Falling

September 18th, 2010

Grodno, Belarus

Every dance has a story of some sort that lies behind it. Those stories can be from an almost infinite number of sources and experiences, be they lived in or read about, heard first-hand or simply imagined from the ether. They carry different weight for a choreographer depending on so many variables. 

For me the most personal, and the most important, is "Falling." Its a dance I came to in an odd way in that I initially set out to just take a duet that I had built over a number of years with people I really treasure, from Bobby Sidney and Melissa Greco to Morgann Rose, and adapt it to two other people I treasure, Bruno Augusto and Kathryn Pilkington. But in the first hour of the first rehearsal for "Falling" back in the spring of 2008 it changed, morphing from a recapturing of a dance to one that told a story of a love of my own which had not, in the end, worked out. That love was the singular one in my life, and I was hard pressed to imagine I'd ever tell anything about it in a dance, even though the woman it was ultimately about was one I had known through dance on an endless number of levels. Even a few years after its failure the story behind it was not something I easily spoke about, much less dove into the way you have to in making a dance. 

But there it was. 

After Bruno left CityDance for Graduate School in New York I put "Falling" away for a bit. It was hard to imagine someone else dancing the part as we'd developed it. But Jason is a special artist and a trusted friend, and Kathryn, he and I put it together again last season. 

As we prepped for the tour we're on now I knew I wanted to take "Falling" on the road. Cheles, our TD, had found some great material for the "drop" that is just upstage of them as they dance in a single shaft of light that runs from stage left to stage right. They appear and disappear through it periodically in this version of "Falling." 

We'd planned to premiere it in Minsk, but the theater couldn't accommodate the black fabric, and its not a dance I like to do without it. But that wasn't a problem in Grodno, which had a wonderful and rich theater. 

So we put "Falling" into the program and ran it before the show. I had, finally, a chance to shoot it from the right vantage point in the right theater. 

These are a few of the images from Saturday.