Begin Again: A Moment with Philip

Philip and Marie

Here, we are rehearsing one of BEGIN AGAIN’s base phrases at Gibney Dance on May 12, 2023

(The following is a condensed version of my conversation with Philip.)

Marie: How did you and Bennyroyce come together?

Philip: I first met Benny in 2013. I was a student, I think I was in eighth grade, and he performed and then taught a masterclass at CHOP SHOP here in Seattle. So, I saw his work and got to learn from him and I was captivated. Then, we reconnected in New York City many years later in 2019, right after I’d graduated from college. I auditioned for a project, and we have worked together pretty consistently since then. 

M: Have you participated in choreographic processes that included non-moving collaborators in the past?

P: Recently, dancing with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, there’s a lot of video design that goes into one of the productions we’ve been doing, and it’s very integral to the piece. It was really interesting to not see the video basically until we got to the stage. It’s such a crucial element. And, actually, similarly to what we are doing in this process, it’s included video of the dancers. 

M: Inside Begin Again, are perceiving yourself as yourself, or are you building a separate character?

P: I am definitely “Phil.” I would say I’m focusing on an arc of myself that is sort of from the beginning of this process last summer to now, and a lot of my personal lived experience at that time and since then. Also, I am definitely considering “Phil,” as my pandemic experience trajectory is more informing. I am actually very consciously with this process trying to bring a lot of my own experiences, feelings, emotions into the movement and the room. I think Benny has created an environment that really allows that to happen organically. Also, just because of the nature of the work. I don’t think I’ve ever done a professional piece or process where I was very confidently like, “I’m doing me and I’m doing me on a very intimate level.” I mean, it won’t necessarily show explicitly in the movement or the performance, but I am really letting emotion and my lived experience inform how I approach everything.

M: Do you think the difference will show to those who already know you as a performer?

P: Yes, it will show. It’s a big shift for me. It’s exciting, because I think I wouldn’t have made this shift until I was in a process that allowed it organically. Knowing Benny, coupled with the subject matter of the piece, it was a no-brainer to be like, “Yeah, I’m being Phil,” which is cool.

M: How would you describe your level of agency within the total collaboration?

P: I can really distinctly remember the first process I ever did with Benny. It was a piece called IN PURSUIT, and it was a restaging of that piece. So, I was not in the original cast who were there when the piece was created. I was coming into the room and learning it, but I remember being really surprised that I felt really encouraged to take agency in the process of restaging. Since that was my first working experience with Benny, that’s always stayed. I’ve always felt like I could make decisions and take risks and that he would never discourage it. I feel very comfortable with that. Definitely in this process, I’m still operating like that. This is the first time with Benny where I’m an Artistic Associate, so I feel even more supported, like he’s calling agency out of me. I feel like my contribution is really important and necessary. 

M: Is the trauma and healing work that is happening inside the concepts informing Begin Again’s creation process personal to you?

P: I feel like I’m really trying to let emotion affect my quality, texture. Even today in rehearsal, we were working on base phrase material that’s existed for almost twelve months now. But, I stopped before we started and thought about an event that I’m using to inform myself in BEGIN AGAIN. I let it spark emotion. I was like, “I’m going to let this moment be in my mind and my body and let it drive some change in how I’m going to do this movement that I’ve been doing.” There are definitely light and dark moments in BEGIN AGAIN. I’ve noticed that it’s much easier for me to find the dark moments and connect to those. I’m going to be curious how I’m going to, just because we focus so much on the pandemic narrative in the seed of this process, so I’m figuring out where the light moments are and how they connect.

M: What are your thoughts on the moments in Begin Again referencing the political realities around us?

P: I think that I’ve been thinking about how we find (in BEGIN AGAIN) the image of protest and then it dissolves. That’s really how protest has existed in American culture in recent times. We have these big, collective moments of action and protest and emotion that cross boundaries of gender and race and identity, and it’s really intense, and gets saturated really quickly. But then, it fizzles away, and that’s happened in many different cycles about many different issue in my adult memory. I am thinking about how, in the piece, that’s a little bit what I see: how we arrive there organically, and it falls away, and what does that mean that it falls away? Will it come back? Will the protests begin again? 

