Sasha Soreff Dance Theater: Rehearsal Blog

Dawn told me, after watching me teach in sneakers,that she wished she was dancing in them, too. That was so funny to me: I always imagine them to be like a crutch, the only way I get to dance. I am both unbelievably grateful for the opportunity afforded by my sneakers and still sometimes sad when a turn is impeded because my sneakers won’t glide, or someone asks me if I am pointing or flexing my feet because in the sneakers sometimes it’s hard to tell (I have a rule I now announce in rehearsals: assume my feet are pointed unless I specify otherwise!)

And so it took me off guard a little to hear Dawn wishing she was dancing in them. Hearing her reasons were illuminating: that it felt more powerful, somehow, for me to have this footwear on, and it seemed more springy, getting into and out of jumps. I don't usually think of it that way. In fact, I often try to minimize the springiness, especially in the landings, because even with the sneakers, the protection offered is finite (and the potential pain, well, painful).

Dawn has worked with me on basically every major piece I have created. She is a brilliant costume designer and collaborator. Some of my most enduring moments of insight about any given work come out of our discussions, and this project, with its many layers and interwoven themes, is no exception.

One of the most exciting developments is that of the “body part soloist” costumes. Four dancers represent injuries of the knee, foot, hip, neck. We are introduced to these dancers early in the piece as they move through solos with restrictions appropriate to an injury (later we will see them in the "clash of the body parts" battling each other). For example, the “knee” dancer bends his right knee minimally, the “neck” dancer pivots from her waist, as opposed to turning her head. Costume-wise, we wanted to call attention to that area without it being a marker when the dancers are not representing an injury. (In contrast to me: of necessity, I wear sneakers for the duration).

The solution Dawn and I came to: a two-side scarf/fabric on the appropriate “injured” area, red when doing that solo and neutral to match the rest of the costume otherwise. The "injury" will thus be marked but only sometimes accentuated, just as we often have injuries but they are not always the source of pain/in need of immediate attention. I can’t wait to see how it looks when we move from the discussion to the reality. And meanwhile, I am going to walk (carefully!) with a little more spring in my step.

I have always been a water baby – I grew up in the waters of Maine (cold? What is cold, when you are the offspring of New England?) and in the pool at the YWCA, where I ingested vast quantities of chlorinated water while learning to swim. Those lessons hold me in good stead now, doing those laps up and down the postage stamp-sized water body that is my local pool.

The pool is one of the few places where I can ever experience my whole body in motion without worrying about the impact on my feet. There is something uniquely comforting about being surrounded and buoyed, something uniquely satisfying about a medium that can provide much-needed cardiovascular exercise and a leisurely place to stretch out.

This all assumes making it to the pool. I have found the NYC pool convenience issue to be a major stumbling block. Yes, making it to the pool without having to walk too much to get there. Yes, the trauma of getting in and out of the water in winter, and yes, finding the time to swim during hours the pool is actually open and not filled with 100 jubilant school children.

But also this: I am still on a no barefoot plan. As in, I am not supposed to walk barefoot, at all. So I have to make sure I have my specialized flip flops with me. They were modified to distribute weight away from the most vulnerable areas of my feet. Which is a lifesaver, because before that, I was having a ridiculous time trying to navigate in and out of the pool without getting my sneakers totally wet. Have flip flops, will swim.

Swimming ultimately serves me far beyond the increased heart rate. Being in the pool provides some of my best creative thinking time. I was stuck on what music to use for class recently, and I found the answer in the water, floating up to the surface while I did the crawl. Likewise choreographic images, potential sequences of movement and new ways to approach a certain character or scene revision.

And of course, for those few moments of unhurried backstroke, it can just be sort of relaxing to let the water carry me, really carry me, so that me and my feet move without fear of impact, for those few precious moments.

I can’t sleep.

This always happens, when I am working on a creative project, especially one as engaging as The Dancer Who Wore Sneakers. Last night, amongst the myriad of thoughts zipping around: how the postcard image should look, framing the save the date email, and how to phrase a request for financial support. It was 1 am. And then it was 1:30 am. And then it was later. And later, and. . . .

Three or four nights ago, in my middle of my middle-of-the-night-not-sleeping-time, I realized I had found a good section during which many dancers could be wearing sneakers.

Who wears sneakers in the piece has emerged as an important question and artistic consideration. The whole cast steps into many pairs of sneakers preset on the stage in the opening moments of the piece. But beyond that, sneakers are used sparingly, to accentuate the fact that, because of my foot challenges, I wear sneakers all the time, on stage and in life. Only one other performer, one of the actresses, will also be consistently wearing footwear of some sort; it is revealed in the course of the show that she has a foot injury that merits special protection.

