So much of the best contemporary work is described as “difficult” or “experimental”, as if you needed superendurance or specialized knowledge to make your way through it. Really, all you need is an open mind — this doesn’t mean you’ll end up liking it, or that you should — and, more important, you need the willingness to spend some time truly looking at what’s in front of you, just as artists take the time to make it.
There were beautiful paragraphs in Claudia La Rocco’s New York Times article on the choreography of Susan Rethorst.
I also liked her quotation for Rethorst’s essay Dailiness
“It [choreography] comes along when it comes along,” she writes. “In the meantime you have to be in there, trying a bit of this and a bit of that, and staying with all those semi-moments, all those ho-hum kinda moments, trying something else and doing it over, and working, but also waiting. You have to keep yourself available, keep the work available, and work up to those whamo times, then with them, also after them, till the next, till the whole thing takes off, tells you it is.”
That feels familiar. I often tell people that I don’t make choreography but I find it. The piece is there but like a shy animal that needs stillness, calm and patience before it makes its appearance.
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