Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2007 - 55

F: All of those things...because artists are constantly drawing on what's around them. I think it's an artist's responsibility to translate the world around himself or herself and
make it palatable or assemble it into some sort of context.
Lately I've been researching Greek myths as inspiration-
not necessarily for narrative storylines, but the figures from
mythology because they represent something in all of us. I
did a piece about Pandora, and even though I used her as an
inspiration point, I was really more interested in female curiosity and the consequences of that. For me it wasn't a story
about Pandora necessarily, but the inspiration came from a
literary figure that is an archetype for women and curiosity,
and a lot of different movement choices were a result of that.
I will often use literature as a spring board, defi nitely.
B: Once you have selected a piece of music and identified
a subject matter or a topic, or found what it is you want to
address in the work, what is your process, the evolution of
the choreography? How much prep work do you do and what
happens in the studio in terms of developing those ideas?
F: First of all, I always start with moving and I always
try and go back to the essentials of what I think I do well,
which is to create material. So I go into a studio with dancers and the movement just sort of comes right out of me. I
give them phrase work, I work on partnering...I do work
in duets and trios, interweaving bodies together, lifting...
I'm rarely concerned with what genders are partnering with
what genders. I'm really interested in movement, even if it's
something that's very still, or the movement is very small,
I'm concerned that I have to generate some material fi rst,
or else the piece just becomes images in my head. So that's
primary. And then I start to link the choreography together.
Sometimes it's tied to musical cues, sometimes I will think
about something that I saw recently or something that somebody said to me that will create a whole new mood for me
and all of a sudden the movement changes. And for me its
how those all link together to form what I think will be
eventually a coherent or a cohesive piece. Then layering the
music on top of that, sometimes I'm very much with the music and the music is dictating those choices, and sometimes
it's a design element that makes those choices for me. You
know, we did a piece where we worked with a very large
six-foot long dress, and the dress as soon as we were working with it changed all the movement material. So working
with a design element, a piece of sculpture, different kinds
of lighting on stage will change the choreography, it will
change the mood, it will change how choreographically the
piece is evolving. So there's never any fi nished product until
all of those elements come together.
B: We recently did a piece together called The Carpet. Can
you talk about where you found your inspiration for that
work?
F: That was really specific for me-the inspiration for The
Carpet. My parents had an old carpet underneath our dining room table that they bought at a garage sale somewhere.
THEATRE

DESIGN

From the film Joan (Jennifer Archibald as Joan of Arc).
Directed and choreographed by Michael Foley; designed by Bill
Brewer.

TECHNOLOGY
SUMMER

2007

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