After our first meeting, Tzveta and I agreed to meet once a week. We did not necessarily have an agenda for our meetings. I talked about discrete optimization, grids, and search algorithms. She did not talk much. She asked questions and listened. I remember her little notebook and she taking sparse notes as we spoke.
After three or four weeks, I either invited myself or she invited me, but I went to a studio rehearsal to watch Tzveta and the dancers in action.
I was mesmerized by the whole experience. The place, the people and the process…
The Place
The studio was captivating with soaring ceilings, blinding lights, cooing floor and hypnotizing corners. The soaring ceilings held space for an entire microcosm of lights, beams, cords, catwalks and structures to create the sets that envelope, support and accentuate the stage. The blinding lights forced one to look at areas where they were pointed towards. The suspended board floor sighed and moaned as the dancers leaped, rolled, walked or ran on it. The dark, unilluminated corners that seemed to extend to infinity challenged one to try to see the walls that defined them. The studio appeared to be this magical, secret place that I did not know it existed in a brick building that I walked past by almost every day.
The People
In their colorful, nonchalantly mismatched, comfortable clothes, the dancers were spread around the studio. Some of them chitchatted casually as they lounged on the studio floor. Some of them adjusted tapes on their feet or sipped some water. Some others rehearsed the phrases without fully exerting themselves to wake up their bodies and remember what they practiced last time. Tzveta was there side by side with them. There was no way to distinguish the choreographer from the dancers. Then, Tzveta spotted and came running to welcome me to their space and introduced me to the dancers. They all waved and smiled making me feel so welcome and at ease.
The Process
There is no way to sufficiently describe the palpable, charged energy in the air, as dancers wait for a rehearsal to start. Once Tzveta said that it was time to start, the dynamics in the studio changed. Tzveta stepped away from floor to get a better view of what was to come, and the dancers spread around as charged as sprinters at the line waiting for a race to start.
I just watched how she directed the dancers, and how she interacted with them. As the dancers performed, she just stood back and watched. Then, she gave feedback. Dancers performed again. Sometimes she would let the dancers to go until the very end of a phrase or she would stop them halfway to change something. It was amazing to see how the dancers commanded their bodies. They would stop and start as soon as they were told to do so. It was fascinating to see how fast they could curb their energy to stop to be able to hear what the choreographer had to say or build momentum to pick up a phrase from where they have left off. I discovered that day that a dancer’s instrument was their body, and they were experts at using them…
Although the process appeared to be repetitive to me in the beginning, I soon started to pick up the nuances of iterations. It was intriguing to watch as she directed them and to see how she asked them for ideas and how she sifted through these ideas. Some of the ideas were picked up to be played with and some others were left behind. The process was open and fluid, and quite democratic. Tzveta did not appear to have a plan for how the final piece should be and was welcoming to ideas and influences. It seemed like she and the dancers were just playing and enjoying the process. But they worked hard, very hard. By the end of the rehearsal they all were glistening with sweat, exhausted but also excited and energized.
Overall, my first visit to a dance studio was an experience where I realized how different we were in our approaches to teaching and research, although we were both faculty members in the same university albeit in two different departments in different colleges. We were only a few hundred yards away from each other on campus but our approaches to teaching and doing research seemed to be millions of yards away.
As different as we were, there were so many similarities between us that helped me anchor what I was experiencing with what I know so that I could stay with it. To me, a dance work was a system with entities (dancers) and resources (dance floor and studio space), interactions among these entities and resources, planned (deterministic) or unplanned (stochastic) outcomes from these interactions, etc. It all made so much sense to me.
In the early days of an interdisciplinary collaboration, there is a guest and there is a host. For the collaboration to bear fruit, both parties have to have the patience to stay together. Typically, the host is always a step, if not tens and hundreds of steps, ahead of the guest. The host has to restrain their impulse to pick up and run, whereas the guest has to let the host pick them up so that they can move faster together while the guest is still trying to make sense.
And, when you are there trying to make sense, anchor yourself in what you know. Draw analogies between their field, their ways of thinking, their ways of doing and your own. Never forget who you are and what you do and how you do it. Because for a collaboration to be successful and create extraordinary outcomes, both sides have to keep doing what they are good at while also staying open to input from the other so that the outcomes are truly informed by both perspectives.