Adaptation Project: A Performance Recipe

In a history spanning thirty-nine years, Dancemakers has produced a canon of over 100 works. Ranging in scale from intimate solos to works for up to twelve dancers, the company's dissemination history includes the informal one-off, the international success, and everything in between. Today, the company's activities include an engagement in a critical discourse on its relationship to this extensive body of work. In 2012, I—resident choreographer Michael Trent—and my collaborators—dancers, composers, designers, and dramaturg—initiated a project that would address the company's legacy through adaptation. Wanting to neither remount a dance nor make a redux of one by the original choreographer, we set out to make a re-imagined performance of a dance from 1974 by American choreographer Mitchell Rose entitled Following Station Identification.

Early in the project's research phase, a number of procedural issues and questions arose for the collaborators including how the original dance would be selected, what the mechanisms for acquiring permissions would be, and the degree of involvement of the original maker in the adaptive process; there was also a consideration of the original maker's remuneration.

The first step of the selection process was to identify a short-list of dances from the company's burgeoning years in the early seventies. Where possible and to help us select our finalists, we conducted casual interviews with individuals who had experienced the works as either performers or audience members. The second step was to obtain permission from the choreographer. The first artist we approached turned us down in nonnegotiable terms.¹ Luckily, our second candidate was delighted to be asked, and he proved to be an invaluable resource throughout the process by providing historical, personal, and anecdotal context. The artist received a one-time license fee for the permission to adapt his work.

This agreement merely marked the starting point of new lines of inquiry: what does it mean to adapt within the same medium, from one dance to another dance? What and how much—if any—of the adapted text does the viewer need to know in order to fully engage with the re-imagined performance? And finally, how can we privilege collaboration (an ongoing value for Dancemakers) in the process of adaptation itself?

The adaptive process we agreed upon was akin to an archaeological dig. By gently brushing away the multiple layers of the dance's known artefacts, we uncovered the adapted text and then responded to our discoveries through improvisations. Ensuing conversations between the collaborators generated a shared relationship to both the old and the emerging art object. The cycle of encounters and responses was iterative, short, and rapid.

The initial encounters consisted of watching rehearsal videos of the original dance (no known performance video exists),² interviewing the choreographer via Skype, inviting four of the original cast members into the studio for discussion, listening to the original score, reading texts (reviews, play bills, and academic texts on adaptation³), looking at still images from the original dance, and viewing related secondary film sources (Spike Jonze's film Adaptation from 2002, for example). As the process evolved, we began to view video recordings of our improvisational responses. Eventually, an art object emerged that we could claim as our own.

The dancers' initial responses to the original video sources consisted of independent solo improvisations in a shared environment. Later, each dancer's improvisational choice-making became more connected to the others' in time and space through a process of influence, agreement, and contamination. Another response strategy consisted in the co-creation of a new artefact by teams of two collaborators—one acting as visual/oral responder and the other as aural/scribe responder. The first responder would narrate his or her observations while watching the rehearsal video (a form of adaptation in itself) while the second responder would simultaneously document his or her impressions of the narration on twenty-foot long pieces of paper...