M: Are you finding in Begin Again opportunities for self-reinvention? Or, has there been any new beginning for you performatively?

P: I’m thinking about how, in the midst of when we started this process last summer, was having almost a second career jumpstart in dance. Really, from the time the pandemic began, and then, right in summer of 2021, almost two years ago now, when I thought I was going to be, professionally, getting back in the saddle, full steam ahead dancing, I had a serious medical crisis that then pushed me back another six months in being able to be dancing a lot. And then, it took a long time to get back again. Finally, we get to the summer of 2022, and I was finally having a bunch of work happen, including coming to Seattle to do research and development for this piece. BEGIN AGAIN is connected, to me, to that big career “begin again”. I feel like I’ve started my professional dance career all over again, in a positive way. Coming back to Seattle now, to finish this incarnation of the piece, is a very sweet part of that beginning again. It’s a very fruitful moment; it feels good. 

- Marie

Begin Again: Evolving the Space

The process of Begin Again has included many rehearsals at Filipino Community of Seattle as part of BD’s residency there. Bennyroyce’s ideas for designing the space have evolved to support props, portable sound, portable light, projection, and several performer entry points. Below are some examples of that evolution:

Example Draft 1

An early drawing envisioning a design plan for the space at Filipino Community of Seattle (FCS)

Example Draft 2

Abby’s sketch of the white boards as they might appear across the Marley in FCS at top of show

Example Draft 3

A rendering including placement for sound and light before white boards or projection are placed

Example Draft 4

A rehearsal photograph by Buffy including another possible layout of the white boards on the Marley at FCS

- Marie

Begin Again: A Moment with Genna

Genna

Genna during a video call with Marie on May 15, 2023

(The following is a condensed version of my conversation with Genna.)

Marie: How did you and Benny come together?

Genna: Benny is pretty good at presenting himself online, so it didn’t take too long for me to see that he was becoming present in the Seattle community. I have ties in New York and lived there for six years, then moved here. I saw his audition post, and I also saw that he had a masterclass at the studio I teach at (Emerald Ballet Theatre), so I got to witness and observe him teaching. That was nice to see, so I decided to go to the audition. Then, he asked me to be a part of this process.

M: Have you participated in choreographic processes that included non-moving collaborators in the past?

G: I’ve collaborated with a lot of videographers. I find it really interesting and freeing to work with someone on that side of the screen. As dancers, we’re so used to setting work for a proscenium stage, or only seeing it from your standing-body perspective. Working with videographers, and learning that you can portray any kind of point of view that you want…there is a lot of possibility within that.

M: Inside Begin Again, are perceiving yourself as yourself, or are you building a separate character?

G: I think this work calls to me, the way Benny has been describing it, I feel very much like my individual self within the work so far. I don’t feel like I’ve been playing a character, which is more-so what I’m used to, embodying something else. And so, I feel like I’m kind of embodying my experience of the last couple of years, and taking that and putting that into movement.

M: How would you describe your level of agency within the total collaboration?

G: Because I’m dancing with other dancers with their own experiences, it feels like I think structuring the piece is about the collaboration with others versus making decisions on my own. But, I think, experiencing the movement is very much what I choose internally to experience. It’s definitely a challenge of having time not necessarily on our side for the creative process. I do feel like it is more being in tune with how it is coming together as a team versus my own choices being the forefront.

M: Do you have thoughts on the props? Do you have experience with props?

G: I find it very challenging, because, I think, of how Benny wants us to incorporate them. They’re very much their own animal, but very much our own thing to learn how to tame and control, and to, like, morph with. I’ve actually worked with a similar idea, but it was more about it being a prop and having very specific angles to hit with a large group of people. We definitely weren’t at all connected to the board. This is a very different experience than what I’ve done in the past. Because I think you also have to think about (how) it is an experience for an audience to look into, so sometimes what you’re feeling might not be what’s coming across, so I think there are a lot of components.

