Salvage

I'm thrilled to be collaborating with Alyce Bochette on her piece Salvage, which will be performed May 21 at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Centre in Fort Myers.  Alyce is a remarkable, versatile dancer and teacher--most recently she was my tap teacher, but more on that in some other post--having performed in Mark Morris's Dance Group for many years, among many other hugely impressive associations.

Anyway, I extended a poem I was already working on with another collaboration, again for another post, for which I had been thinking of ideas for Alyce's piece.  We spent an afternoon talking just about the dynamics of that word salvage.  Clearly about keeping and saving, but also as much about letting go, abandoning, dispossessing, all with spiritual, nostalgic, and familial elements at play.  About three weeks ago, I gave Alyce the poem, and she has choreographed a remarkable dance for a trio, and we then decided to make the poem a script.  The wonderful Katie Pankow and I will perform the poem while the dancers dance--we're blocked upstage to the right, sitting on a really big box, and so we're part chorus, part musicians, part Brechtian spectators.  The rehearsals have just been marvelous.  And this piece will be the first dance for the program (the closing dance, I must say, is riveting, emotional, and very smart). 

Alyce is working with Stuart Brown, and it will be dance with video, image, fabric, silence, boxes, music, and it has been a joy to be a part of.  One of the dancers, by the way, is Gerri, and it's been a good while for her since she has performed in a serious piece (even though she won a judge's award for a great rhumba she performed last fall for a charity event). 

In any event, it should be a special evening for all who attend.