Blood, Sweat...and Sometimes, Tears

by Simone Baechle, Company Member and Interim Managing Director 

Dancing for Shirley Mordine is a truly singular experience. As Jan Erkert, head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, states in the acknowledgments for her book Harnessing the Wind: “Shirley Mordine opened my world to weight and space even though it took tears to get there.” It may be cliché, but if the process is easy, it’s rarely worth one’s time.

There are days when I’ll leave the studio with a sense of accomplishment and pride. Shirley asks a lot of her dancers—being able to fully express a movement idea is a real achievement. There are other rehearsals when I’ll feel frustrated and stunted. The most disheartening aspects of these rehearsals, though, is that Shirley is rarely wrong. She never misses a beat. It’s purely my responsibility to “step up my game.”

Sometimes I feel like I can’t stop over-thinking things, or that I’m having trouble breaking my predictable movement patterns, or that I’m failing to connect with my partner. Lesser choreographers might not care about these nuances. Lesser dancers might get defensive, or choose not to work on these skills. This is what makes working with Shirley Mordine so gratifying. Even though it may seem like a lot to handle, we become greater performers by learning how to integrate all aspects of our bodies and utilize all tools of our craft for the task at hand. Shirley is authentically invested in each company member’s evolution into a fully realized movement artist.

Every Mo & Co piece is conceived holistically- not just in terms of the choreography, but in terms of the whole experience. Lighting, set design, soundscores, visual projections, text—Shirley frequently works with all of these. It is an honor to work with someone whose vision, not just of how the steps should function, but of how the whole aesthetic sensibility should coalesce, is so complete. 

Mo & Co is Back on the Move!

Woah! An exclamation is the only fitting way I can think of to begin this post. It has been quite awhile since this blog has been updated, and a lot has been going on in Mordine & Company Dance Theater. Without sounding too businesslike, my objectives for this post are: 1.) To inform readers about the goings-on of the company as a whole 2.) To introduce myself and give some insight into a dancer’s perspective on the process.

The biggest shift in the company has been its composition—Shirley is working with an entirely new cast of characters. Have you met the new dancers yet? I suggest you check out our “Company Bios” page to learn about Melissa Pillarella, Katie Jean Dahlaw, Stacy (DeMorrow) Miller, Danielle Gilmore, Mary Kate Sickel, and myself, Simone Baechle.

Since the beginning of October, we’ve been creating material for our April 14 collaboration with Natya Dance Theater. This one-night-only event will take place at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, and will be performed by a cast of 6 Natya dancers and 6 Mo & Co Dancers. Our December 4 event “Fete Champagne” will give the audience a glimpse of the company’s movement sketches in progress.

The main themes of our collaboration (from my perspective, at least) are: marginality, resistance, and immigration/transmigration. What if you can’t find a place to call home in a new and confusing landscape? How does it feel to be denied a voice, an opportunity, a chance to interact? How do you react to being excluded from the majority? Wisely, Shirley has chosen to have the dancers physically respond to these topics as individuals, rather than try to create some sort of overblown, generalized opus about cultural experiences (as less seasoned choreographers might do). In our discussions as a company, we realized that our myriad backgrounds—as second generation Americans or as children profoundly removed from our immigrant descendants, as women who live near or far from our parents, as bold trailblazers or gentle coax-ers of change—would contribute to a much denser narrative than anything that someone could “set” on us.

I cannot speak to how Shirley’s inspirations for this collaboration may evolve. However, I can shed some light on process as I have come to understand it, and I can share the jumble of thematically relevant ideas that have crossed my consciousness: the young Indian immigrant protagonists in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, a radio story I heard on NPR about a lack of any IDs/government records for many impoverished individuals in the southeast US (this article on voter IDs illustrates a tangential issue), my personal experiences working for a company that was male-dominated, the poetry of Yeats and T.S. Eliot (wasn’t WWI truly the catalyst for the next 100 years of universal cultural turmoil?). These are just a smattering of images that I have begun to draw upon as a movement artist.

I’d like to conclude this blog post with a recollection that is more personal and concrete than the aforementioned jumble. As first 7 or so summers of my life, my parents and I would visit Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo reservations. My family’s trek via minivan from NJ to the southwest seemed to be a meditation on these ancient people’s pre-Columbian journey via landbridge from Eurasia to the Americas. Whereas my parents and I did not have strong ties to our German/Irish heritage, these pilgrimages gave me an invaluable sense of scope about the rich anthropology of our country.