M: Are you choosing to actively engage with or integrate identity into your approach to Begin Again?

G: For some reason I have a feeling that once everything is set, as far as material, that it might come out stronger, how I put my own experience in the piece. But, I am finding it super challenging to pull out my own experience from the pandemic, because it was such a lonely time for me, and it’s hard to think of showing people that feeling, because that’s super uncomfortable and kind of sad. Even though I know that we all went through it in our own ways, it’s still an uncomfortable experience to relive and to pull from. I don’t feel like I’ve had a resolution from going into a more “pre-pandemic” phase, but I feel like I got punched in the face and I’m still trying to figure things out. It’s weird, because I still think I’m living the experience and trying to figure things out, which, I know we will always be feeling that way, but I feel a little behind in a resolution within my own personal life

M: Is the trauma and healing work that is happening inside the concepts informing Begin Again’s creation process personal to you?

G: I’m trying to go a more creative route within it (Begin Again) and try to look at my overall experience from a different perspective, or trying out different perspectives. I think it’s easy to live in the trauma of it all, but I’m definitely trying to sit with how it affected me and everyone in other ways. It’s also interesting being around people who are pondering the same questions. It’s also something I want to try and be more aware of, as the time comes near to the performance, of being able to let myself connect with the other dancers and other creators, because that’s a little difficult for me to do. It feels very vulnerable. I’m definitely reminding myself about that every time I’m coming in.

M: Are you finding in Begin Again opportunities for self-reinvention? Or, has there been any new beginning for you performatively?

G: Connection and having this awareness of really connecting through a real experience with other people will probably be a very different experience than I’ve ever had onstage or in a creative process, because of a lot of the work I’ve done being not that, or even close to that. I think that’s a huge thing in my personal life, of being able to ask for help, and being able to be vulnerable about my real feelings and thoughts, and I think that I’m bringing a piece of that into this process. As a result of that, it’s going to give a different feeling and I’m going to have a different outcome through this process.

- Marie

Begin Again: Recognition and “Misrecognition”

Candelario, R., (2023) “Violences, Aftermaths, and Family, or: How to Make Dances in this Body?”,Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies 42. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/conversations.3647

In the last edition of the Dance Studies Association: Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies Dance journal, scholar Rosemary Candelario writes a partially biographical essay about her and her family’s experiences around anti-Asian violence, and anti-Filipino violence in particular. She writes:

As Karen Shimakawa has shown, the abjection of Asian Americans is both a process and condition of American national identity formation in which Asian Americans are both “constituent element and radical other” (2002, 3, emphasis in original). In other words, “America” is defined through the (ongoing) exclusion of Asian (Americans) who thus constitute a necessary part of that same identity. For Filipinx Americans, Lucy Burns clarifies that it is a process more specifically of “visibility and misrecognition” (2013, 4).

The creation process for Begin Again often grapples with violence, both implicitly and explicitly. Bennyroyce explores images of loneliness, disconnection, isolation, and even unhoused-ness through the lens of their own related, intersectional experience. These various kinds of violence are all very much contextualized in an atypical, pandemic-based state of affairs, and are rendered with an emphasis on the performers’ interior lives, as well as Benny’s. There are images relating to protest, which in many ways could be considered almost timeless on first encounter, but reference specific instances, especially those taking place in Seattle. Public protest always demands that protesters place their bodies in space, time, and energy in places visible to observers, and these kinds of actions are embodied in Begin Again. But, within Begin Again, the peculiarly isolating experience of the pandemic is layered in, as no protest’s embodiment is rendered as collective, but rather, as singular embodied action that could take place either within or outside of a group. Here, Benny plays with ideas like Candelario’s reference to Lucy Burns notions on visibility, and the layered, individuated images of solo protesters trouble the viewers understanding of their own recognition, or “misrecognition,” of what they see or have seen.

- Marie

Begin Again: A Moment with Rhea

Rhea

in a photo by Joe Lambert

(The following is a condensed version of my conversation with Rhea.)

Marie: How did you and Benny come together?

