Sketch 8 fest cooks up 3 new works
Ballets by women choreographers in program this weekend in S.F.
“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation — experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.” — Paul Theroux
Choreographers are like chefs in more ways than you might imagine. Their ingredients aren’t fruits, vegetables, meat, herbs and spices, but bodies, movement, music, fabric and light. Balance and proportion are the keys to success for both. While it might take all day to put together a delectable repast, it can take several weeks to create a half-hour moving feast of dance.
To see the results from a local “choreographic kitchen,” check out the Sketch 8 dance festival presented by Amy Seiwert’s Imagery company tonight through Saturday at the ODC Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. This year’s theme is “Origin Stories.”
The idea behind the Sketch series is to provide a laboratory for choreographers to experiment beyond their usual approach to their artistic process, to break out of their old habits. Through the immense popularity of television cooking shows, there’s an awareness that it takes all kinds, from icon Julia Child to rebel Gordon Ramsay. You’ll find an equally diverse lineup of dance-makers.
For this year’s program Seiwert invited New Yorkbased choreographers Jennifer Archibald and Gabrielle Lamb to join her in creating new work for Imagery’s eight dancers.
Archibald’s choreography is fusion cuisine. She hails from Toronto, where she says “being classically trained was really important to my parents. When
I was in college I was doing a lot of hip-hop in the club scene and belonged to a crew before I moved to New York. That urban aesthetic has always been a really strong voice within my classical technique training.”
“I try to use narration when I work,” she adds. “I don’t tend to do work that’s super abstract. In the studio, I’ll paint the movement super quickly in the first few days and I don’t backtrack. Here, I’ve been allowed the time to look at the work and that slows me down. I’m trying ideas where I’ll sculpt something and if it doesn’t work I’ll take more time to figure it out.”
“I’m also incorporating more elements of acting
within the choreography than I normally do,” Archibald explains. “I’m asking the questions — what are you seeing, why are we doing this in the scene. We’re figuring out every single intention behind each gesture, so that it makes sense. I’m working at Yale with actors and I think they’ve taught me a lot more about intention and responding truthfully than I would if I just continued to work within dance.”
Lamb is more like the cook who’s whipping up a gourmet meal with whatever ingredients she’s already got in the fridge. It’s not all ad hoc though.
“I often start with improv,” Lamb says, “I usually come in with two or three movement phrases that I’ve
generated on my own body to give (performing dancers) an idea of what I’m looking for. Then I try to see if I can generate more through them by directing verbally. I definitely know when something is right or interesting as a shape or if it belongs in a specific place in the dance. It’s not something you can plan ahead of time, you have to search for it.”
The final adjustments come when she’s gotten to know the dancers better.
“Each day I learn a little bit more about the dancers and I go home at night and shuffle my Post-it notes and come up with a timeline,” she says. “I arrange them by who I want to see together in which musical sections.”
Seiwert is more like a culinary
anthropologist.
“I’m workshopping some ideas for a piece for Sacramento Ballet next year,” she says, adding that ideas are being built around music by violist Christen Lien.
“She’s classically trained but also an improviser and has written a concept album about Elpis, who in Greek mythology is the personification of Hope. She is one of the evils in Pandora’s box, but instead of escaping, Elpis is trapped inside. Christen took that further and explored what she does inside. Will she get out? She becomes so angry that the friction sets the box on fire. The box is destroyed and she goes out into the world of today having been trapped in the box for a couple thousand years.”