While I don’t remember a lot of details about these trips, I do have a lot of visceral memories of how the warm, dry desert air felt on my skin as a reclined on the minivan’s back seat; how the trees in Bryce Canyon smelled like a heavenly mixture of vanilla, pine, and cedar; and how the earthen pueblos were punctuated with doors of bright turquoise (which is still my favorite color to this day). At one point, my family and I were invited to watch a Hopi homecoming ceremony. One of the dancers, whirling with an otherworldly speed, slowly slowed down and separated herself from the circle. She reverently swayed to the drumbeat as she moved toward me. To my astonishment, she presented me with a corn maiden Kachina doll. The rich movement that I witnessed during this ritual and the generous spirit of these people has been an influencing factor in my decision to become a dancer. I look forward to drawing upon more memories like this as Mo & Co continues its movement exploration.

If you can't wait til April (and why should you?!?), then join us on December 4^th at Fete Champagne for a sneak peek- 5pm at Architectural Artifacts in Ravenswood. Make sure to RSVP to marketing@mordine.org- the event is FREE and features champagne and small bites.

Peace, Love, and Plies,

Simone Baechle

Comments on Rehearsal Process of LifeSpeak

Jim Manganello has been observing the rehearsal process of the creation of Mordine & Co.'s newest work, LifeSpeak, over the past two months. The following are his personal thoughts on the process.

I came to Mordine & Company as a theater guy who doesn’t know fifth position from fourth or releve’ from tiptoes. Having been deeply effected by I Haven’t Gone There Yet at the Epiphany Church, I asked Shirley if I could be around for her next rehearsal process. Talking a couple times over the summer, before rehearsals began, I was delighted to learn about Shirley’s deeply theatrical sense. True theater consists of real bodies creating something in real time—bodies both on stage and in the audience—and the total production depends as much on the imagination of the spectator as on the behavior of the performer. I was even more delighted to hear that the new Mordine & Co. piece would be built around stories and storytelling. We theater folk are in the business of stories.



Stories do not pre-exist the telling of them. Events occur, but the stories that we make are something rather different than the event we describe. A story is an event in itself. It might be a method of coping, of making sense of a situation that’s otherwise destructive or merely disorganized. It might be a necessary lie that allows us to move forward. In our theatrical context, storytelling is a performance. And that performance does something, both for the dancer and for the audience. Shirley is encouraging her dancers to move their storytelling away from a mere imitation of the event they’re describing—a personal tragedy, a family drama, a camping trip gone awry—and towards a creative response to that isolated event. This is a shift that’s often forgotten in theater. Especially in the Western dramatic tradition, we too often ask how we can emulate events that occur outside the theater and too seldom consider what can only happen via performance, and therefore why theater’s necessary at all.



The risk of doing a piece about stories is that the dancers will start emulating, that they’ll demonstrate what happened in the extensional world rather than produce a really creative act. But Shirley has turned that temptation into a productive challenge: she has challenged her performers to consider some literal story and to trust that they can dance out of that, foregoing the literalness and allowing pure creativity to take over. The director in Shirley has an acute sense of when her dancers are trying to fulfill some preconceived image, when they’re “acting.” Just this morning, she told them to let the sensation of the story “drop in,” and then to dance out of that, to trust that from that story, they will be able to create beautiful movement in space. And in so doing, the audience won’t be asked to play a guessing game—“I wonder what story that Mark guy’s acting out?”—but rather engage in the act of storytelling itself, with all its tragic and comic capabilities.

-Jim Manganello

Journal #6

April 26, 2010

The making of this performance is a multilogue . . . is that a word? . . . a conversation between many, using body, text, sound or gestures that fail to express the miraculous, but are extraordinary in their attempt. We move our way into the unknown and believe that it is new. We have created a way of being with each other and an audience in the time and place of the theater.

Early in the process of making this work, we began nurturing a collection of solos that were based on images that the individual company members had seen. The image solos have an otherworldly quality. They communicate curious we’ve-never-been-here, how-did-we-get-here qualities because they don't depend on the conventions of traditional choreography. They depend solely on the individual performance skills, bodies and imaginations of the dancers themselves. They are singular, specific and unique to the narrative or visual image that sourced the material. When we add other dancers or group choreographic structures to these solos, they become familiar and perhaps more digestible, they have more entertainment value, they give us a comfortable rhythm to hook onto. But in doing that they generalize. They begin to look like the previous group sections we made earlier and they lose their specificity.