Rhea: I met Benny back in the Fall of 2022. I showed up for his Contemporary Class and we had a little chat afterward. He was looking for dancers and that’s how we connected. The relationship is ongoing.

M: Have you participated in choreographic processes that included non-moving collaborators in the past?

R: I have a friend, her name is Katie Moorhead, who actually knows Benny from freelancing in New York. She put together a small outdoor project that was a collaboration in an outdoor sculpture park in Rhode Island. She had a friend who is a classical guitarist and put together this really wonderful, very laidback performance series that was a little bit choreography-based, a little bit of improv, interacting onstage with the musicians, so they weren’t separated. That was a great experience; I felt like I connected with the musicians in a more intimate way than you normally would if you were separated by an orchestra pit. The times that I’ve had collaborations with non-moving people, it felt like they were fully a part of the work. It didn’t feel like they were separated by being non-moving, it was like all of us together were the moving components of the work.

M: How would you describe your level of agency within the total collaboration?

R: I think Benny creates a good place to let you…there’s room for my self to inform the work. But, I also feel a good balance of letting them inform my artistic journey. I feel like it is a good balance of both.

M: Do you have any thoughts on the props?

R: In the beginning, it felt very alien, just because it is a white board. It’s very obviously a clean, blank slate. Usually working with props, you have, already, a sense of what to do with it. I didn’t feel that with the blank board, the white board, so it took a little bit for me to figure out what felt comfortable, moving with it. I also think the more that Begin Again is shaping, is being shaped, is helping to inform how to interact with the boards. You want to interact with it in a way that is not just holding it with your hands, but it’s just big enough for it to be a little bit awkward.

M: Are you choosing to actively engage with or integrate identity into your approach to Begin Again?

R: I’m not sure yet!

M: Is the trauma and healing work that is happening inside of the concepts informing Begin Again’s creation process personal to you?

R: I do feel like I use my personal experience in the initial creation process. But then, moving forward with the work, I then prefer to connect through the work. So, I guess, using personal experience in the beginning, and then letting that morph into being a little less personal but still emotionally connected. I don’t know why that is? I don’t know if that’s a protection instinct or if it’s more finding this…I feel like “character” is not the right word in the work, because it isn’t a narrative piece. Finding an artistic presence that is not “Rhea Keller is herself in the work,” but finding another sense of self.

M: Are you finding in Begin Again opportunities for self-reinvention? Or, has there been any new beginning for you performatively?

R: I like to find an arc through the whole piece, and I think the end will give a resolution that will help me find that. Benny and I just started working on this solo where I have two boards. They are this weight I have to carry, or this trauma that I have to deal with before that transformation can happen. They start as very weighted, and I can barely carry them. Then, eventually, I find a way to make them light. We’ve talked about metamorphosis and there is an image of a butterfly. I do feel like that is a very cathartic moment for me personally. So, that process is starting to happen, and the change into more hopefulness is going to be a big catalyst for, I think, the group or the community as a whole to find that.

- Marie

Begin Again: A Moment with Claire

Claire

Claire shares thoughts on Begin Again with Marie on May 5, 2023

(The following is a condensed version of my conversation with Claire.)

Marie: How did you and Benny come together?

Claire: I went to school with Phil (Strom), and, in 2019, watched Land, Lost, Found at Gibney Dance in NYC. It was super thoughtful and complex, and it was like entering a meditative garden in the middle of the city. There was beautiful movement and strong dancers, and that was the first introduction to Benny and the work. I learned about Begin Again when Phil and I connected in Seattle last summer. When the dancer call was put out, it was at a moment when I been looking for dance in Seattle, and to reentering in a bigger way. The pandemic changed how intimate a relationship I had with dance. The audition process was a welcoming and exciting a space, and that reaffirmed not just wanting to work with Benny and be involved in the piece, but reaffirmed myself wanting to create and dance in this way again.

M: Have you participated in choreographic processes that included non-moving collaborators in the past?

