Here are the pictures by awesome dance photographer, William Hebert:
The past couple weeks in rehearsal, I've spent working with each individual dancer on their respective solos. Their solo material is created collaboratively between choreographer (me) and the dancer. I had each dancer come up with a prose or poem about a favorite memory they have and then I had them extract specific words out of the original. The original movement phrases were created from those words. I gave specific movement ideas to each individual dancer based on their phrases to formulate a truly individual story that is unique to the dancer. The finishing touch will be interviewing each dancer and juxtaposing their words to their solo.
I hand-picked each dancer not just based on technical ability, I picked each dancer because of her background story. Her cultural upbringing, her personality, her openness to learning about other cultures. It was important to me to have dancers that can relate to the project and invest their time in rehearsal. (Dancers if you're reading this, THANK YOU! You inspire me!) They come from a variety of cultural backgrounds (more on this later...) and it is stunning to see this cultural exchange in rehearsal every week. :-)
