Leopold Group

Leopold Group

The Leopold Group Blog

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18 days ago

by lizzie

Here’s the game…

I stand in the front of the studio and improvise for about 5 seconds. Then I give the dancers about 20 seconds to remember, decide and construct their best version of what I did. This is repeated ad naseum until the dancers’ brains nearly explode. The pace of choreographic production is maddeningly fast. The result is awesome ven-diagramatic solos, divergent and overlapping in wonderful ways. Check out this video to see some of the solos that came from this game on Saturday. I like how impossibly individualized the movement becomes.

ENJOY :)
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20 days ago

by lizzie

Today we embarked on a new work/project entitled A Correct Likeness, exploring the intersection of still photography and dance. The title comes from the need for early painters to render an accurate “likeness,” of faces or landscapes or historical events, as a marker of their artistic success. Prior to the invention of photography (and strangely for a while there after) artists were charged with the task of recording people and events, blending fact with fiction in order to represent things strategically but recognizably.

And well, it just doesn’t seem right to be without a camera recording our rehearsal process as we go. The pictures offer a chance to reflect on the material (the choreographed steps) through a pairing of these two mediums – dance and photography. There are more photos on our facebook page and we would love feedback.

What do you see? What don’t you see? Who do you see and who don’t you see? What feels true about the photograph?

Dates and details on upcoming performances to come!
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35 days ago

by lizzie

You Look Really Familiar

I’m working on a series of solo performance pieces as part of “Performance Sensorium.” Huh? Well, it’s a bunch of PhDs in Theatre and Performance Studies who are reading theory about the five senses and then, in response, devising performance instead of writing papers. It’s both terrifying and liberating to be out front behind the computer.

This picture is from my piece on vision/visibility, You Look Really Familiar.

You Look Really Familiar is a choreographic exercise in recognizing and remembering previous lived experiences, embodied movement experiences. To highlight the terribly effective distortions of time and self-perception, I videotaped myself simply moving – bare body, bare room and no sound. The video serves as a record of a past self and a tool to reconstruct this past in the present, inevitably illuminating the impossibility of the task at hand. The performance asks me to re-create the danced experience live, in front of an audience and in front of her original (now digital) self. The audience will grapple with the challenges of layered time and layered visibility of the body. Does clothing obscure the body? Does the body obscure the dancing? What is seen definitively and what is imagined? The simple doubling of this body, changed by time (time spent learning the steps that originally occurred spontaneously and without premeditation) and circumstance (the context of the live audience inevitably plays a role in the second incarnation, clothed and inevitably nervous), complicates the opportunity for simply viewing. You Look Really Familiar speaks to a repeated past and the passage of time made visible through that strained repetition.

There are a couple of more photos on our facebook page by the incredible Matthew Gregory Hollis. Next up, sound. Warning…there will be kazoos.
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94 days ago

by lizzie

I’m reading John Playford’s “The English Dancing Master” (a 17th century treatise on dance) for some research. Had to share this gem. It’s a score for a country dance called “Jenny, come tye my cravat.” Think that’s what I will name my next dance….
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117 days ago

by lizzie

Headshots are Hard

Yesterday we had a photo session with the wonderful Arn Klein to take some new headshots. My dancers decided to call me “Tyra” as I bossed them around from the other side of the lens. Then I was convinced to take my turn in front of the camera….

I was quickly reminded that I’m a much better behind-the-scenes participant than I am otherwise. There is a reason that I make dances and don’t dance them in front of people on a stage. I’m a wimp! It was an important reminder that what I ask of my fabulous dancers everyday is HARD WORK! Whether pirouettes or headshots, they are brave women and I salute them. Having people look at you critically, from behind a camera or from an audience, is tough! I would rather hide in the wings and think critically than be the body thought of critically. I cannot do what they do and I am so lucky to have them and to have them put up with me when I boss them around.

So, thank you Amanda, Nicole, Meli and Jordana for your hard work in front of the camera yesterday. You are beautiful and strong and I aspire to have your confidence.
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215 days ago

by lizzie

FINALLY! I just posted some videos from our August show, Dancing. I made a little mash-up of each of our new works, Lips of Their Fingers and une elephante. Check ‘em out on the video page and let us know your thoughts!
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232 days ago

by lizzie

Check out my thoughts published in Dance/USA’s eJournal:
Bridging the Gap: The Rocky Landscape of Today’s Dance Business
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245 days ago

by lizzie

WHAT IS DANCE?
by Technical Director & Lighting Designer Joshua Paul Weckesser

I’m going with a few big ideas and then, most likely, discard them immediately. This is the internet, it is my right. I work in dance, it is my habit. Years ago I worked on plays. It was a time, hard to believe now, before cell phones and always-on internet. Even then I was drawn to the real thing, where the simulacrum would not do, to these places where the public comes and sits, the lights dim, the hush and then. And then.

I read Ibsen, I saw Checkov. I quote Shakespeare while watching football (“I hate it, as I hate hell, all Patriots, and Brady”). But all these words, words, words were not enough. Our crown prince said it himself, “can this cockpit hold / the vasty fields of France? or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?” No, we can’t. Not when the cineplex is down the street, not when the television is in our living rooms, the very internet in our pocket. There are always words coming at us, and so few of them can grab our attention and fill us with wonder, with disgust, with shock, confusion, elation. Most of the time they settle comfortably into the white noise that is the sound floor of our lives.

That is the thing about dancing. You can’t be driving and watch a dance. You can’t be making dinner with dance on in the background. It demands your attention. The only way to consume it is wholly and completely. Which is why bad dancing is so painful to watch, the failure is so complete. There’s no reprieve. The theatre doors are closed, exiting is awkward, as is checking your phone. You have to sit and watch. The other edge of this sword is that amazing dance condenses all of your life into this moment, while your eyes land on that wrist and it flicks here and then rests there. “Of course,” you think, “There it is.” And it has always been there. And a moment later it’s gone.

