Double Exposure

A Project of RAWdance

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All about process

While we’ve done much of the documenting on our own, we are blown away by the way visual artist Hillary Goidell has been able to capture it through photography. She has attended our rehearsals with as many artists as possible (see a previous post about her here), and filled in the rest. With the same two dancers in every photo, we never imagined just how singularly she could capture the essence of each duet in a still image. It’s truly uncanny.

Many of Hillary’s images are up on her website, but the full exhibit is up at Robin’s Cafe at ODC Theater until October 7. Check it out before it’s gone!

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“perfect way to end the long light of a summer day…”

May 26, 2016

“RAWdance’s stunning dances are like drifting through a waking dream — everything is clear but maddeningly elusive…”

We’re excited to be included in KQED’s guide to exciting summer theater. Check out what they’re saying about the upcoming premiere of Double Exposure, and who else they’re looking forward to seeing this season!

Rattle Your Soul: A Guide to Summer Theater Focused on Radical Disruption

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Snapshot

Something we realized early on about Double Exposure is that, unlike our previous work, it felt really important to document the process and share it along the way. The creative process is as much a part of the project as the final product.

Hillary Goidell - Ann CarlsonVideo was one of the first things we talked about, since it’s the most immediate way to offer a taste of each process. But with photography, we just got lucky.

Sometime early on in the project, Christy Bolingbroke (Director of ODC Theater) introduced us to Hillary Goidell, a photographer who, among other things, had been collaborating with movement artists on Hillary Goidell - Shinichi & Danaphotographic documentation in both the US and France. We had no idea what to expect, but sometimes instincts are all you need.

Hillary is incredible. Even though each process depicts the same dancers, the same or similar spaces, and the same overall project, we look at her images, and we can feel the unique vibe in the room. She’s come to four sessions so far, and her still images transport us instantly back into working with each specific artist.

Check them all out here. More coming throughout the process.

Hillary Goidell - Any O'Neal

 

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In the beginning…

We had no idea what we were getting into when we first began this project way back in 2012. We were responding to necessity more than inspiration. One of our dancers was sidelined by an injury a couple of months before our fall season and, after deciding he was too integral to replace, we suddenly had a 20-minute gap to fill in the program.

Too tapped for another new work, we decided to take the chance and commission other choreographers to jump in and set work on us. This was a first for RAWdance – and what an incredible opportunity to approach some of the Bay Area’s hugely talented artists who we’d always admired.

Of course the catch was that we had less than two months, tight rehearsal schedules, and a limited budget. Not the best pitch for an artist.

Long was out. Short was the answer. Really short. Two-minutes short. We don’t remember exactly how we hit on two minutes and not three or some other number, but that’s where we landed. Two minutes seemed accomplishable for a busy artist. And it seemed like a tempting problem to solve. How do you make a satisfying dance with a beginning, middle, and end, in two minutes?

The two-minute paradigm helped the rest of the piece fall into place. Duets have been at the core of our work since the beginning, and two minutes balanced out two dancers. Commissioning four choreographers gave us roughly the right length work for the program, and could offer a wide range of voices to the piece, making each two minutes wildly different from the last.

Double Exposure (draft one) premiered at ODC Theater in November 2012, with duets choreographed by Ann Carlson, Joe Goode, KT Nelson, and the pair of Shinichi and Dana Iova-Koga.

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