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Choreographer's Diary

by Leigh Witchel

Day 25 - August 31, 1999.
17 days until the performance.

Horizon rehearsals move faster today, but they are no less tense. When I finished choreographing the new ballets, I felt immense relief, but the dancers are moving closer and closer to performance day, so they are feeling the pressure I felt relieved from me. I just try to keep everything moving, and the flare-ups to a minimum, and to keep the lines of communication open
and the dancers talking to each other and me. We review the beginning of the third movement learned yesterday, and then I teach the rest. I disliked much
of the final section to a piano cadenza and being too disjointed, with a particularly vulgar lift where the women's crotches are in the men's faces. It was one of the first ideas I had when I started the ballet, and was
actually an interesting acrobatic lift on its own, but should have been edited out as the ballet went on as being out of context. Often, the idea that germinates a dance no longer fits the dance that grows around it, but it's hard to remove the original seed.

I choreograph a new section in its place, and it's somewhat static, but better than the original. And frankly, I don't want to nit-pick right now, it's too tense. I just want to get some steps on the table, and I'll fine-tune them tomorrow. I need to make the new material flow more, and in my head I'm seeing a rushing, massed quality, so I need to move to that somehow. Peter Lopez, who will be doing the sound editing for Armature, comes by at the end of rehearsal and the dancers run Armature (without Morgan) so he can see it and we discuss the editing of the selections.

I got up early today to pick up the mechanical for magazine ads for the company from the printer and deliver it to Dance Theater Workshop. I went to
rehearsal from there. I set four minutes of the ballet, including new choreography in four solid hours of rehearsal, and soothed a few ruffled feathers and tried to listen to everything everyone had to say to me. I went to work and did the postcard mailing with two friends. Then I wrote this. I'm tired. It doesn't hurt to remind myself how much fun I had making the three new works. I can see that no matter how worried anyone else gets, these ballets will be fine by performance. I've done this already through six concerts, better and worse, but we've always survived. And I don't remember ever enjoying it as much as this year, even with the tension surrounding Horizon. I simply refuse to stop enjoying what I'm doing. As Mary said, God love her, "It's just ballet. When did this become World Peace?"

Day 26