Presenting new work at Drums Downtown XI

This winter I collaborated with the esteemed percussion musician, Joseph Krygier - senior lecturer in the OSU school of music department, and we will be presenting our new work Whirligigs at Drums Downtown XI, April 3rd and 4th in the Capital Theater / Riffe Center, Columbus OH.

Drums Downtown is a multidisciplinary concert hosted by the OSU school of music percussion ensemble, an event that intertwine and celebrate music, digital technology and dance.

This year Mr. Krygier asked if I was interested in choreographing to a music piece that he had just begun composing, knowing that if I said yes, I would not have the music to work with before halfway through the creative process. This was an opportunity I could not say no to.

So for the first two month my cast (of OSU dance majors) and I worked tirelessly on creating movement material that investigated ideas surrounding the nature of whirligigs, such as: propelling motion, action/reaction, coming together and dissolve, and more.

An element that was hard to explain to the dancers was the experimenting with digital delays that Mr. Krygier was incorporating in his composition, meaning, he was experimenting with sending the "real-time" sound through GarageBand (Apple software) adding various delay plugins. We decided to bring the dancers over to the music department so that Mr. Krygier could show them exactly what he was working on. Seeing their reactions and subsequently hearing them expressing the various imageries the music seemed to inspire, was helpful as we ventured into the next stage of our creative process, piecing ideas together - yet, not having the music.

We are now one week from when the dancers will step on to the stage, and Mr. Krygier is in the final stage of composing the music. As we are incorporating the final touches, I find myself looking back at the overarching process, and I have to credit my dancers for their inexhaustible creative inputs and for being gracefully patience.