Photos: Jennifer Mazza
Entrances & Echoes premiered at Colby in March 2015 and an excerpt of it was presented at the Bates Dance Festival in July 2015. Entrances & Echoes, in development for several years, evolved from a series of related, shorter investigations, which are also included in Project 14. Like articles that precede the publication of a book, each of those short works was first a stand-alone piece. Viewed as a group, the multiple pieces demonstrate the malleability of choreographic ideas as work evolves over time.
A second version, created with and performed by an almost entirely new cast, treated the same ideas with different content. This version, performed at Triskelion Arts in 2017, also included two guest artists each night who improvised throughout the work and were guided through the piece by the performers.
In Entrances & Echoes, the seemingly borderless stage space is repeatedly limited to tighter spaces—rooms get rearranged, dismantled, and put back together. Thematic doublings play with anonymity and togetherness in temporal, spatial, verbal, and energetic echoes that cast sometimes supportive, sometimes ominous shadows; dancers encounter edges – real and imagined—that close in on them. The work borrows bits of text from multiple sources and examines repetition in shifting contexts to twist physical and textual content. Stage direction from play texts has served as a springboard. That language is precise, coded, and permissive, designed to activate the imagination and call attention to the artifice of staged performance as a space and time framed for spectatorship. The text points to narrative but does not tell a single story, just as the movement does not carry a singular meaning. Instead, this work, like all live performance, relies on a sense of kinesthetic empathy and trusts that you will allow yourself to meet and interpret the work. And that agreement includes a willingness to encounter uncertainty, which is the fertile ground of the creative process and the space in which the dancers meet each night as they simultaneously execute and rediscover this evolving work. We invite you to engage in—and echo—that creative process of discovery.
A second version, created with and performed by an almost entirely new cast, treated the same ideas with different content. This version, performed at Triskelion Arts in 2017, also included two guest artists each night who improvised throughout the work and were guided through the piece by the performers.
In Entrances & Echoes, the seemingly borderless stage space is repeatedly limited to tighter spaces—rooms get rearranged, dismantled, and put back together. Thematic doublings play with anonymity and togetherness in temporal, spatial, verbal, and energetic echoes that cast sometimes supportive, sometimes ominous shadows; dancers encounter edges – real and imagined—that close in on them. The work borrows bits of text from multiple sources and examines repetition in shifting contexts to twist physical and textual content. Stage direction from play texts has served as a springboard. That language is precise, coded, and permissive, designed to activate the imagination and call attention to the artifice of staged performance as a space and time framed for spectatorship. The text points to narrative but does not tell a single story, just as the movement does not carry a singular meaning. Instead, this work, like all live performance, relies on a sense of kinesthetic empathy and trusts that you will allow yourself to meet and interpret the work. And that agreement includes a willingness to encounter uncertainty, which is the fertile ground of the creative process and the space in which the dancers meet each night as they simultaneously execute and rediscover this evolving work. We invite you to engage in—and echo—that creative process of discovery.