Beth Gill "Untitled" Research in 2016

[HEAVY FOOTSTEPS]

[Beth Gill] My intentions going into this particular project were

to work less conceptually and a little bit more

imaginatively, which is to say that I was interested

in spending some time at the beginning of the

process by myself working kind of with visualization and

my own imagination to see things and then slowly

to connect the dots between the things I was seeing

and build out a piece from that place.

A lot of the process that I have been doing and

that I continue to do here at MANCC was a

somewhat like analytical process of trying to

understand some of the initial images that...

that we've, like, manifested.

[Gill speaking to performers]

"And open that left foot.

And start to think about

the head leading forward."

[Gill Voiceover] As I mentioned, so much of the process is about

finding an inquiry into what some of the visual

images might represent or sort of the meanings

that might be coming off of them.

I thought it could be interesting to gather together

a somewhat diverse group and kind of pick their

brains in that way.

I think everybody is a faculty member here at FSU

but coming from very different departments,

we had somebody from psychology,

we had somebody from theater,

somebody from dance,

we had a photographer there, other visual artists.

I was really excited inside of the entry points

conversation because I felt that although each

person sort of had a different language to kind of

attack like what they were seeing and

what it was making them think about.

I felt like everything I heard was part of the larger

canopy of ideas and thought that had come up for

me and for the dancers as we've been

interrogating sort of these images on our own.

[original composition by Jon Moniaci playing]

[Gill]

We had like roughly two weeks here at MANCC.

In the first week, we had the entire cast as well as

our composer, Jon Moniaci, so that first week was

spent continuing to work kind of structurally to

understand the like, layering and weaving together

of these different choreographic lines.

All of that work that I was doing with the dancers

sort of in the room was a kind of active space for

John to keep cultivating the palliative sounds that

he's working with and, you know, building more specific

musical compositions to match some of the choreographic material.

So that's kind of how we were working in

the first week.

In the second week, I've been primarily working

with Stuart Singer and Heather Lang.

They are somewhat intertwined into a kind of

single choreographic, like stroke.

One of the things that we uncovered at the end of

the week was the possibility of working with this

material of theirs in kind of a retrograde format.

I think the interest, or at least my interest still in

that is to sort of place this very precise, formal,

like frame on this material that is very weighted and

sensuous, and this is just a very sexy material

where their bodies are intertwined and you're

watching these contours glide over each other.

So that process has been very brain-melting and

we've spent pretty much an entire week

working that way.

[dialogue between Gill and Lang]

[Lang] “So then it pushes back first, then the right goes,

then with the left, this guy.”

[Gill] “Good.” [Lang] “And then”

[Gill] “Okay just that forward.”

[Gill Voiceover] I feel like what ended up happening is

we kind of unlocked this potential with

Heather and Stuart and kind of dug into that work,

but what is exciting when I think about moving

forward when we get back to New York is getting

to bring this new material that we've been

developing into the studio,

and the excitement of getting to see it

kind of juxtaposed against other bodies and

some of the other material that we have.

But there's still a lot of figuring out that needs to

happen in terms of where these particular bodies

and roles and choreographic lines are kind of

going and some of that is sort of in relationship to

just a kind of weaving a very loose narrative that

isn't really written out, yet. That's kind of the work

that needs to happen.

What do some of these particular choreographic

lines, like want to say?

You know so what is their trajectory and then

thinking about those kinds of questions in terms of

just the framework of the whole piece too.

[original composition by Jon Moniaci playing]

[SUSTAINED AMBIENT MUSIC]