A choreography must always move faster than the capacety of the viewer’s eye to fully understand "how it works”. it should always be one step ahead of its audience, thus creating a strong sens of moving forward (in time, substances, ideas, naratives etc)
Pitfall
When the work one creates isn’t about himself, it opens the way to see how the dancers, as the immediate and most intimate manifestations of a dance piece, must be given the conditions and context that will allow their talent and individual qualities to come into being.
They in turn, will also have to understand that "its not about them". A full cycle of realizing the independence of the choreographic process and substance, from its makers. (Agnes Martin once wrote. "The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.”)
But even if this second aspect is harder to achieve, i'm constantly looking for ways of maximizing their ability for creativity and clarity. To a large extent, this is attained through creating a subtle balance between making them aware of the choreographic mechanism and the way it functions, and at times, putting them through processes in which they are unable to fully grasp the forces that determine the flow of events/actions/situations.
Awareness
Awareness is at the hart of the act of dancing - the wider it is, the more information and details a dancer accumulates in real time, the more the dance becomes clear and meaningful. When dancing within a group, most of one’s attention should be aimed at maximising one’s awareness at what is being done by the other dancers. This frees the dancer’s own body and mind to engage fully with the movement, and creates a clear relation to the other dancers, thus giving the dancer the best reasons to move (or stay still for that matter…). Acute perception of the wider context, is at the origin of good dancing.
Process
The first thing that happen in the studio at the start of the process, usualy looks good, then you start doubting it and begins to change certain elements, and before you know it, the whole thing stops making sense. Choreographic sections that were almost finished and felt quite good, fall apart. It's as if we haven’t experienced enough with them for it to hold. The whole thing doesn't have enough structural history. It’s not always the case, but sometimes the mere accumulation of attempts, layers and deleted versions, is needed. What I'm always after is some simplicity where the whole thing is just there, and sometimes getting there goes through throwing some great 'younger’ versions in order to arrive to ‘older’ ones.
Change
No significant work of art can be made without the creator conviction he is making something that can and will fundamentally change people's way of understanding and experiencing life and the world around them. It goes without saying that it doesn’t really matter if it’s the case or not eventualy. Art that is not made with this sincere belief is either cynical or simply bad, and it bares no long term importance.
Re-staging
Re-staging an existing piece with a new group of dancers, must feel like a new creation process, rather than a reconstruction of an existing thing. There is an inherent logic to the construction process, which is at the core of what the work is all about. It’s like an envelope around the dancers. The fact a re-staging is treated as a separate and independent process, allows the dancers to find their place within it, and not just react to something somebody else did. It makes the new version, an original.
Choreography/mechanism
Choreography has to do with the creation of mechanisms that set off and detrmine the overall action (the more these mechanisms are open to "live" aspects, the more the onstage action gains credibility). These mechanisms have to be partly exposed and seen by the audience. By being aware of the need to make those mechanisms visable, the dancers gain a wider spectrum of awareness regarding their actions. They are letting the audience see the ‘choreographic engine' (or parts of it), thus giving them an additional channel of communication with their audience.