Chances are though, if you’re reading this blog, you already know all this. But the choir is the easiest group to preach to.

I read once that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” And my first thought was, “Oh, I’d love to see a dance about architecture.” Something so passing, so fragile, so dream-like reaching out for something so solid and seemingly-permanent. The analogies between an elbow and a grand staircase, an ankle and an elevator. The dissonance between what is meant and what is seen. Writing about dance seems about the same.

All of this comes out of Lizzie saying, “You can’t sit with dance the way you sit with a painting.” Comes out of Melissa resting on Nicole’s knee, desperately maintaining her composure while the ground literally shakes beneath her, frantic and then still, trying to do something while someone tries to stop her from doing that thing. Comes out of Laura at the head of a line holding her pants to her right, everyone revealed in the leotards and hidden in the dim floor lamps, the tension rising, the pants dropping, the music starting and the moment has passed. Delicious and sweet, like a remembered candy, like a remembered first kiss.

It comes out of turning a brickwall into a backdrop; transforming a wood floor with a patch of astroturf. Of writing lighting cues on a brand-new console. Turning half a plot and some units on the ground into a fully realized design, a cavernous room into a theater. Of the stress of sitting next to the choreographer throughout the whole run. I press a button and, hopefully, something beautiful happens. If not, there is little I can do. Powerless, I can only watch, perhaps weep, and on this show look to my right into the shock and loss on the face of the prime motivator of the event. It’s a feeling of almost sweating, of sitting up straight for an hour and a half. Standing by and then going. Surely, there are other ways to live, but I do not care to know them.

What is dancing? I don’t know. I never will. That’s why I keep coming back. My thanks to the Leopold Group for asking. For being comfortable in the question, in the doubt, in the incomplete answers. If someone was to ask me, “What is dancing?” I would like to take them by the wrist to this show, sit them on those bleachers and say, “We don’t know either, but watch. The journey is the important part.” Like all great mysteries one answer leads to new questions. Here’s what I can say for sure: You can watch it on the internet, but something that is amazing you turn to your friend and say, “Man, I’d love to see that.” Because the seeing isn’t complete until you’re there hearing the zipper work, the bare foot sound on the astroturf, the ever-present breath, images serve only to whet your appetite. After it’s over you’re left with wonder, like a vanishing dream. You can’t hold onto it, only moments remain, only a feeling. And it feels, oddly, like coming home because we are such stuff as dreams are made of. And we, like the dance, will vanish into air (into thin air).
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261 days ago

by lizzie

PROGRAM NOTES FROM LIPS OF THEIR FINGERS
PREMIERED AUGUST 2011

Lips of Their Fingers grows out of the historic tradition of pantomime as a part of dance. The title comes from a quote about early Italian ballet and its use of pantomime as an outrage. How dare these dancers speak with their hands! Speech was sacred to the tongue. A few hundred years later, this repurposing of body parts provides the basis for modern dance. Lips of Their Fingers calls into use this history, bringing new meaning to good, old fashioned “body language.”

Gradually peeling off layers of clothing, the cast pits intensely physical movement against the most inanimate of objects, a floor lamp or the false naturalness of astroturf, to find delineations between the dance and the body. As the layers fall away, you see both more of the dance and more of the body. Does it become harder to watch the dancing when there is more body revealed? These questions are not unique, they underscore all dances. Lips simply creates a living, breathing, sweating case study to better enjoy these questions.

Staying with the simple in order to see the complex, I employed the most obvious dance moves I could imagine. We Hustle; we Electric Slide; we slow dance. We hope you can use these familiar markers to follow us seamlessly into the more complex modern dance language. We hope this makes it obvious that modern dance is not scary or intimidating. If you’ve ever danced the The Y-M-C-A, you have already accepted the communicative powers of the moving body. Lips is just abstracting these possibilities.

Not wanting to stray too far from the original idea of pantomime, we dove head first into the most dense performance theory text I could find, making gesture phrases out of the words. This seemed to be challenging the idea that one language was more clear or linear than the other. These written words used unfamiliar jargon, created new conjunctions and referenced people and ideas that I had never before encountered. But by translating each paragraph into danced, mimed movement I could start to swallow some of the information. Instead of resigning myself to confusion, the gestures offered tools for digestion. The ideas flow from dance to words and from words to dance. If you find yourself watching the dance with this same mindset, translate.

Upbeat, athletic and a little bit sassy, this dance is illuminating – lamps in hand – what we’ve looked at lots of times.

photo by Matthew Gregory Hollis
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270 days ago

by lizzie

Some Thoughts From Jordan

Last weekend I missed rehearsal. I was up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin teaching yoga to families who were escaping the city for a few days. But Saturday afternoon, I was able to sneak away from the group and I had my own private rehearsal. I might have been miles and miles away from the Chicago Cultural Center, where we have been rehearsing all summer as part of the DanceBridge Grant, but I was rehearsing at the same time as the rest of the Leopold Group dancers back in Chicago. I turned the music on and went through the whole piece, Lips of Their Fingers. I reviewed phrases and marked timing. And even though I was alone in a small cabin in the woods, the message of Lizzie’s dance came through to me. Lips of Their Fingers is a dance about dancing. I was energized. Creating this work over the course of the summer, we have jumped, crawled, turned, fell, leapt, kicked, and wiggled. You name it, we probably at least tried it. Through it all there was excitement in the air. I was amazed to feel that same buzz so far away from everyone. It made me look forward to Monday night when I would get the chance to dance with my fellow Leopold Groupers again. We just finished that rehearsal. Now, more than ever, I am excited to share it with you, the audience.
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