The problem we have is a structural one. How can we show these seven solos in a way that doesn't become (as Phil Martini said yesterday) “the predictable string of solos section”? The working rule of I haven't gone there is for us as a traveling company of performers to not go back to where we were before. We suddenly find ourselves at a dead end or lost in a strange land structurally. It is the last section of the performance. It is now time to collaboratively work together to draw the map that shows how to navigate this place. Maybe its better to think architecturally than cartographically. We need a blueprint to design the way we will be together in this new room since we will stay here together till the end. This blueprint uses only the individual skills of the performers/collaborators and the material of their image solos.

A description of the work we are creating cannot be separated from the qualities and characters of the dancers. Perhaps if I describe their qualities as performers and artists I can give you a sense of the miraculous adventure that this work is becoming.

Emma Draves’ dancing being is a gift to time and space. She is a sojourner that thoughtfully places landmarks through the performance. She venerates moments with transcendence. She understands stillness.

Meghann Wilkinson punches holes into the other world and lets it leak into the performance. She is comfortable with the liminal contamination that her arrhythmic and astructural perversions heap onto dance. This is also known as intelligence. We will follow her curiosity.

Adriana Marcial is an iconic dancing presence. Her movement quality addresses the internal concerns of spirit and psyche. She moves under a fully rounded spell cast by a working evolution of ideas and technique. Her technique is complimented by the comprehension of ideas. This is performed as a matter of fact.

Leigh Ann Boatman offers the essential opposite as the perfect solution to inquiry. She proposes the qualities of youth and contrary openness. She moves with lightning sharp angularity and brevity. She works in smart, rogue anarchist territory that refreshes the drone of elegance and beauty.

Anna Normann moves toward lucidity from a clear perception of source. Her movement has an intuitive signature that originates from the non-logic of feeling and sympathetic understanding of image. Her instinct is richly complicated by knowledgeable choice. She embodies fluidity in concept and action. She is an enabler and brings joyful creative energy to the stage from unexpected places.

Natalia Negron approaches this work with enthusiasm and a commanding, patience. She moves with an attentive, listening density. She employs a sense of playfulness with her technical sensibilities that alter the rigid formal structures with accessibility.

Mark Duthu brings laughter. He is an entertainer and understands in body and soul the power of dance to fulfill our needs. He is instantaneous creativity. His movement amplifies our consciousness and delight of exteriority and thus admits the present moment into the air we breathe.

Shirley Mordine is the seer seeing sideways moving forward with us. She is our critical eye, our captain, our storyteller. Her years of experience hunger for the infinite unmakeable dance. These dances are at her door.

Those are the tools and materials we will use in the next rehearsal to build our ending dance.

Journal Entry #5 by Bryan Saner

April 13, 2010

Natalia learns Persistence.

There is a dance in I Haven’t Gone There that we have named Persistence. Persistence comments on our attempt to stay the same. Shirley tells the story about the roots of this dance concerning refugee groups that when allowed to return to their homeland attempt to rebuild life as it was before the war. It’s also a comment on our persistent belief that war is necessary. It is also a comment on our current national conservatism; “We will stay this way.” As a culture we desire going back to what we know, back to traditional values or those ways of living that we believe were better. It thinks about how culture breaks down and how it builds. It asks if culture’s deterioration is inevitable.

Persistence is multidimensional. We can also be persistent about accepting or creating change. David, Sean and Dmitri each danced the pulsating rhythm that drives persistence. Those men have amicably left the company but the dance and rhythm of persistence is still in. Now Natalia sets the beat. Its persistent inclusion in the performance illustrates its own point. The dance stays and Natalia compliments the meaning by allowing it to progress and change with creativity. Natalia’s rendition of persistence asks if culture could be remodeled in order to be appropriate for the present moment.

The formal components of persistence are rhythm and repetition. The composition follows a disciplined regimen of pulses and dancing on the beat but it also respects and responds to deviations of the beat. This deviation creates a crack in the wall of tyrannical form. The emotional components of persistence are a mixture of blind obedience to the form and a nonconforming challenge to visionless despair. The critical maverick irregularity tenders hope and confidence.

We value ambiguity in performance and dance. We don’t agree. Some see the incongruities, unanswered questions and tangents as vehicles that take us to places we weren’t expecting to go. They thrill at arriving in the middle of uncharted territory. Others look to theater to provide more clues and clarity and point to a transformative new vision that has yet to be realized. Still others are expecting entertainment and the theater moment to be a creative (or [re]creative) event.