So the other night, sometime after I had given up looking at the clock and counting how many hours of sleep I wasn’t getting, I realized that the “hide and seek” scene would be an ideal opportunity to see many dancers in sneakers. That sequence features an elaborate walking pattern/movement phrase for 10-12 dancers. I spend most of the piece dancing with, and sometimes against, one dancer who represents my injury and, in some ways, the feelings and issues surrounding the injury. In “hide and seek,” I successfully escape from from her, thanks in part to the fact that I am “camouflaged” in a crowd of sneaker-wearers. I am looking forward to seeing if and how that idea plays out in rehearsal.

65 days til opening night. Or, I should say, 65 nights. And a million things to do and create and figure out between now and then. I can see the middle of the night wheels turning already - I just hope somewhere in there I actually get to sleep!

When I first began to think about this piece, one of the early images I had was “clash of the body parts.” It is a hallmark of a dancer’s life experience, and maybe everyone’s, that when one area of the body is injured, compensatory injuries soon follow. It’s like that song I remember from childhood – “the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to. . .” I don’t even know if those were the actual limbs in the song, but you get the point. An injury might be local, but it has body-wide repercussions.

For me, this has often seemed like a depressing game of connect the dots. If I favor the injured areas of my foot too much, I start experiencing pain in my knee. When I limp a lot, the muscles in my right leg work harder and the left leg muscles get weaker going along for the ride. The most surprising compensatory injury by far has been my most recent left forefoot flare up leading to shooting pain all the way down my left arm – most likely the result of pressing down on crutches (and impinging on my c7 nerve, apparently). Sometimes it feels like there is an intrabody competition going on, as various muscles and joints compete against other regions for support or attention.

Out of which comes the “clash of the body parts” section of the piece. I wondered what it would look like to personify these competing interests with dancers fighting each other, narrated by a sportscaster: “and now we have the right knee facing off against the left hip. They are a pretty even match but let’s see who will come out ahead!” The competitors will be cheered on by their teammates (“Go hip!” “Go knee!”), as the drum beat gets increasingly intense and competitors lose out to those with the superior injury.

I am just beginning to take that image into the studio. In rehearsals, the dancers and I are exploring movement vocabularies born out of limitations – how does one move, without turning one’s head, mimicking a stiff neck? What happens when you do a whole phrase without bending one knee? And what happens, when you pit these dancers, acting under such severe limitations, against one another? Who wins the “clash of the body parts,” in the end?

Stay tuned!

I have attended many auditions in my life, from 1 or 2 people being asked to try movement informally to 400 people cattle calls in which dancers are cut after 2 chances to show the phrase learned 2 minutes before. This past Saturday, Sasha Soreff Dance Theater had its first official auditions. Twenty people joined me and my company for two and a half hours, trying on movement I have created in the hopes of getting a job in “The Dancer Who Wore Sneakers and Other Tales.”

It is quite a thing, selecting performers. In the past, I have reached out to people individually, dancers with whom I have danced or seen around town in class and other work. And I am extremely grateful to have a core group of people who have worked with me consistently for the last few years – they fulfill my work beautifully, and you can see them in the photo gallery. As I develop this new work, though, I realized that the scope of the piece was going to be larger, and that I would need more dancers. A lot more dancers.

I have been asking myself for the last few days -- before, during and now, after the audition: what am I looking for, how do I know how to choose? And as with many things in this creative realm, it is incredibly hard to articulate. How to write about this, even -- I could write that I look for dancers who move from their centers, who have a sense of flow as they move, who are grounded, who are expressive, who have a strong sense of focus, a willingness to take risks. And that is all true. But those are just words, and the sum of those words doesn’t necessarily the ideal dancer for my work make.

Like many choreographers, I have a movement signature, a particular style and approach to moving that I definitely want to see reflected in my dancers. And I want performers who will bring themselves to the work as well, who are open to collaborate and to live in the rehearsal process with me. Again, just words, words I am using to give a glimpse of being in a studio – trying to describe the practice of executing the same phrases over and over again with subtle changes, experimenting with new partnering possibilities, translating images into movement.

There were many beautiful dancers at the audition on Saturday. Everyone who came had something unique and precious to offer. Now it’s my job to determine how the piece will best be served, and which dancers most exactingly fulfill the specific vision that is “The Dancer Who Wore Sneakers” in the making.

So here it is, after Labor Day, clearly in the fall season, the back-to-school season. And clearly in the season of preparing in earnest for the December concert. The list of things to do seems to have multiplied exponentially, and I am finding myself in the classic over-stressed position of most choreographers -- really, most creative people -- that I know.

