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First Year: Riley Watts on Thaddeus Davis By RILEY WATTS
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| Thaddeus Davis (center, in white T-shirt) demonstrates a move for the first-year dancers. (Photo by Rosalie O’Connor) |
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I won't lie; working with Thaddeus Davis has been hell. In this context, however, I don't mean hell in a "fire-and-brimstone" kind of way. Let me explain: This being the premiere major performance for our first-year class, each of us felt a certain pressure to make a good first impression. But there was nothing we could have done to prepare ourselves for Davis's work. For the first few rehearsals, he threw stones of improvisational choreography at us and expected us to catch them. His phrasing—never accompanied by the traditional 1-2-3-4 counting, but instead with such emphatic noises as "chicade-chicade-chicade-chica boom BOOM!"—seemed to solidify into a logical series only after he did it with us five or six times. Those with exceptional short-term memories survived; for yours truly, the process took (ahem) … slightly longer.
What made learning this piece especially challenging was not only how he taught us, but also what he taught us. Though it was clearly not ballet, its classical roots were unmistakably visible under a layer of vibrant, staccato modern movement, creating exaggerated lines and rhythmic patterns. A few times during the two-and-a-half-hour rehearsals, Davis gave what he put as a "lecture of the week." He noticed that some of us were having difficulties throwing ourselves into his choreography, and tried to impress upon us the necessity for each of us to find our own, organic style of movement. This "funk" (as he so eloquently put it) is completely personal and is a prerequisite to truly understanding any choreography. To offer a clearer illustration, he applied this concept in terms of location. For example, I am from Maine, and I move like I am from New England. The other funks, ranging from Brooklyn to Iowa to the Isle of Wight (located just off the southwest coast of England), create an interesting mélange of styles and rhythms in rehearsals. Thaddeus's personal Alabama funk is directly related to percussive sounds. He said, "I hear funk and I hear a certain kind of passion in music, where I can find the syncopation in it. It's like being a percussionist, and you have to add all the high-hats and timbales." Without finding rhythm, Davis's choreography was extremely difficult to do well. Aesthetically, he had us experiment with our bodies' natural reaction to gravity to communicate through his steps. I asked him how he relates his personal funk to others as he is teaching choreography. He summed it up in one word: "Plié. Plié is where all of it is, putting the weight down … Good ballet is down. It's really the art of illusion … I can't stress enough that bad dance, in my eyes, is devoid of weight."
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