At the end of three weeks, I'm exhausted, but happy. We had Brigitte (a stager from NDT) here to teach us Symphonie des Psaumes, the first of the three Stravinsky pieces in our program. Stravinsky wrote this piece in 1930, where the choir sings the texts from three Psalms (38, 40 and 150) throughout the three movements. Kylian choreographed it in 1978, early in his career, and set it within a constrained space smaller than the stage where chairs and a box of brown flooring mark out the walls of the church that holds all of our movement.
The music, in natural Stravinsky fashion, makes a mess out of the idea of meter -- we spent the entire first week or two (or three) trying to count fast enough in every language at the same time, all while the meter was changing and the melody was swinging wildly over the underlying tempo, leaving us frantically searching for the 5's, 8's, 7's, 6's, 3's, 12's and 14's.... This led to the recent discovery that counting past 8 in French is a lost cause; as soon as I'm supposed to find neuf-dix-onze-deuze I completely lose the correlation between the music and the steps and the counts, because it took me two counts to figure out what silly number came after neuf! Maria, one of our principals, has been laughing about it with me in rehearsal, where she has often caught herself, mid run through, realizing she started counting the next 1 after 8 counts, instead of 12, and so trying to do math while dancing to say, "ok, I got to 3, 3 plus 8 is 11, plus 1 more is 12 and then I start again at 1!" -- of course by this time you're another 8 counts late, so you're trying to add those together too, and it quickly spirals out of control. There's a lot of looking at each other in this ballet, and praying (fitting, given our setting).
I've been particularly beat up -- it's a physical ballet, lots of deep lunges and tricky partnering, deep contractions, so we're bent in half and walking in a deep plié so the inside of our wrists are the most forward and upwards part of our body, attached to the invisible chord pulling us all the way across the stage -- and I got lucky enough to be one of the two couples in both casts. First cast my partner and I do all of the corps de ballet sections (the whole ballet is only eight couples, arranged in different patterns throughout, but with four soloist couples and four other couples who are in the group pieces and the pas de 4 and pas de 8, etc) and second cast for one of the four main pas de deux couples. It has truly been a blessing to come back to Kylian, where I can feel like I can continue to build on the pieces I was just starting to dig my fingernails into in June with Petite Mort. There are so many ways in which I can feel my dancing being stretched and pulled in the best of ways, learning to pare away my physical bad habits and mold myself into his way of moving, with simplicity and clear intention. This feels as different from Petite Mort as Mozart is from Stravinsky, meaning in so many ways and in none. It is still all about finding how to work with your partner, how to let your body relax into tension, pull out and extend from each exhale.
On top of that, this past week we have had Gilbert Mayer here as a guest teacher. He is one of the iconic professors from the Opera National de Paris -- both the company and school at the Paris Opera -- and brought classical ballet (and how it is to be done in the école francais) back with a vengeance. It is really amazing how hard we work, how long we have been dancing and taking class every single morning, and yet there are so many things that are still wonderfully too hard. We finished the week by filming a full run-thru of Symphonie with each cast, and then being made to sit and watch it (dancers notoriously hhhhhaaaaate watching themselves on video) -- leaving us amazed at how much better it has gotten over the three weeks, and just how far we still need to go before we're even close to being satisfied.
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