C: I think I’ve loved every experience I’ve had working with non-moving collaborators. I’ve worked a lot in processes with composers and live musicians, that’s been the biggest presence. Worked with a piece that was with a live drummer, another with a live guitarist/composer, and in school, with Phil, actually, I took a class called “Composers, Choreographers, & Designers,” and that was really my first experience on the choreographic end. We (choreographers) were paired with (student) composers, set designers, and costumes designers to shape a piece over a whole semester starting from scratch on the same educational journey, so it was all new for everyone to meet at that intersection. I was able to share input from the very beginning, in the conceptual moments. It turned out to be really thorough, and don’t I think I recognized how integral they are in the process and how many conversations go into any choice. Also, the level of trust every person needs to have in the process taught me a lot.

Most recently, at the end of 2022, I was in a piece where we collaborated with a scent designer, which added a whole other dimension. I think collaboration just adds so much richness to the choreographic process. As a dancer in the process, it gives us so much more texture and concepts to play with when we are moving, regardless of how the movement came to be.

M: Inside Begin Again, are perceiving yourself as yourself, or are you building a separate character?

C: Personally, I tend to perform with a mix of both. I think I like a space that allows my live decisions to breath and change with every performance while at the same time having anchors of storytelling. Begin Again feels closer to a character and a journey that I’m portraying. But, because we are so involved in the creative process right now, it does feel particularly mine, and tied to my own journey.

M: How would you describe your level of agency within the total collaboration?

C: Because it is our first collaboration together, I am still understanding that question as we proceed. So far, it has felt like I’ve had a lot of agency. At least, I can offer a lot into the building of it, which is meaningful to me. I think part of it is that I am excited and respectful of the way that Benny shapes work, and I want to allow myself to be swept into that. At the same time, I love processes where I am able to engage and offer myself genuinely. So, I can’t speak to once we get closer to solidifying it, but right now, as we are sketching, my own movement tendencies are allowed, and my thoughts and mistakes are allowed. At the same time, I do want to do Benny’s work honor, and to make sure I’m not only contributing what I want. I feel like I’m still wanting to prioritize what he feels is important in the moment.

M: Do you have thoughts on the props? Do you have experience with props?

C: The boards are new, for sure. But, I think what feels the most natural is when I treat it (the prop) as a partner and a live human. In that framework and mindset, when I approach it that way, it does feel like dancing with a human. I think I’m still understanding their weight and their momentum. Also, the edges feel, because it’s a flat surface and a straight edge, it doesn’t feel like a hand I can grab onto or something 3D that I can grasp easily. So, I think trying to move with it allows for cool moments of corners with my body that I’m finding. Knowing how to hold it, and trust that I’m holding it, that’s what I’ve been wanting to work on so that I feel comfortable in performance.

M: Are you choosing to actively engage with or integrate identity into your approach to Begin Again?

C: I think the concept has felt so personally charging in a way that I don’t think necessarily relates to my outword indentity. To be frank, my pandemic process has been extremely internal. I was in my own apartment alone for six months in New York City, and so I think reemerging into community and life has felt like part of a healing process. At the same time, the struggle has still been internal. Because of that experience and how it relates to the concept, it has maintained an internal world and an emotionality, kind of a journey in that way. At this moment, the concept has provided this opportunity to heal in a different way, so I can definitely see it expanding to be shaped by indentity and how I feel in that way. But, at this stage in the process, it feels interior.

M: Is the trauma and healing work that is happening inside of the concepts informing Begin Again’s creation process personal to you?

C: Even unconsciously, engaging with the creative process has felt like a form of addressing, like, facing trauma for me, personally, and healing. Dance holds a lot of charge for me since the pandemic, and dancing in a space with others still holds a lot of charge for me. Being in a creative process where I'm asked to be present in the space, I think that holds charge as well. In its framework, it's already been asking me to face a lot of things that I need to Begin Again, literally. Even being on a train with other people is asking me to let go of the fears and stresses and be here. In the process itself, in rehearsal, I don't think it's felt as conscious there. Maybe because once I've let go into dance and the structure of rehearsal, it's felt easy, and like I've arrived. I can just, like, be present as myself without some of those stresses.

