For the work-in-progress showing, we managed to put everything we have been working on into one long sequence, so that the material could be seen as a complete piece.
For the most part, up until now we have mostly been focusing on character development and individual moments/ interactions. But in the last few rehearsals I've tried to combine these moments into scenes... like a filing system of sorts. Most of these scenes remain as unfinished sketches until I decide which ones are worth keeping. In order to decide which scene sketches to keep I arrange them into a sequence. From this draft of a sequence (which I put together using a combination of intuition and "chance operation" techniques) I see what kind of narrative emerges. I want to allow a narrative to "emerge"... rather than "impose" a structure from the outside.
In the hours leading up to the showing, we arranged the scenes and moments into one long sequence that could serve as a first draft (see pic above). First drafts help me see what's not working and cut, cut, cut. I am a big fan of editing... and in general don't think that choreographers do this enough. Cutting is harder said than done, because it's so easy to get attached to moments that you love... but like a bad tangent in an essay, they only hurt the piece as a whole. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between liking something because you're attached to it, and liking something because it works, but this seems to get easier with each piece that I make.
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