jacopo

The past month has flown by, I really can't quite fathom how on Earth it's March already. The four weeks following the January program (for the not so bright ones out there that'd qualify as February) were swallowed up by rehearsing Spazio-Tempo, an incredible contemporary piece by Jacopo Godani. I'm second cast -- which probably we're not going have time to rehearse and perform -- so mostly taken it as a few weeks of vacation from ballet, throwing myself into just workshopping his choreography and style of dancing.

Jacopo is an Italian fireball, shaved bald ex-Forsythe dancer with a slightly protruding belly and a mouth that would make a sailor blush, no matter if the sailor was Italian, French, English, Spanish, or Japanese. He and his assistant, Francesca, ran a shock-and-awe campaign for pretty much the whole time they were here, trying to jolt the dancers out of the habits built into our bodies in thousands and thousands of hours of class and rehearsal, to throw away the classical movement style and approach carrying our body from a whole different direction. Not the easiest task in 3 or 4 weeks, but an incredible experience. His movement style is wriggly and interesting and relaxed -- think of how to get from point A to point B in the simplest fashion, a straight line using muscles and form.... that's the opposite of what Jacopo wants. He wants interesting, complicated, natural (well, not natural for ballerinas), defined by the ends of your fingers, the tips of your toes, and originating from your pelvis. Crude, funny, demanding, vulgar, bit by bit Jacopo got across his theory of movement, the energy he wants between dancers on stage, how he plays with the music, and his method of dancing where you relax and let the bones move and the movements happen even more wriggly as you push harder, rather than using the muscles to force it.

Naturally, the weeks have been chalk full of quotes and laughs.  The reigning favorite is "It's almost as though you're all swords, and I want your body to be a fucking nuclear weapon" -- one of his core philosophies is that classical ballet is an antiquated art form, made for the aristocracy of Louis XIV's court, and the world has evolved since then.  Why would you want to dance like they did two hundred years ago, when you can dance like someone from the 21st century?  Being stiff and held upright and poised and coiffed.... all of that is old.  Instead let the norms of the surrounding world into the studio, walk like a person, have pas de deux's where both people are partnering each other rather than just the man lifting the woman as some perfect object, look into each other's eyes.  Don't look out to the audience, look at each other, build the feeling of a "fucking communist revolution" in the ranks of the dancers, where we all shout out loud the counts to be sure we're together, race together against the music to hit the last position and hoooooollllldddd.... until Crash! the musical cue hits and we race to the next stopping point. This is not a ballet about a prince and a princess reigning over their court, but a group of 12, intermixing and challenging each other and pushing each other on for the whole half hour of the piece.

Philosophy of the feeling of the piece aside, there's also the actual executing-the-choreography piece.  He wants movement that is completely counter to classical ballet -- relaxing instead of holding, letting joints and bones move while muscles bounce and rebound instead of place each thing exactly so -- while retaining the line and pointe work and vocabulary of classical dance.  Equally though, he rejects the early 20th century versions of modern, where lines were straightened instead of curved, the weight was dropped down, pointe shoes discarded. Instead he's looking for something different, closer to Forsythe, but looser, lighter, shapes defined in space so fast that the path of the fingertips is crucial because it is what leave the traces in the audience's vision that hover after the body has moved on to the next step. To get the results though usually requires Francesca in your face, yelling "move from your ass!" as you try to get your body to be subject to your mind rather than the years of training you've drilled into your muscles, or him calling across the room: "Open your ass hole!" as you try to do a pirouette (while moving the whole top of your body in a wave, naturally, despite the 2 in diameter of your pointe shoe tip that you're balancing on).... And my personal favorite as an illustration to Julian as he held his arms out in a circle directly out from his chest and let Pascale, his partner, drop through them to kneel on the floor -- "it's like you're the asshole, and she's the turd coming out.  pfffttt" with a little hand wave to illustrate exactly how she was supposed to drop out of the space he defined.  What fun :)

This is all for the program at the end of March, so we have a few more weeks to work on it and get it into our blood before he comes back and kills us all as we get into the theatre.  I can't tell you how many things where, if we do them not quite how he wants, he "will come up on stage and slit your throats!" which is decent enough motivation. More to come soon on the rest of life and the other half of this program -- Allegro Brillante by Balanchine (that'll be me) and Tchai Pas and Por Vos Mueros by Nacho Duato -- but for now, there's a snapshot at least of Jacopo.  If I got you interested, just above is the link to the pas de deux that I'm learning, performed by Dresden, so you can get a visual sense of what he's asking for.  See if you can't spot the asshole and turd moment ;)