Back to School
- 21 Sep 07, 4:01 AM
Tomorrow is a big day. West Coast is doing its first school assembly in our new configuration, with our new work.
Weird stuff happens in school assemblies. It just does. They are where we make all of our worst mistakes. And we have a hard time not cracking up. One of our pieces involves a sofa; this is a challenge at the best of times, but in school assemblies the thing just comes to life and begins a performance on its own. In one piece, a dancer sends a wheel flying across the full length of the stage to another dancer who is hanging out. This frequently goes wrong ... wheels fall unexpectedly ... but the last time we did this, the rolling dancer sent the wrong wheel, the waiting dancer improvved and sent it back. She danced off stage and came back with yet another wrong wheel .... that would have been fine except it was the wheel of a chair of a dancer who was about to make an entry. Everyone just died and the whole thing froze up for a panicked 10 seconds; it felt like forever. Sometimes things go wrong despite our best efforts. Carefully engineered moves that depend on the floor not being too slippy, sticky, or both go wildly wrong -- Oh yes! The dance company! We've just polished the floor for you.... My roller-skating, skateboarding colleagues sigh.
I am a little nervous about this particular assembly: the kids who go to school in this small town of about 10,000 people are hyper privileged -- median house/condo price two years ago was 1.8 million dollars. It's definitely an "affluent enclave" and thus very different from most school assemblies where we arrive and we either have to perform in the dining hall (with all the leftover food on the floor) or on the school stage (wanna bet the lift isn't working or, worse, that there isn't a lift at all.... Yes, we check when we take the booking, but you know how it can be). Tomorrow, even though this is an elementary school, we will have access to the larger of the two theatres....! School assemblies frequently leave huge splinters in our non-disabled dancers' feet and bruises for everyone, but I guess we will be safe tomorrow... At their best, school assemblies are filled with kids who are so psyched by what we are doing; at worst, we are facing senior school kids/high school kids who appreciate the chance not to be in class, but aren't exactly thrilled to be watching a bunch of disabled people dance. This particular school has arranged "personal time" with the dancers; we're doing classroom visits.
Plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong here. We try to be open and receptive, but sometimes even frankness can be a problem. I remember that, when asked where her leg had gone, one dancer once said, "It died and went to leg heaven." There was a stunned silence and that ended the event pretty quickly. Then, there was the time when, noticing that one of our dancers didn't look disabled, a kid asked, "Well, what's wrong with you..." I dread these moments and always stutter over what to say.
OK, I am off to tweak my chair, tape up the bits that need to be taped, put air in the bits that need air, tighten up my loose screws and ....
• Visit a tense, tense
Comments
I am really interested in seeing this performance - I am trying to imagine how exactly you get the "wrong wheel" of a performer who is in the wheelchair? And send it across stage?
I wish you best of best on the performance - and that you get no bruises or other disasters.