Theater creates space and time for these diverse expectations and cultural differences to be investigated in the spotlight. It’s a place where we can repeat ourselves. To act the known past and possible futures . . . to both embrace tradition and also practice transformative change in the same body

Journal Entry #4 by Bryan Saner

This is the fourth 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."


April 5, 2010

There are days when everything seems possible. We accept them with the same gratitude we extent to the days that are impossible.

This is the nature of work. The lesson I learned from the recently departed activist Gene Stolzfus is that when we are doing what we want to do, no matter how passionate or committed we are to the profession or how much we enjoy the work, there are days when it is simply just that. It is work and it is not necessarily enjoyable anymore. There are other days of completion, joy and accomplishment but its best not to attach a value of good or bad to any of it. Shirley described it once to me as a “witness by people who are in practice and daily ritual.” The word witness here is crucial in its gerund form; both to be present actively and to be the watcher.

Anna Normann and Natalia Negron have stepped up from their intern positions into performing positions.
David Gerber, Sean Tomerlin and Dmitri Peskov have come and gone through the company.

Meghann Wilkinson created a duet with David for I Havent Gone There. When david left she taught it to Sean. When Sean left she taught it to Dmitri. When Dmitri left she taught it to Mark Duthu. “Im going to teach a workshop on how to teach this duet.” She said. Mark learned it in 45 minutes. A combination of a good day, a good teacher, a good dancer, time spend with the material, hope that the material finally settles in someone’s body and faith in the slow moving toward and culminating in that one good day and that one body of a good dancer.

Shirley pushes hard against limits. She doesn’t accept them easily. She compounds the moments of rehearsal by demanding that the dancers perform at the same time they are learning/creating the material. The layering of expectations challenges the dancers. They are learning new material, creating new material, remembering the movement in their bodies, remembering the placement of their bodies in time and space relative to angles, physics, gravity, motion and weight, coordinating timing and transitions with the other dancers bodies, engaging three dimensional sensing (seeing and listening with the entire body), going from internal to external, and polishing the movement all at the same time.

She described her work to me as “Making something possible for someone else that they can’t do by themselves.” I see this struggle between Shirley and the dancers often. The dancers are working something out from the inside. Shirley sees their external manifestation. . . the thing their bodies do on the outside. The inside and the outside seldom mirror each other adequately. The creative place is the liminal gap between what the dancers are working on from the inside out and what Shirley is working on from the outside in.

It demands much from everyone. It demands a comfortability with the awkward positions we find our bodies and emotions in and not correcting this awkwardness but going with it to see where it goes, to maintain it, to flow with it, to allow it to become a new species, to mutually become other and more than we were.

Journal Entry #3 by Bryan Saner

This is the third 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 29, 2010

Last week I wrote some thoughts about the body. . .

I mentioned the systems that body is composed of and proposed that instead of the dualistic mind/body philosophies we literally begin thinking about our body as being the infinite multiple aggregate systems of experience, , , The body as infinite chapters each reflecting infinite systems.
Today I want to write about the difference between having a body and being a body because the question proposes multiple ways of imagining our interface with our existence/culture/aggregat

e.

My writing and interest in this is not only related to dance and performance, but also to the whole of those interrelated systems that compose the body. In an effort to cultivate a sense of wonder and joy in the discussion, I will add that the intentions of these questions are not to be seen as proving one identification or another as being positive or negative or having more or less value. We find find ontological value in all angles of the question and indeed as performers, don't intend to propose anything but the question. The audience will answer. This is one of the purposes of live performance.

I also want to add that I hope we don't figure this out. Thought and the body it investigates is infinite. The questions and possible discussion they create within the body and the immediate neighborhood around the body are more valuable than the temporary answers we might find, The better our microscopes and telescopes become, the more we prove our infinity. The more answers we conclude, the more questions we will discover. We would retrograde if this process stopped.

In an effort to expand the dualistic nature of the question I will add the related but different questions that thousands have asked before: Is body the self? Is body an object/vessel that contains being? Is it the perceiving machinery that connects us to everything other? Does the other create us? What is us? What is other?

So as a first step to thinking about the body as systems, we return to the question at hand:
Do we have a body or are we a body?
But that's all the time and space I have for today. . .enough for the questions. You can respond. Really, just post a comment. Maybe that's what facebook can offer; our body’s inter(face) with the collected con(text) of these questions, our common experience, our creative practices, what we are eating for breakfast. . .