I have some exciting news.
Quicksilver have been chosen to perform in ReFRESH at The Place in February next year! This means that over the course of the next few months, our rehearsals will be geared toward creating a work especially tailored to this performance under the guidance of Kerry Nichols.
Our music choice was determined by a mystery choreographer, which, after the picking turned out to be none other than Akram Khan. Rather serene, but with an increasing intensity, this sound score has an amazing potential as a score to work with.
Our artistic director, Laura Harvey, will be working with the idea of dementia. Having a personal connection with this subject, and through her own teaching experience of those with dementia, it’s an idea with a wealth of development potential.
Our first rehearsal involved attributing body parts to numbers, then using our phone number in a version of the Forsythe Cube to create a phrase. Simple, but always successful, there are a plethora of idea that can extend from this creative improvisation. Forming partnerships, we then chose half the phrase to teach to a partner, joining our new movements to the end of our own phrase… then inverting it.
Thus the mind-bending continues. From this, we created a phrase with a partner that involved further points of contact: 1) a moment of eye contact, 2) a moment of stillness, 3) call and respond, 4) a point of touch, 5) a point of reaction.
This process takes our rehearsals back to what I love to do. Class is important, conditioning essential to the dancer… but process of creation – what can I say – it’s another love… and is perhaps the driving force behind wanting to be a dancer, rather than being satisfied with classes only. Eep! This should be fun!