- Marie

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Begin Again: AAPI Trauma In This Pandemic Age

Kwan, S. & Wong, Y., (2023) “Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence: An Introduction in Three Parts”, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies 42. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/conversations.3645

Bennyroyce and Marie discuss trauma and its impact on Begin Again’s movement material

Dance Conservatory Seattle, August 2022

This month, Dance Studies Association: Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies journal published Volume 42 Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence: An Introduction in Three Parts. This entire journal, including writings by artists like Gerald Casel, SanSan Kwan, Yutian Wong, Joyce Lu, Johnny Huy Nguyen, Crystal Song, and other several others, centers on trauma experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic that informs and inspires Begin Again. I will touch several of these articles in separate posts.

Today, I would like to refer to SanSan Kwan and Yutian Wong’s “Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence: An Introduction in Three Parts.” They write:

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a correspondingly virulent spate of anti-Asian sentiment in the West, particularly in the United States. Fueled by xenophobia and racism, attacks on Asians in North America, the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have increased at alarming rates, but the convergence of anti-Chinese rhetoric, anti-science conspiracy theories, police violence, the lack of nationalized healthcare, and the lack of will to pass or enforce gun control laws in the United States has translated into a moment in which Asian life, like that of other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) life in the United States, is once again deemed disposable. The contours of this hatred—and the violence through which it is expressed—are far from new.

Inside the research and development phase of Begin Again in August of 2022, Bennyroyce often referred to pandemic-induced trauma. (He continues to do so in 2023.) Not just grief, or bereavement, but emotional and spiritual wounds. His research around the qualitative aspects of the movement material he was inventing circled back again and again to this concept. It was especially important to be working toward discovering methods for healing, but always within a historically informed context. So, it is relevent that Kwan and Wong contextualize their introduction thusly:

Anti-Asian violence in the United States has existed for hundreds of years; and it is the result of a long history of racist immigration laws, the legacy of empire building, and militarism. The year 2022 marks the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first race-based immigration law in the United States. It provided the blueprint for subsequent anti-immigration policies, as well as current-day anti-Asian rhetoric. The COVID-19 pandemic has merely re- invoked nineteenth- and twentieth-century formations of Asian bodies as vectors of disease, contamination, and infiltration.

Much of the thought behind Begin Again is motivated by Bennyroyce’s determination to face the particular trauma encountered in the pandemic context by people in the AAPI community. It is clearly identified by the performers in the studio that he is inside a continuing exploration of the healing possibilities of the choreographic process, supported by the dramaturgical one, that will result in Begin Again being brought to the community in May as a direct reaction to and acknowledgement of pandemic trauma that has been inspired by thinking on a historically racist continuum.

- Marie

Begin Again: A Dramaturgical Approach

For the first time in our years long collaboration, Bennyroyce has asked me to contribute in the role of dramaturg. Begin Again, with it’s personal accounts of global events, is particularly ripe for dramaturgical creativity.

First, it is important to define this role. Just as in each creation process a choreographer plans and discovers methods and strategies in order to bring the work to life, a dramaturg works at an act of inventing her own methods and strategies in order to offer support to the essential vision of the work. We have been working together to better and more particularly define my role as the process of creating Begin Again progresses.

In order to more clearly communicate what we are doing, I have included below an excerpt from my work “Un-Airing the Dance: Choreographic Excavation Through Dramaturgy, which cites several dramaturgs’ approach to their roles:”

Dramaturg and professor Katherine Profeta explains that American dramaturg, editor, and lecturer Mark Bly thinks of this role with two words: “I question”. I consider Bly’s approach to be not as much one that edges toward a brutal interrogation, but rather, one aimed at guiding the choreographer to herself. If this questioning method is employed with care, I believe it can enable the choreographer and dramaturg to together discover exactly what the choreographer is searching for, while also creating capacity to understand what she may have already found during the process up to and including the moment of particular dramaturgical inquiry. Meanwhile, theater director and choreographer Ray Miller writes that the contemporary dramaturg manages the expansion by working as an “activist co-creator” or as a “dispassionate observer.” The notion of the “activist” here seems most vital, as the I believe that the writer, curator, and dramaturg Andre Lepecki illustrates similar practices along this instruction when he writes about a “not knowing” that is “resolved...by a practice of doing.”

