Please join us this week as we engage with Molly Rose-Williams and her the collaborators for Social Movement, which premieres on Saturday, November 17, 2018 at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley. Purchase your tickets here.

Today we hear from collaborator Galen Rogers.

Galen Rogers grew up in San Francisco studying taiko, aikido, capoeira, and tablas. These forms provide the foundation of his physicality and musicality and cultivated curiosity, sensitivity, and an expansive vocabulary from an early age. At Oberlin College he earned his BA in ethnomusicology and founded Oberlin College Taiko. After graduating from Oberlin College in '12 he joined Jiten Daiko, a taiko ensemble based in San Francisco that focuses on pioneering new expressive territory for taiko arts. He has been the director of this ensemble since 2014. In 2013 he also began studying Gaga with James Graham. He performed professionally and toured with James Graham Dance Theater in 2016 and 2017, and has continued to dance professionally ever since. He currently teaches taiko, gamelan, and ethnomusicology at San Francisco Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and Marin Academy.

Transitions and Gender

In most of the dance processes that I've been a part of, the choreographer and dancers have come up with scores, movement, and scenes that speak to the theme or idea behind the piece, and then moved onto the most challenging part of creating something to present – figuring out how to connect those moments into something cohesive. The transitions have been an afterthought created to support the choreographed scenes, the intended focus. The process of making "Social Movement" has been different.

For me, the most important moments, the ones that speak the most to the theme of social movement, ARE the transitions. Our piece is essentially a series of scores. The rules of each score are clear and consistent, even though the movement is always new. But the transitions between scores are different every time. The transitional moments ask the most from us as improvisers. They require us to be the most sensitive to the ensemble, the most communicative, the most bold. In these moments, the dance fragments, gets out of control, loses steam, turns into something new. It's unpredictable even though we're all aiming for the next score in the sequence. The transitions feel like the most authentic moments, the moments that capture the organized chaos of what social movement actually is.

A lot of my thinking this season and throughout this process has been about gender-based violence, patriarchy, and men who don't listen to the women around them. As I began to understand the importance of transitions, and as we continued to string scores together, I realized that I was often the person who initiated the transition to the next section. Reflecting on this pattern in the context of current events made me curious about what it would be like to perform with the ensemble and not initiate anything – only follow, only listen, and notice how that changed things. I had to adjust my assignment a few times –  the first time I tried it, I was like a "tail" on the ensemble — people were moving on to the second and third score and somehow I was still in the first section, so I was still drawing attention to my participation, but in a different way. The next time I modified my assignment to: "dissolve into the group" — don't push, don't pull. I can't say if I was successful, but it was a satisfying challenge. As a man who spends a lot of time as a teacher and a director, I'm often in charge of the people around me, or I'm expected to fill silence, or push forward an agenda. It was interesting to discover that dissolution is absolutely not passive. It is quite difficult, active, and continuous. This rehearsal process has been extremely rigorous in a variety of ways, and I count these moments of dissolution among them.

It's been a privilege to dissolve into a group of such powerful women!

Dumplings or tamales?

Tamollys.

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Related posts and websites:

What is "Social Movement?" by Molly Rose-Williams

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 5 Days until Social Movement by Molly Rose-Williams

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 4 Days until Social Movement by Molly Rose-Williams

mollyrosewilliams.com

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