A Choreographer's Blog: secrets

Friday, April 25, 2014

SECRETS AND SEAWALLS - Program notes...

We are heading into a first-look showing for Secrets and Seawalls today at TheaterLab to wrap up the Hotel New Work Series and get our grounding before residencies over the summer.

I'm excited, and a bit scared - the work has gone in a very different direction than I had originally thought - but, this...this too is perfectly fine and really exciting.

Andrew Broaddus, Callie Ritter, Michelle Micca and Katie Brennan

Here are the program notes for today....

Secrets and Seawalls

a collaboration of dancers, an architect and vulnerability.

Friday April 25, 2014
Theaterlab 357 W 36th St NYC

Dancers: Callie Ritter, Michelle Micca, Katie Brennan, Andrew Broaddus
Choreographer: Melissa Riker
Collaborating Architect: Lee Skolnick

Dramatugy: Pele Bausch

I am honored to be working with so many brave & beautiful dancing souls.

This work began in 2013 with dancers Benjamin Oyzon, Hilary Brown, Jun Lee and Zoe Levine.

Thank you Lee, Callie, Katie Andrew and Michelle for your commitment, creativity and honesty

as we continue to find out what this work is becoming.

Secrets and Seawalls is made possible by

generous individual donations, The KP Leadership Circle

a residency at TheaterLab via Hotel New Work and

an upcoming Residency at Adelphi University

Performances at Adelphi are on Sept 12^th and 13^th, 2014.

About the work

What is a secret?

Where does it hide in you?

How might it move through you?

Where would it reveal itself?

How would you reveal it to another person?

These are the questions with which I entered the rehearsal process of this piece.

Over all, Secrets and Seawalls is an exploration of structure and vulnerability –

The initial inspiration for the work was a combination of two major NYC events.

Sept 11, 2001 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

After 9/11, there was a murmur that NYC’s seawalls had been fractured.

Teams of architects and engineers were brought in as a task force to discover the extent of damage.

As a busy New Yorker, I never learned the outcome. And I didn’t really think about it again until Oct. 29^th, 2012,

as Hurricane Sandy, the full moon, and a Nor’Easter slammed the East coast all at once, I thought of the walls – the possibility of fracture – and what keeps this powerful city safe and our amazing subway system intact….

I also thought of our human reality: We think we are quite powerful; We have all of the structures in place…

But once we lose electricity, NYC is just an island, and our homes at the beach are constantly facing off with

something so much more powerful than us….

So where is power? Is it in the open, honest vulnerability? Or is it in the mortar, the structures we build?

Is it about retaining our information or about releasing it so that others might learn as well?

Thank you for joining this journey of questions with us.

~Melissa and Kinesis Project dance theatre

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Secrets and Seawalls -- the beginning

Did you think I had left you forever?
Not a chance.
I was napping, kind of.

Let's step into process again....for the first time in a while.

The question series to begin this process was:

Think of a secret.

Where does it live in you?

How does it move through you?

Where would it reveal itself?

and finally...

How would you reveal it to someone.

Here are some images from our Open Studio in which we worked through the movement that had been created over a few weeks from this beginning point.

....These are the beautiful people I get to work with to make dances:
Jun Lee, Benjamin Oyzon, Hilary Brown, Zoe Bowick Levine (and sometimes her son, Leo) missing in action is Madeline Hoak, but she'll be back in the mix soon.