When the performing arts theorist and dramaturg Konstantina Georgelou, choreographer and scholar Efrosini Protopapa, and performance maker, performer, and researcher Danae Theodoridou write that while the role of the dramaturg can be “relativized and obscure” and “ungraspable,” the key is to engage with what I am describing as the expanding realm by both choreographer and dramaturg devoting themselves to a “common area of inquiry.” This area of inquiry must be the same space carved out when Bly dares to “ask,” and must follow a path of discovery that begins with Lepecki’s “not knowing.” All of these different articulations of various dramaturgical approaches expose a certainty: that the expanded realm of the role of the choreographer, opening to include the role of the dramaturg, contains extreme, persistent, and functional overlaps.

To help answer the question of why a carving out of each creative role with extreme overlaps has sprung up, dramaturg Bojana Cvejic offers that the “appearance of the dramaturg in contemporary dance...is all the more curious for the fact that choreographers themselves have never been more articulate and self-reflexive about their working methods and concepts.” In this reflexivity, choreographers understand that the function of devising their methodologies precedes what I like to think of as an active spatial excavation process. This process, while certainly undertaken in part alone, is massive, moving, and unwieldy, and possibly much better attended to alongside what Cjevic refers to as a “friend”, or an individual invested in ensuring “the process doesn't compromise in experiment.” This reflexivity has also prompted choreographers to realize the need, and to find a way to repair the gap. It is inside the contemporary development of “this unique relationship between a choreographer and a dance dramaturg...that dyadic configurations” emerge in support of each work’s idiosyncratic modes of engagement and creative activities. By “dyadic”, I believe that Miller refers to his particular defining of the choreographer and dramaturg relationship as a distinct and peculiar thing of its own that is un-aired when the two figures meld their efforts together along the agreed upon line of inquiry. It is clear that, as Cvejic suggests, creating what she terms as a false “binary division of labor by faculties: choreographers are mute doers, and dramaturgs bodiless thinkers and writers” is not a functional outgrowth of the role of dramaturgy within choreography, as each role-occupier is working concurrently toward the same revelation of an un-aired work within the same set of agreed upon tools, so that “the boundaries of these faculties are blurred and constantly shifting.” The blur and the shift are defined by each coupled choreographer and dramaturg in ways that are completely clear only to themselves. What is not clear is how, as Ray Miller explains in an interview with critic Bonnie Maranca, bringing to the choreographer “a wealth of images, associations, sliver of music or design element, historical documents, or contemporary perspectives (serve) as ways to stimulate the choreographic imagination” operates within the shift and the blur (94). I suggest that with each agreed upon proposal, the resulting intervention exposes another layer of the eventually excavated work, shifting the blur closer to being the visible, and bringing the members of the dyadic configuration closer to knowing, that is, to perceiving the dance itself, and farther from Lepecki’s “not knowing.”

Miller suggests that “dramaturgs provide a natural crossover between theory and practice, between history and choreography, and between performance and audience response.” This natural crossover might be considered as something of an intercession, meaning that the crossover Miller refers to is a distinct activity (or set of activities), and not at all a passive positioning of the dramaturg between an active totality of choreographer(s), dancer(s), and performer(s) and an inert, receptive spectatorship. This approach can be illustrated by a sequence described by dramaturg Pil Hansen, who has identified a series of strategies she calls a “multiplicity of approaches” that dramaturgs can then use to cut, paste, overlap, disregard, engage, and re-engage with whatever they encounter. These strategies are “transitory, lifted from …(another) context, and rendered abstract principles.”

So, it is clear that choreographers and dramaturgs define and redefine their co-creative processes with each new work of dance. The most interesting and potent moments and connection on these defining fronts will eventually appear as Begin Again itself.

Phil and Marie in a sketch of a “floor duet” at Dance Conservatory Seattle in August 2022

- Marie