The spine is the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work. You intend to tell this story. You intend to explore this theme. You intend to employ this structure. The audience may infer it or not, but if you stick to your spine the piece will work."
Choreographing is a lot like writing—they are both compositional in nature. They both require commitment, vulnerability, and a lot of editing. I find this to be especially true when creating work on myself. When I am inside of it, it’s hard for me to distance myself from the work that I’m doing. So, to do that, I am forcing myself to record it, analyze it, and write about it.
This semester, in addition to producing a project for the writing capstone, I am also required to choreograph and produce a senior concert. I am responsible for creating a group work as well as a solo work on myself.
The inspiration for my solo came very late in the process of creating it—I knew I had to make a solo, so I started to just make movement without really any meaning to why I was doing what I was doing. It wasn’t until I completely lost my mind from stress and laughed myself into a meltdown in front of my three best friends did I know what my spine was. Or, rather, did I have the courage to name it.
Tharp writes, "There's an obvious reason why, as a choreographer, I am constantly groping for a spine. Dance is preverbal; it doesn't have the writer's advantage of using language to establish meaning and intent. The vocabulary of dance is movement, not words. So I need something more in the form of an idea, an image, a memory, a metaphor to make my intentions comprehensible to the audience. I have to articulate this to myself because I won't be using words to articulate it in public."
My spine is to lose my mind. To do that, I want to produce images that are at once comical and disturbing in order to befriend my demons. That’s terrifying, and broad, but I mean it in the sense that I deeply want to be human onstage. I feel the urge to be human in the sense that for some reason, the stage is the safest and scariest place for me to laugh myself into a meltdown. Naming that is important--befriending my demons is an abstract and confusing topic. A meltdown is something tangible, something relatable, something familiar that the audience can grasp on to during the rollercoaster of abstract art.
I really enjoyed exercise 22 of this chapter, "What's Your MQ?" The exercise deals with metaphor and patterns, finding meaning where there might not be any. I focused on five of the seven prompts:
1. How many images and objects can you see in three minutes of cloud gazing? (11)
2. While doing a "mindless" chore, like washing the dishes, try to become the rhythm of the process. What's the rhythm? Give it a name. (Folding laundry--I think of it as a sort of free jazz improvisation. Different with each piece of clothing. I'm calling it "A Laundry List of Things To Do."
3. Distill a mechanical sound and mimic it. Lock the tempo and beat within you and then mimic it when you speak. (I tried this when I was talking to my professor--she thinks I've lost my mind to stress now.)
4. Focus on a superstition, like knocking on wood to bring yourself luck or tossing salt over your shoulder to fend off evil spirits. What image springs to mind? A happy ending or the devil? (Saying "merde" to other dancers before performances. If I don't, someone will get hurt. If I do, the show will go well. Either way, the show always goes on.)
5. Study a word's linguistic roots. Where does it take you? (The word hospital originates from the Latin hospes, meaning guest or stranger. Guests or strangers seeking help from people trained to help. Refugees, looking for compassion. Politics and policy.)
Each were exercises in metaphor playing different roles, and each made me realize that whatever my intention was, each audience member would find their own unique metaphor about the work I create. That my spine will be uniquely mine, and that others will place different spines on top of mine as they witness and digest what I have made.
