In total, twelve weeks of rehearsal for Nameless forest have been completed over five months, including the just finished “second rehearsal sequence” consisting of twenty-eight rehearsals spread out over the fifty-nine days of February and March.

The production has developed to about 50 minutes, or approximately 70% of the completed work, which is exactly what I was hoping to accomplish by this time.  But we had help. Several friends of the cast, professional colleagues, the serendipitously curious and other strangers, at least thirty in all, graciously helped us by coming to see the work and participating in it as an experimental audience. This was a fundamental aid to the development of Nameless forest and I am incredibly grateful for your many insights and comments, all of which added depth and nuance to the work.  Thank you all so much.

Roxana has been working magic with the costumes. Please check out her
images elsewhere on this blog. Sungmyung wasn’t able to attend this rehearsal sequence, though we were in constant communication during the process.  He did create and send the set design maquettes envisioned during our ASU residency last November.  After receiving the beautifully rendered set models and showing them to colleagues we came to the difficult conclusion that we needed a slightly different approach. In truth one of my gracious colleagues that came to see the work, Young Jean Lee, said something to the effect of “why are those big t-shirts in the space?”  Her question revealed something I was missing.

Since I knew what the design was based on, I had always thought of the set in relation to damaged bodies, as headless, armless torsos that framed the performing space. But she looked at the maquettes and saw striped sculptured tees. Where I imagined depth, she saw product placement.

Though clearly an exaggeration, she was, unfortunately, right. The maquettes did look too much like empty t-shirts.  Though we agreed  with Sungmyung that emptiness was the point, we also all agreed the metaphor of the set shouldn’t point towards commercial product. The new design fragments a single torso into two parts, preserving the emptiness while giving it a more dynamic, visceral impact.  It successfully manifests the original metaphors while integrating better with Gandalf’s neon elements, and as an added plus is less material to ship. Now if we can just get them made.

Fortunately we have time, though the countdown has definitely begun.

-dean

postscript:
Am reading “How to do things with Art” by Dorothea von Hantelmann, and
“The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” by Roberto Calasso: both very interesting.

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See the process of building Roxana Ramseur’s costumes for Dean Moss’ Nameless forest.

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A recent letter from Cassie Mey, a visitor to Dean Moss’ open rehearsal:

Dear Dean,

It was a pleasure to get the sneak preview of such a moving and powerful work! I’m honored to get such an intimate view of your artistic process. Of course, I would love to return soon.

Meanwhile, I’m still letting the work settle in. I find your approach in this piece, to dialogue with the vision/world created in a Sungmyung Chun’s work, fascinating in terms of the inherent limitations and possibilities. One major challenge a choreographer might face is dealing with the “blank canvas” (if you will) of beginning a work, or else the strong bias of one’s own opinions/history. But as I see it, you’re almost coming at it from the opposite extreme—working from another’s vision that you find your own way into and then expressing an original dialogue with it. I’m sure this is highly simplifying, so I apologize if I have it all wrong! But your use of the container of the sculptures and world expressed within creates such an interesting tension. All without forsaking the movement, the tactility, the nature of the human beings whom are performing in this work. I’ve continuously admired your deep engagement with this unique collaborative model with which you choreograph.

Some images and sensations that stay with me:

• the sense of detachment and separation in the opening (watching another’s suffering/struggle from afar) contrasted with the gentle, almost accidental feeling of touch of the performers sitting near me
• the “breathing pile” and soles of feet displayed unselfconsciously; vulnerability and speaking with a performer, catching full eye contact as they move by
• the weaving movements, the eyes closed “memory walks” and their contrast in “Maori” men’s section
• balancing on bodies, which makes the floor seem alive somehow, the organic shifts of a human’s balance that occur in response to gravity
• the haunted lamp, smile mask figure
• encircling winds, of breeze and birds
• Wittgenstein, especially: In Wittgenstein’s view, language is inextricably woven into the fabric of life, and as part of that fabric it works relatively unproblematically. We do not, when speaking ordinarily, worry about how our words mean what they do. Philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home and into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed, specifically for the purpose of “pure” philosophical examination. Wittgenstein describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language (the language of the Tractatus), where all philosophical problems can be solved without the confusing and muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, just because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no actual work at all.
  
• and his language games. (I think he’s trying to describe all that we can’t “know”; the magic mathematics of the universe; or one’s own Buddha nature and the heart sutra) all of which went through my mind about 3/4 into the viewing.

