dancers performed the same set of dance moves with two different soundtracks. The first was a slow, relaxing piece probably used to help the dancers feel a beat, whereas the second consisted of talking and whispering, kind of like background noise, which was probably the real soundtrack. From seeing this, I really noticed the effect of music on dance moves. The former made me more focused, anticipating the next movement with the beat. The latter, although interesting, sometimes drew my attention away from the dancers during the higher pitched and faster parts of the music. The second set of dance moves with a different soundtrack contrasted the previous ones. The music felt like pop and was very upbeat, which really fit the energetic, almost like a workout nature of the movements.
Ultimately, my experience watching Jasperse’s dance rehearsal with Simone and Stuart can really be summed up with the following quote. In the words of the great poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Life (or in this case dance) is a journey, not a destination.”
~Erica Kwong (Blog B)
