Le Cour Jeune #3

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I am a graduate student. 

I feel like there is enough said in this one statement to excuse (almost) all the craziness, offensiveness, spaciness, rudeness, hyperness, absent-ness, and any other ness-ss-es you may have observed in me lately.  I'm so stressed it's oozing out of my pores; yet strangely I'm pretty happy.  Even though I have 8X more things to do that time to do them in, I really enjoy doing all of them.  And as everyone knows...busy keeps the blues away :)

So I think I should finally get around to talking about this project that I hope will be the culminating point of my career to date.

I've endeavored to create a piece which speaks to those of us who haven't fully grown up yet; who are still trying to discover who we are, what we want to do with our lives, and what is the thing called Love.  I imagine that most of us who might be "grown-ups" on paper might still feel like we belong to this group, so I've titled it "The Young Heart" as much to describe the subject of the piece as to include the "young-at-heart".  The title of the ballet (if we can call it that) and it's four movements are in french because the words spoken were originally written in french; but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Right now I'm only going to be able to talk about the one of the movements (*grad student*).  Concept and explanation to follow in subsequent posts...(stay with us!)

Le Fardeau de L'Amour

(in english: The Burden of Love).  Tonight we had our first rehearsal for the quintet in the 3rd movement. This is the longest movement in the piece (6:37min) and pretty heavy stuff.  It's basically an abbreviated version of the 7th letter set to music that took me forever to find. (It has a pretty specific emotional journey.)  The soloist (when we add her in) begins the piece dancing diagonally across the stage, onto the apron, and up to the edge of the proscenium.  As she dances her thoughts and feelings about love, the stage right pillar becomes her imaginary partner.  It is supportive and fills her imaginative need in these musings, but ultimately it is (as all inanimate prosceniums are) unresponsive, and again she finds herself alone.  She then turns away from it to find the quintet scattered across the stage.

The girls in the quintet (at least for the 3 min that we went over today) embody different kinds of "love", or more acurately, the different situations which feelings we often call "love" lead us to fall into. 
There is the girl comfortably married in a rather "business-like" relationship with her husband;
the girl who has yet to be married who is still joyously captivated by the object of her love;
the girl imprisoned in a marriage with someone she thought she knew;
the girl who gave everything in the name of love, only to be left abandoned;
the girl working to learn how to be yourself in a relationship with another person...

As the movement progresses, we realize the danger of making a poor choice in your partner in life, how much can be lost...

I have an amazing cast.  As I was watching them develop the movements that try to explain all this and explore what could actually be expressed through the choreography, I started getting chills.    The gravity of the subject matter sat hollowly in the pit of my stomach, and I could see similar reactions in the dancers.  It's a little odd to describe such a rehearsal as "successful" when the emotions the girls were trying to express were so dark, but they were so good at expressing them.  We had to quit an hour and 1/2 into rehearsal because we were all too emotionally drained to keep working.

The movement does pick up a little and end on an enlightened, hopeful note.  When we finish the choreography for the movement the rehearsals shouldn't be as down, but if they can continue to be this powerful, I will be very pleased with the final product.

Today, I feel like an artist.