[ad_1]
Physically, Mearns said, the movement was different from her previous experience of Wheeldon’s choreography, which had mostly been “very upright, with some quirkiness, but very classical.”
“This is very, very topsy-turvy, rounded, falling off your leg,” she continued, adding that usually Wheeldon had to rein in her no-holds-barred way of dancing. For this ballet, she said, he wanted that quality from all the dancers. “It’s kind of great.”
Wheeldon’s approach to creating “From Me Within You” (the title is from a line in the Dehmel poem) was new for him. He knew he wanted to collaborate with Manning after they met through a mutual friend. “I loved the movement within the paintings and the juxtaposition of stillness with a riot of color,” he said. “I was intrigued by their story-no story aspect.”
He asked Manning to create paintings inspired by the Schoenberg score, deciding that would be his starting point, rather than the more conventional choreographic approach of the music as primary inspiration.
In an interview before a rehearsal she attended, Manning said, “So often people want design as wallpaper for their projects, but this felt new and radical for both of us.” The music, she added, “feels connected to grief, to moments of tremendous hope. I was painting with that tempo, that intensity, with the poem’s idea that through interconnectedness, we can achieve metamorphosis.”
Although Manning usually embeds human figures in her swathes of color, she decided that the scale would make painted bodies too visually noisy. “The main thing was to share the brush with Chris,” she said. “The dancers are the final brush marks in the composition.”
[ad_2]
Source link