The essential question, and struggle, that defines this classic over-stressed position: how to balance artistic work with the administrative and production needs that lead to said artistic work being shown in the world. There are as many solutions as there are creative people. And I am sure I will continue to find my own way, hopscotching between the artistic and the administrative.

This week, I am preparing for the upcoming audition, working on the postcard/poster for the piece, and doing some fundraising. Over the last few days, I have also been developing a side profession in the booking of rehearsal space. This is an amazingly difficult task in New York City, where there are call-in times and queues at the popular studios to secure prized rehearsal space. Booking rehearsals is the bane of a choreographer’s existence. Well ok, maybe the lack of space and cost of doing business in general could compete for the top bane of existence status, but still, it is a challenge.

It turns out that the SSDT company members, as well as the growing list of expected and prospective performers in this (what was I thinking?) 30- person piece, are all on crazy schedules. And of course those crazy schedules are all crazy in different ways. Especially since many of the dancers with whom I work are teachers – Pilates, yoga, dance. Some have clients/classes at 6 am, some at 1 pm, some at 6 pm. That is sometimes the same person.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could just have office hours at a studio, for huge blocks of time, and dancers could come and go? Given the cost of studio space (often $15 or more an hour) and all those crazy schedules, including mine, that’s unlikely. But a choreographer can dream. . . and meanwhile, make sure she is attending to fundraising, postcard-creating, audition-prepping and of course, creating.

There is something a little terrifying about handing a group of actors, no matter how trusted, the script over one has been laboring. Something a little terrifying and more than a little thrilling to hear the actors playing the roles out loud that have been living inside one’s head for so long. That was my experience tonight, when a small group of actors gathered to read the material I have been writing for the Dancer Who Wore Sneakers.

From the beginning, I knew that this subject matter deserved to be expressed in many different ways: visually, verbally, in movement and in music. I want the audience to have every opportunity to access the themes of the piece, especially what it means to negotiate, and surprass, limitations. With that in mind, I have been working on two different spoken word sequences. The first and more developed is called “Measured Steps.” It imagines a future world where the ecosystem, and particularly the ground itself, is said to be so fragile that people are required to limit impact by only taking a certain number of steps per day (a new use for pedometers!). The second sequence was intended to bring a little comic relief to the piece, tracking several actors who lose their will and ability to act and have to find their way back, expressed in monologues.

Yesterday, as I was charting out the arc of the piece, I realized that, this second set of material didn’t really seem to fit with the direction of the piece. Tonight’s reading confirmed that. These monologues, though intriguing, seemed tangential to the sneakers piece. Hopefully the monologues will find a home in future creations, because they have the potential to be powerful. Meanwhile, and happily, the first sequence, “Measured Steps,” is on the right track. It needs a fair amount of pruning and reshaping, but it is on the right track. I am quite grateful to have some material with which to move forward!

Coming away from tonight's reading, I am struck once again by the fact that creative work is often as much about cutting as, well, creating. It doesn't matter how interesting something is if you can't discern what iis being said or why it matters. I expect to be doing a lot of both cutting and creating in the next few months.

I had this thought in rehearsal, that I wanted to write about the process of creating a piece that was both so personal to me and so potentially resonant in a world where we constantly negotiate our own limitations. I was watching the dancer next to me effortlessly complete a turn I was stumblingly through (a turn I in fact had choreographed) and wondering what was going on. And then I realized - actually, remembered - that my balance is totally different because I dance in sneakers. Which meant that I needed a different strategy to execute the turn. The sneaker strategy. And in that moment I saw the heart of the piece I am creating. It is the heart of my day to day life as a dancer wearing sneakers - how to be in my art fully, to honor the aesthetics and fullness of dance while still inhabiting my own body and acknowledging my physical limitations.

I went to a performing arts high school where it was drilled into me that in our limitations lies our freedom. And only in the last few years have I begun to understand what that means for my life, both from studying anatomy -- because things like the structure of our joints determines so much about the way we can move, and from my own experiences, teaching, choreographing, and dancing without a direct connection to the floor. I came of age, like many modern dancers, reveling in the exhilarating sensation of barefeet on studio or stage floor. I miss that. But for all I get frustrated and resentful that I don't get to have that anymore, I am mostly grateful that I have any options that allow me to move and to dance. Sneakers are both the thing that keeps me from the experience I want - dancing barefoot - and my greatest, greatest ally (along with well-designed orthotics) in allowing me to fulfill my dreams.

Over the next few months I will be writing more about "The Dancer Who Wore Sneakers and Other Tales" - the process, the production, the many artists and collaborators participating in this project, and me, finding ways to dance in my red sneakers.