Artists improvise to a Wesley Hymn performed by Ellen Gerdes (voice) and Dave Burrell (piano) during “Where Heaven’s Dew Divides.” (Photo: Nathea Lee)
“…emphasize the inward process of memory over the outward process of performance.”– Katherine Profeta, from “Ralph Lemon and the Buck Dance”
Shavon Norris describes a difference in the rhythm and “the break” of process and production. Her description is less about musicality and performance, and more about human relationships and building an artistic community that acknowledges multiple voices and experiences. The rhythmic spaces she describes seem akin to flashes of spontaneity that arise out of collaboration.
I value the rhythm of the process more than I value the rhythm in the production – all of the ideas, and the energy. And all of that moving that happens in the making. And sometimes this [hits knuckles together] happens. Like the way rhythm lives in the process. And people’s expression of passion and ideas and conflict and, “Do it this way,” or, “I see it that way.” That’s where the living is.
It’s interesting, because I’ve worked with Leah, and I haven’t performed with Germaine. I feel like there’s this really interesting balance. I would categorize Leah as, like, a century: her rhythm is in centuries; her thought process is in centuries; she’s thinking from here to a hundred years. And Germaine’s is a little more like seconds… And so being in a space with those two rhythmic bodies is also very informative. It’s a good reminder that people are operating in different times and understandings and expressions. So I’ve really been aware of that, because I feel like they have been leading this… I think it was a valuable thing to see as I continue to figure out relationships, and how to be in other people’s spaces. So less about rhythm in movement and dance, but more in humans and interaction. And then when something new pops in, that’s the break. Those things make the rhythms. I can hear them a lot better. And appreciate the expression.”
Germaine Ingram discusses an emergent process rooted in improvisation and collaboration for creating Where Heaven’s Dew Divides, in hopes of undermining a hierarchical approach:
I guess your second question had to do with how we found any sort of measure of coherence. And, you know, there wasn’t necessarily a strategy for that. I’d have to say coherence emerged. We decided from the beginning that we wanted the production to really draw on improvisation. Improvisation was really key to the questions that we were delving into in the project; it became really key to the process of organizing the learning community. So it really would have been a divergence to move to some top-down, authorial process of creating this production. So we wanted to keep it open to improvisation. And, of course, there was the danger that we’d have a variety show rather than a coherent production. But I guess some of the things that worked, as I said: we lived and worked together for several months, sharing workshops, explorations, quotes… So we had this shared repository of quotes and texts that we used as prompts for improvisation or prompts for discussion. We had experience working together, and seeing what it was to work kinesthetically with one another, so we brought all of that to the process. And we were working with a shared exploration of this history. So even though people were sort of pulling out different parts of this history, and working from their own particular aesthetic, there were lots of shared touch-points that created this network in which we worked. And so we just at some point – as artists do – sat in the middle and looked at all the materials we had around us, and figured out how we could put it together in a way that audiences might understand.
Ellen Gerdes on bringing more of the individual to performance:
I think there’s this generalization or assumption that performance is somehow fake, that it’s acting, and you put on something, and you put on a story that’s not the truth, and that it’s a fantasy in some ways. And I think that even the work with Manu is saying, “I’m gonna use who you are! So show us who you are on stage.” And that’s where your performance begins. And I think that’s very different from “acting a role.” In dance we might not have that sense of acting a role, but we still do some things where maybe we are trying to cover up ourselves…
And so in this group, I think we are able to explore a little more of, “Okay, what if it’s really ourselves and sincerely ourselves that are also interacting with a particular history and particular questions, and individual questions that were not the same for all of us… The performance is multi-layered, and it’s complex, and it’s collage. It has a visual collage, but each component is also pieced together from different perspectives, from a diversity of people and genres and interests. And that to me seems a very affective way to ask these questions about what we feel every day and go through every day. And to talk about what people who we may hope to empathize with, but can’t really empathize with—um, what everybody else is going through. I think the multi-layered, multi-perspective component of it seemed the closest I’ve felt for a long time as a performer to those types of questions.
Sheila Zagar speaks about performance heightening the connection between the artists, and the rich atmosphere in which to experiment:
I felt like there was something about performance that really changed, and escalated, the intimacy and dynamics that I felt was glorious. And that might not have happened. I felt like I didn’t initiate as much as I now would like to initiate. Now I’m ready to do some initiation. It took me this long to feel like I found I could’ve ran on anything that interested me. And there was so many things that did. I feel like there was just a pinhole in the egg, although the pinhole was very rich. And I feel like what I got was an explosion.
Khalil Munir describes the richness of collaboratively producing Where Heaven’s Dew Divides, acknowledging all the different people who participated in creating it:
Because when you really look at the whole grand scheme of the project, it wasn’t just the dancers. It was the lighting guy, the sound guy, the person who created this collage, yourself, family friends and people to bounce ideas off of. So it was a total collaborative process. The audience just gets to see that end result. But they don’t get to see everything that goes into making this beautiful gumbo, you know. They just get to taste it.
Dew Crew Memoirs 