This is my small offering back to you, the performers, and the work; I’m looking forward to its continued evolution.

Fondly,
Cassie

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Sari Nordman, a performer in Dean Moss’ Namesless forest, shared these excerpts from a journal she’s been keeping throughout the creative process:

I came to this project after having seen two full-evenings and one shorter performance by Dean. I admire his skill as a choreographer who has honesty and discipline in his vision, and felt honored to be selected to participate in the work. He is extremely bright and in most rehearsals I see him come up with new, little masterpieces. The collaborators involved are very interesting and I cannot wait to meet them all. I love my fellow dancers; everyone is supportive, creative, very individual and we have so much fun. I feel I have been encouraged and pushed not only as a dancer-employee but also as an artist. Since past fall I have been writing a journal and am going to include a few chapters here. I thought these moments would be fun to share.

Kacie and I have a duet, a women’s duet, and it went through a transformation from last fall. As I read back in my journal I was amused to read a description of the first version:

In one direction I have a sad smile, I look to another direction and feel insulted, I turn my head away but continue moving to this direction, then smile but suddenly fall down. I turn my head to another direction and give a resigned smile. That was hard! I’m not sure if I ever did it right.

When we began the second rehearsal period we did not visit the old duet but instead Dean asked me to tell him what I usually like to do when I break up with someone. Well, I ended up telling my last break-up story and that is how Dean gathered movement; my break-up gestures, my gestures when I was talking, telling my story. So simply he came up with material that is meaningful in the context of the piece and has context to me. (Luckily there are a few years from my last break-up so I am not going to cry over it but can share and perform it!)

As a dancer I am used to expressing physically with my body, and now I do lots of expressing with my face. Often I feel quite self-conscious as I feel there is so much attention to my face. This is hard, and a new skill for me to learn, to consider my facial expressions. Dean says to me: keep it alive. That helps.

Most of the male dancers have family members who were in the military or FBI. Dean’s father was the mayor of a West coast town. We sow lots of humor in the rehearsals (which is such a delight), and it is fun to imagine that if all of these dancers had followed their family members’ paths they might be in governmental jobs, and Dean might even be the president. Instead, they became dancers and choreographers! Hurray!

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We’re back in rehearsal.  During the time we were down, I began to rethink the role of the audience on stage. Sungmyung Chun had thought of the idea in relation to Korean traditional circular theatrical space and I thought it was interesting because my last two works had also dealt with the audience and though I wasn’t sure about the how of  that integration in this work, I was sure it was something I wanted to explore, something that I was already exploring.

A rendering of the stage space made during the first rehearsal period

But what is it, having some audience on stage? How does their activity and image relate to what the performers are doing? During the break that question kept gnawing at me.  The first rehearsals had gone well.  We had made some work that accurately captured the feeling of Chun’s sculptures.  But like my experience with Laylah Ali’s work forming the basis for “figures on a field”, the replication of the painting’s visual composition alone as the performance narrative would, to me, result in something limited, and it would not take advantage of the true translation from one medium to another.  That was solved by thinking about the larger environment.  So what is the larger environment here, I thought.

We had decided on the circular space and having a few audience members on stage with us.  I began to think that the offstage audience could think of the performers and the onstage audience together as  a single community.  If that were true, what would then make up the dynamics of our relationship? From this question came the idea that the performers are “hosting” the onstage audience and the interactions on stage create a spectacle for the offstage viewer that frames not only a translation of Chun’s work but also the community for which and from which it emerges.

More questions. Hosting is visually simple. What is its nature? What are the expectations between guest and host? How can that dynamic be heightened, made visible, commented on? I begin to think of ways an audience is engaged in performance. Virtuosity is the top of the list. If virtuosity is a traditional mode of communication then what is its role in the presentation of vulnerability, of  experimentation? How is that related to Chun’s practice or mine. How do we expose and share our idea of rigor through the presentation? What is it that communities see in the individual’s presentation of  “existential angst”…. themselves? others? mere indulgence? What is the role of sincerity, of cynicism, of abstraction?

I think about what Warhol said about life: “being born is like being kidnapped, and then sold into slavery.” I laugh, I think it’s true, but doesn’t that say something desperate and inevitable about our condition, our communities?

We’re in the third week of our second rehearsal period, we’re inviting guests and more questions.

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