Unchoreographed • A Re-(w)Rite
A co-authored statement of creative process
by Erica Gionfriddo and Krista Leigh Pasini
October 25th, 2019
Below is a dialogue between dance artist Erica Gionfriddo & interdisciplinary artist Krista Leigh Pasini on the creative process for their recent collaboration Re-(w)Rite as part of the Billings Symphony’s Tribute to the Ballet Russes.
Krista: I immediately envisioned dance artist Erica Gionfriddo for this project. In my creative process I consider the artist as a whole and integrate a method of creative process that is porous to both their craft and artistry as well as their individual inquiries. My work as a dance and performance artist is unchoreographed, yet still intricately planned and staged. The title of choreographer rarely describes my process adequately and I often find the titles of facilitator, conceptual installation artist, and a dramaturg more accurate. Rather than asking the artists I collaborate with to adopt my movement patterns through mimicry, I employ other methods of translation which instills an environment of personal agency in the work we create together. This process is more of a conversation with space held for continued investigations as we communicate back and forth through movement, words, images, and corresponding theorists.
Erica: I am in a space of reimagining myself as a dance artist; of breaking open and breaking through past and future forms of expression, discipline, and pleasure. This is wholly destabilizing and also empowering, particularly when seen so clearly by a mind like Krista’s. With this process, in the simplest of terms, she presents ideas and I physicalize them. Whether you might call either of us a choreographer is irrelevant. What I’ve developed, at Krista’s insistent and unwavering belief in my abilities to reinvent, is an improvisational practice demanding my utter devotion to several inquiries at once. What will transpire will be a physicalized dialogue between our months of theoretical discussion, my personal grappling with a new movement language, and contending with the (musical/dance/historical) lineage of Stravinsky’s iconic work. The container making all of this possible will be my ability to respond in real time to the musical artists I share the stage with. This is not a staging of a dance set to music. This is an embodied practice.
Krista: Which, I think, creates an agility and adaptability in what I call our movement signatures. When I enter into a space or a project it’s always with a performative intention, a continuous “open rehearsal,” even if I and those I am collaborating with are the only witnesses. In this way, the heightened awareness, often only dedicated to performance, becomes stretched more evenly across the entire process. I think this opens creative pathways to how the work is influenced by everyday interactions and observations - influences that are both internalized and externalized. Perhaps a more specific title would be to call myself a movement ontologist, which implies that I’m interested in the nature of movement, and the sequenced patterns of these movement signatures. This relates to my current inquiries which I refer to as prismatic transference or ekphrastic documentation: the way in which my philosophical inquiries transcribe into another person’s creative inquiries, and how the artwork adapts to the new or merged inquiries. This process stems from kaleidoscope thinking, which was introduced to me in my undergraduate work as an honors scholar in history and political science. Kaleidoscope thinking is a term developed for Thomas Edison’s approach to creativity. Edison was known to juggle multiple projects and look at them from multiple angles. In my undergraduate work, I was encouraged to look at the historical stories, journals, and documentation of the past with a similar aim. I use this in my creative process to reorganize and re-interpret inquiries and context. As an artist working with historical works, it’s vital to tilt the lens and observe the complex and ever changing prisms. I approached Rite of Spring as a document of history, a time capsule from 1913. I also wanted to look at the score and the traditional narrative through current contexts and future narratives. What began as a practice of kaleidoscope thinking slowly evolved into what Erica and I now call a Re-(w)Rite of Spring. I began to look at the context of the project in a much larger scope and shared my findings with Erica in conversations and written exchanges.
Erica: From the first communications for Re-(w)Rite, Krista and I have been united in a desire to decisively turn away from the traditional narrative of this particular ritual and rewrite it for a 21st (or 22nd?) century society. Casting off notions of virgins and elder men, pagan and the divine, even sacrifice as death came easily to me. It feels somewhat vulgar to admit that it was much more difficult for me to connect to our ecological framework of Re-(w)Rite, even though intellectually and politically I fight to combat climate change. Why do I not feel the pull of Mother Earth? Why does she remain abstract, even as I connect to dance; one of the oldest forms of human-nature communion? To begin to understand my perceived failure, and in order to express through movement, I had to focus in on Earth as Mother as Woman horribly abused. When I think about my own battle with femininity and the desire to imagine new modes of being in the world, I begin to consider how Earth as Mother as Woman also desperately needs newly imagined futures. This ability to imagine beyond the dominant reality, to even desire a future we can’t yet define, is what queerness means to me. And so, from this queer eco-feminist perspective, I was able to find a movement language that encompassed and expressed many conflicting desires as well as hope for that previously unimagined future.
Krista: By default, I often work with professional dance artists who possess an acute and nuanced ability to communicate through movement, and for this project I sought Erica’s intellectual capacity to “stay with the trouble” and investigate the various prisms I was sharing as source material and inquiry. This physical dialogue is often where potent inquiries about gesture and societal inquiries emerge. This project evolved to include both an established movement language and gestural patterning which is everything I had hoped to achieve with bringing a solo dance artist to meet Stravinsky’s score.
Erica: Re-(w)riting such an iconic piece of music and performance did not mean rejecting historical contexts; as a dance scholar I am well versed in the lore of the Rite of Spring and its many iterations. But we did turn away from past narratives that no longer serve us; consciously stepping toward a new, yet unknown future. This meant not a re-stating of the music, but a “going with” that allows me to re-embody the power in Stravinsky’s chaos without drowning in it. Part of my practice will be to let the symphony move through me, not simply move with them.
Krista: Much of my recent focus is investigating how intentionality can contribute to performativity, and how that awareness can translate into a heightened experience for the artist engaging in the movement as well as those witnessing the ephemeral nature of dance and performance art. This philosophical aspect of my process stems from my research based in heuristic inquiry, which supports inquiry based methods and development. The connection between inquiry based processes and improvisational techniques are kindred spirits in this kind of creative process and often integrates an interdisciplinary approach to choreographic methods.
Erica: Perhaps the best way to pay tribute to the disruptors and provocateurs of the Ballet Russes is with our own equally unabashed and avant garde approach.
Still image of dance artist Erica Gionfriddo pulled from video documentation for Re-(w)Rite (2019).
