Il Maestro

Backstory

In the spring of 1986, Dance Alloy was down to just four members, after the departure of Jim Aarons and Barbara Maiberger to dance with other companies in different parts of the country. And yet, as they say, the show must go on, so the remaining members of the company (Elsa Limbach, Ginny Adams, Patty Maloney, and me) had to figure out how to create a full repertory program for the subscription season.

Because that March 1986 program needed some content, I had the chance to create a solo for myself to help fill out the evening...and Il Maestro made his debut.

The Process

I had always been interested in conductors, admiring their knowledge of the score and the composer's intention. But what fascinated me was how a particular conductor could shape a work so that it sounded unlike any other performance of that composition. Ballet dancers have to do that all the time; often, they are dancing roles that were created a generation (or more) ago, and they need to find a way to make the performance their own, bringing something from the soul to make a performance special.  

For me, I had that experience only rarely. Because Dance Alloy frequently commissioned new works from established and emerging choreographers, I enjoyed the great luxury of having dance works choreographed for my body. I got to create the definitive performance, and that truly was an honor.

I had long been a fan of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, and the sprightly opening of the 3rd Brandenburg seemed the perfect piece to work with. I knew I needed to create more of an atmosphere of being at a symphonic concert at the beginning, and Jim Cunningham of WQED-FM came to my rescue by combing through the station's recordings of the Pittsburgh Symphony performing at their home in Heinz Hall. He was sensitive to the scale of the orchestra tuning up, and found a recorded concert of the orchestra about to perform a Baroque work, so that the instrumentation would more closely match the performance of the recording of the Bach that I was using.

In the Studio

I began, as I usually do, by analyzing the structure of the music. 

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Choreographers don't generally "see" the music the same way a composer would. We're looking for sections, patterns, repeated elements, and the overall shape of the work. Our method of counting doesn't necessarily match the meter written in the score—we enjoy phrases that span measures or melodic lines. [In the choreographic notes below, you'll note that in several parts of the work, my movement phrases are in 7-count units, while the music is written with 4 or 8-count phrases. By the end of my first phrase, I am "out-of-sync" with the music, and the dance's downbeats don't match those of the music. I love playing with the rhythm like that!] You see here my outline of the score for the first movement of the Brandenburg, identifying what I hear in the music. This would become my structural outline. 

Rudolf von Laban was the Austro-Hungarian dance artist and theorist who created a method and language for describing, visualizing, interpreting and documenting human movement. In his writings on Space Harmony, he documents a series of "scales" to be performed by dancers that reach into each of the 24 directions surrounding a person. One of those scales became a core motif in the work.

 

These three pages below document my notes for the work—what in essence is the notation of the work. Like many choreographers, I use a mixture of text, pictograms, stage diagrams, and Labanotation itself. It may not be pretty, but is enough for me to remember the choreography.

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Reception

The performance was reviewed by both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press.