Five minutes of choreography performed on stage can take weeks of work. An hour you spend at the theatre is a culmination of months of preparation and practice. A whole night of performative art is sometimes a product of a year’s worth of thought, conversation, and intense emotional consciousness.
It sometimes seems unfair—that what you worked so hard to create vanishes in just a few fleeting moments. However, this is in the DNA of the performing arts; it is a defining characteristic that, even with the advances of technology, will never change. Even more, the very ephemerality of the performance is what makes it so exciting. It is experienced once, and it is felt forever. Most importantly, it informs what comes next—in art and in life. Constantly transforming, it both mimics and challenges what goes on in society. What people do not realize is that what they see and experience is only the tip of an iceberg. What exactly goes on behind-the-scenes?
Take a step into a dance rehearsal with me: Baba Stafford Berry (Director of the African American Dance Company and Professor of Practice for the Department of Theater, Drama, and Contemporary Dance) is choreographing a piece for the IU Contemporary Dance Winter Concert, Shifting Landscapes. Our rehearsals are twice a week for two hours, and although the concert takes place in February 2020, we have been dancing together as a cast since September 2019.
He shows us a movement that has roots within the African Diaspora. He teaches us the name of the people who do the dance, the place the dance is done, and why the dance exists. Us dancers move across the floor in an attempt to execute what he has shown. He stops us. He gives us corrections concerning placement, quality, energy. We all try again. This is the first step that will lead to a complete piece of choreography which will carry its own artistic intent.
Alright, so that’s dance. What about something like theater? Let’s take a musical: students go to rehearsal for the next IU production, Big Fish, or University Players’, American Idiot. On the first day, the performers read through the entire show as a cast. The next day, they begin to talk in depth about their characters: who are these people within the dialogue, between the dialogue, and outside of the dialogue? They etch out time to learn dance moves from the choreographer, to practice the melodies with the aid of the music director, and to take blocking notes from the overall director—line by line and scene by scene.
In order to create a performative piece of art that will eventually be presented in front of an audience, everyone involved must give themselves over to long periods of time that require intense concentration. The goal is to perform with such ease and confidence that the backstory of what goes on every day leading up to it seems impossible…And this is exactly what an artist lives for: both the process and the product.
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