Meditations on Metamorphosizing

The first time I ever saw Mordine & Company Dance Theater perform was a couple years ago at The Ruth Page Center for the Arts. I was relatively new to Chicago and its dance world and I had only performed for a few smaller companies. I was struggling to find myself and to find that company that would help push my dancing to the next level. As I sat in the auditorium and saw Mordine & Company’s “LifeSpeak” I had no idea that a year and a half later I would be one of those dancers on the stage performing that same piece. I had no clue as to how difficult the piece was, or of how hard Shirley would make me work. All I knew sitting in that audience was that I wanted to dance like those dancers on stage.  They were so aware of their bodies and how they worked. They were all unique and not a single one outshined the other. They seemed so honest and I wanted to be just like them. Now that I am part of the company and learning “LifeSpeak” myself, I feel I am nothing like those dancers who I watched before, but I am getting closer to discovering my own voice in each rehearsal. 

The new piece we are creating now is called “All at Once/Acts of Renewal” and deals with many ideas, but the one that resonates with me the most is the idea of transformation. We have been exploring that moment just before you transform, and discovering that it is full of frustration, stress and difficulty. And when finally break through that wall of resistance, you become something else—a new version of yourself that still contains elements from your past.

Throughout this process of working on the new piece Shirley has asked us many times to take movement phrases we have created and transform them. We’ve explored how these phrases are affected by others moving in the space, we’ve pushed the movements to a place outside our comfort zone, and we’ve played with minimizing the movement to get down to the essence of the phrase. Through these exercises I have learned so much about my voice as a dancer, and I feel that I have a much clearer idea of what I want to say and how my body feels portraying those ideas.  But I have also realized that through working with Shirley the past year and a half that she has helped me transform my dancing (and by extension, myself) into a new person.  One that is less wary of venturing beyond predetermined boundaries and is unafraid of new experiences yet to come, but who also contains part of her old self and knows and respects where she came from. There were some difficulties and frustrations before I let myself change, and I am sure there are more ahead of me. However, I’m certain that the process of transformation is what I found to be so inspiring about those Mo & Co dancers that I saw onstage in the past.  And with hard work and willingness to evolve, I hope that in the future I can encourage someone else like those dancers inspired me.

-Stacy DeMorrow, Company Dancer

Journal Entry #2 by Bryan Saner

This is the second entry in a series of commentaries written by Bryan Saner, the Associate Artistic Director of Mordine & Co. about the rehearsal process for "I Haven't Gone There."


March 22, 2010

We talked about satire in rehearsal today.
My Oxford dictionary suggests that the etymology of the word is closely related to satura.

“This general sense appears in the phrase per saturam . . .according to the grammarians this is elliptical for lanx satura ( lit ‘full dish’: lanx dish, satura, fem of satur full, related to satis enough) which is alleged to have been used for a dish containing various kinds of fruit and for food composed of many different ingredients.”

I like the reference to enough. Satire functions as a way of stopping insanity. As if we are saying Enough! Basta! and the legitimate way to do this with our bodies is to mock the thing we are opposing. I like the layers that are developing through multiple ingredients that accumulate in satire. One action tells many stories.


In later definitions The Oxford quotes Goldwater Smith in the Feb. 19, 1880 edition of the Atlantic Monthly :

“There are different kinds of satire: the epicurean, which laughs at mankind. . . the stoical which indignantly lashes mankind, . . the cynical, which hates and despises mankind.”

The Epicureans, Stoics and Cynics in their time (4th and 3rd century BCE) were well respected philosophers, citizens and political groups who provided important structure to Greek culture. We still value these communities although we relegate them to comedians, clowns and angry activists. Maybe dancers and performance artists could be counted in the group. These groups still provide important structure to contemporary culture but the impact is so subtle compared to the power of corporate influence and drones exploding silently and invisibly in other countries.

Our rehearsals of repetition and repetition and again and again, of actions and individual routine, of words and movements that accumulate in our bodies must have some reason for being. How can we spend so many minutes, hours and days on these details that perform in a second? How empowered those seconds are. Our cells are supercharged with the memory of these movements. This is how our habits are programmed into the body until we are a full. This is how we reprogram the body out of its habits when we have had enough.