In college, I was the choreographer who showed up to rehearsal with counts and movements written out in a notebook, having envisioned the finished work in my mind a hundred times over before ever choosing the cast. In my first semester of graduate school my composition teacher asked, “what does it mean to care when it comes to the creative process?” As I thought over this question it became clear that I’ve directed my care externally, toward the thoughts and expectations of my mentors or colleagues, and toward the finished product. The following semester I quickly jumped at the opportunity to switch my way of thinking—to focus on input over output, on process over product. This new creative thinking brought me to my first choreographic work as a graduate student.
My research explores dance, community engagement, and civic service—connecting people across social, political, cultural, and geographical borders through art. As an advocate for refugee rights, I wanted to draw attention to the current refugee crisis in the United States. In the past, I had worked with a non-profit organization dedicated to helping refugee children become acclimated after arriving to the U.S. and I wanted to continue contributing to this cause. I went to an event titled “Examining the Refugee Crisis Through Art,” where Columbus artists shared their work and talked about their creative processes. There was deep conversation about the representation of refugees as statistics along with a lack of individualized attention, the desensitization of the crisis among Americans, and the need to humanize these people who have been marked as criminals. But how could I choreograph a piece about the refugee experience when I, myself, was not a member of the refugee community? I couldn’t. I could, however, create a piece about the human condition and highlight the shared human emotions involved in refugee experiences.
With this work, I wanted to draw attention to shared human emotions during times of hardship. The work was unnamed and involved a cast of six dancers with various levels of experience. I knew that this process would require an ability to sit in discomfort—to be vulnerable—for both myself and the dancers. For myself, the discomfort came from an unsettling fear that I would unintentionally cause harm to others by taking on this topic. For the dancers, I anticipated a discomfort in revisiting past emotions and experiences. Working off of Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens' concept of brave space, it became my goal to cultivate a rehearsal space and a creative process that empowered the dancers to be brave and to take risks.
Part I: Establishing Brave Space
In their essay titled “From Safe Places to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice,” Arao and Clemens begin by discussing the importance of establishing ground rules. This first step is the key to creating “a learning environment that allows students to engage with one another over controversial issues with honesty, sensitivity, and respect” (Arao and Clemens 2013, 135). Our first cast dinner took place over pizza and began by establishing community ground rules. This gave us an outline for how to move forward and support each other throughout the process. As a cast, we discussed what felt important and accessible to us, as well as how we could express these elements in the choreography. Words that came up included displacement, exhaustion, and reaction.
Every rehearsal included three elements aside from the actual creation of choreography. These elements included (1) a check-in, (2) a team-building exercise, and (3) a check-out. Our check-ins provided an opportunity for the dancers and I to celebrate something that brought us joy or to confide in the group over something weighing us down. Check-ins offered a space, every week, where we could always count on being heard and seen. Our team-building exercises were used both as a physical warmup and as a way of getting to know each other. Our check-outs allowed us to reflect both as individuals and as a community, creating a space for each of us to share what we were enjoying or what needed to change throughout the creative process.
In “Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response” applied theater professor Jan Cohen-Cruz discusses the methods of fellow social justice advocate and director of Roadside Theater, Dudley Cocke. Cohen-Cruz states, “Cocke asserts that effective grassroots organizing around issues of social justice invariably begins small. He sees the basic unit of such organizing as the individual discovering through experience, reflection, and study his or her own truth about the issue, then testing and developing that truth in dialogue with others, who also have knowledge” (Cohen-Cruz 2010, 97). This concept of beginning small with individual, self-reflection and expanding gradually into group discussion served as the foundation of our rehearsal process.
Part II: Collaborative Choreography
The choreographic process was also a community effort. I compiled a list of 16 different emotions or keywords mentioned within refugee narratives. The dancers each took the list and next to each word, wrote about a time in their lives when they felt that same emotion/role. They also had the option of skipping a word if they could not relate it back to a memory. I purposefully chose to isolate the individual keywords on the list from their correlated origin because I did not want the dancers to compare their own experiences to those of the refugees, but instead to focus on the similarities in what was felt. The dancers then took their experiences and interpreted them through movement, creating one movement phrase/gesture per each word on the list. These phrases and gestures became the backbone of our work.
We chose to open the piece with the elements of displacement and exhaustion, brought up during our first meeting. The dancers discussed how, although they’d never experienced physical displacement, they could find a connection to an internal sense of displacement associated with not knowing how to deal with their lived experiences or the emotions that emerged. Their internal, emotional displacement was a metaphor for the physical displacement of the refugee. To show this, we drew multiple possibilities for arranging bodies in the space (we called these “orientation keys”), crumpled them up, and placed them in a pile on the floor. The dancers each randomly chose one key each and used the keys to orient their bodies in the studio. The dancers set up for their first position in blackout, the lights would rise, fall, and the dancers would move to the next position in darkness. We did this several times, over and over, trying to literally exhaust and disorient the audience with not knowing where a dancer would pop up in space each time the lights came up.
Once we had our movement, we began piecing it together through games and exercises. Our first exercise was an adaptation of Arao and Clemen’s “Crossing the Line” (also known as “One Step Forward One Step Back” and “Leveling the Playing Field”). In the original exercise participants line up at one end of a room while a facilitator calls out a series of statements related to social identity, privilege, and oppression. The participants then take a step forward if they believe that a statement reflects their lived experience. The original goal of Arao and Clemen’s exercise is to demonstrate the effects of social stratification and injustices within the lives of the participants. I wanted to use this exercise, but to manipulate it in a way that would highlight the commonalities present among the dancers as opposed to highlighting what made them different. The dancers lined up, side by side, at one end of the studio. One at a time I called out each emotion from the list. If a dancer had a particular experience that correlated to that emotion, they stepped forward. If they didn’t, they stayed in place. At the end of the exercise the dancers looked around and found that, for the most part, they had traveled forward together as a group. Not one dancer was left behind, and not one dancer led the group. Although each dancer felt these emotions at different intensities throughout their lives, what brought them together as a cast was that they weren’t harboring those emotions alone.
Reaction was the third word that came up during rehearsal discussions. The dancers spoke about how although they could not control the experiences that related to the emotions on our list, they did have control over how they react to those experiences and talked about how their reactions influenced where they ended up next. We chose to show this in our work by using a process that was uncontrollable (to an extent) to outline how our dance would evolve. We had two dice. One was twelve-sided and the other six-sided. The dancers grouped together and took turns rolling the dice—first, the twelve-sided and then, the six-sided die. The twelve-sided die decided the number of steps to be taken and the six-sided die decided an action to be taken (1 was roll, 2 was jump, 3 was slide, etc.). The dancers could not control the physical movement, but they could control which direction they chose to take that movement.
Part III: Reflection
Although this work never came into fruition due to the unpredictable effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have never been more proud of a choreographic undertaking. While reflecting inward, I am proud of myself for stepping outside of my comfort zone and my typical way of choreographing. During my first semester of graduate school I had a debilitating fear of judgement that distanced me from my creative process. I was so afraid of doing the work wrong that I didn’t do it at all. As I reflect on the dancers, I am proud of their vulnerability and honesty. Author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown said “there is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.” I feel that as a cast, we did that. I am a believer, like da Vinci, that art is never truly finished—it is only abandoned. This is the one work that I feel okay leaving behind, because it was never about having a finished product. It was always about the process.
Works Cited
Arao, Brian and Kristi Clemens. 2013. “From Safe Places to Brave Spaces: A New Way to
Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice” in The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators, edited by Lisa M. Landreman. Sterling: Stylus LLC.
Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 2010. Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. Abingdon: Routledge.
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