A LOOK FORWARD: Activating Chance in SKETCH 13

SKETCH 13: Lucky challenges four choreographers to bring chance into their process.

Image description: Five dancers support one dancer in the center of a clump, her arms spread wide and leg unfurled behind her head. On a black background, blue text reads: SKETCH 13: LUCKY; white text reads: July 28-30, 2023.

What does it mean to embrace chance? Imagery’s Artistic Director Amy Seiwert has long been intrigued by the theoretical use of chance in artmaking, which she first encountered in Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, a string quartet by pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley. Seiwert, who reads music and often refers to musical scores in her choreographic process, was confused when Riley’s score didn’t match up with what she was hearing. Instead of a set score, the composer had written a collection of 24 short modules along with instructions for the musicians to “co-compose” their order, dynamics, and length—giving agency to the performers and resulting in a piece that would sound different in any given performance. How could this method be applied to dance?

This initial curiosity opened the door to many more questions and considerations at the heart of dance and dancemaking. For Seiwert, ballet’s tendency to focus on achievement and accomplishment can be hard to shake. By actively embracing chance as part of the choreographic process, she hopes to fuel the kind of generative discomfort that makes honest risk-taking possible. With a balance of trust, vulnerability, and authentic, open communication, she hopes to cultivate an environment where artists can put faith in the creative process, stay in the moment, and let go of expectations.

Now entering its final season, SKETCH 13: Lucky invites its four choreographers—Seiwert, Imagery Artistic Fellow Natasha Adorlee, and guests Hélène Simoneau and Trey McIntyre—to incorporate an element of chance into their process. For each choreographer, the prompt remains open to interpretation as they set out to make their dance. The challenge can be daunting, though using new tools can also be a lot of fun. In their first days of creation, each choreographer took time to explore their approach to chance in collaboration with the dancers. In many ways, the element of chance amplifies the palette of possibilities in this symbiotic creative relationship.

Grace-Anne Powers in rehearsal for Seiwert’s dance. Photo by Robert Suguitan.

Image description: A dancer in black pants, colorful leotard, and pointe shoes takes a wide open stance with her front foot pointed, arms outstretched in front with her palms facing outward, fingers splayed.

Seiwert is using “if-then” equations to puzzle together a collection of interlocking modules in her dance, which she anticipates will have some variability even in performance. With this dance, Seiwert is leaving more in the dancers’ hands than ever before, and is equipping them with new and familiar tools they can use to thrive in their choices. Her initial experiments in rehearsal take the form of structured games that the dancers play together in pairs and small groups, rearranging and manipulating phrase material in planned and improvised ways. They’re actively problem solving to create flexible plans capable of adapting to changing circumstances, a skill that will prove essential in performance. As Seiwert puts it, “Strategic planning is both essential and useless—make a plan and prepare to deviate from it.” In one game, five dancers deconstruct a short dance phrase, but only three can be in motion at any given time. This leads to a live negotiation between movement and stillness, a conversation that requires each dancer to have a finely-tuned sensitivity to their body and the others around them. Coincidences of timing and new coordinations emerge as the dancers get comfortable with being in a mindset of continual discovery. Throughout the process, striking the right balance between order and chaos will allow both Seiwert and the dancers to turn uncertainty into endless possibility.

Kelsey McFalls and Joseph Hernandez in rehearsal for Adorlee's duet. Photo by Robert Suguitan.

Image description: Two dancers captured in a weight-sharing movement: a dancer in a black tank top and pants holds the bent arm of another dancer in a turquoise shirt. Each pulls tension sideways away from the other, their eyes focused and downcast.

Imagery Artistic Fellow Natasha Adorlee, whose background in contemporary dance and multimedia artmaking lends itself to outside-the-box thinking, feels that chance nearly always plays a part in her process, from the challenge of taking new risks to harnessing the unpredictable chemistry between dancers. Chance also shows up as a theme in her duet for SKETCH, which is based on her parents’ first meeting and the role luck had to play in sparking their love. Within this narrative frame, she is interested in exploring the bittersweet influence chance can have in balancing individuality and connectedness in relationships. The duet’s ever-shifting dynamic moves between playfully aggressive passages dense with quick gestures and precise footwork and languid partnering that requires controlled momentum and weight-sharing. With every new encounter, the dancers must be fully present and attentive in every moment to sustain the thread of their connection. In the studio, Adorlee closely observes how SKETCH veterans Kelsey McFalls and Joseph Hernandez interact and problem solve together to find gestures and quirks to weave organically into the dance. This receptivity to the dancers’ personalities makes for a dance that remains open to interpretation—one that can never be danced the same way twice.

Anthony Cannarella in rehearsal for Simoneau’s dance. Photo by Robert Suguitan.

Image description: A dancer in a gray tank kneels in profile, pulling a swath of bright red fabric along the floor.

Hélène Simoneau’s approach leans into the challenges and opportunities chance has to offer, and she is taking full advantage of SKETCH’s laboratory-style approach to collaborative, experimental dancemaking. Chance operations were a part of Simoneau’s compositional training, through which she learned how to employ new methods and tasks to shake up her process and break her habits. For her, chance helps avoid the paralysis of “chasing the muse,” and she prefers to be more playful than strict with her approach. Much like Seiwert, games and tasks shape her initial process: Simoneau photographed herself in twenty poses, which she shared with the dancers to put in any order they’d like, intuitively filling in pathways and transitions to create unique individual phrases. Improvisation also factors into the genesis of her dances: she crafts several short phrases on her own body, pairs the dancers up to learn and interpret one passage, and then has each pair teach their material to others—a process of iterative reinterpretation heavily influenced by chance choices and individualistic qualities. She guides the dancers to experiment with the focus and texture of their movement, finessing tone, rhythm, and scale to make discoveries from the inside out. These methods allow Simoneau to keep from being too “precious” about her movement material, instead using her intuition and sharp eye to incorporate unexpected elements into the dance.

(L-R) Johnathon Hart, Matisse D’Aloisio, and Grace-Anne Powers in rehearsal for McIntyre’s dance. Photo by Robert Suguitan.

Image description: Dancers in rehearsal clothes stand facing forward in a sunlit studio with gray walls. The dancer in the foreground has one hand raised in a signing gesture with an inquiring expression on his face. Two dancers stand behind, preparing to move. Three dancers far in the background face away from the camera.

Trey McIntyre says that chance is ever-present in his dancemaking in the form of “trusting in the moment” and “being attuned to what is” through every step of the creative process. In his dance for SKETCH, he is taking new chances by incorporating American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken elements into his movement vocabulary. As these languages merge, their intelligibility blurs and comes into focus—for McIntyre, dance is a language and dancers are always speaking with meaning, whether recognizable or abstract. It’s this spectrum of intelligibility, and the place ASL occupies on it, that interests the choreographer as a point of departure for his dance. In the studio, Deaf dancer and choreographer Antoine Hunter helps translate McIntyre’s intentions into ASL and give feedback to the dancers on specific gestural and expressive elements. Hand shape and placement, facial expression, and physical dynamics all have subtle implications for meaning, tone, and inflection, which the dancers use to guide and express their choices, even as they sign while navigating complex dance phrases. McIntyre plays with themes of intimacy, communication, and compassion, centered on the telling of secrets. The dancers carry secrets with them throughout the dance, and their sharing asks the audience to consider how it feels to tell a secret. His chance element? Secrets volunteered by audience members, to be read aloud as an improvised score for one section of the dance (consider yourselves duly warned).

A Look Back: Merce Cunningham’s Chance Dances

You can experience these chances and more in SKETCH 13: Lucky at ODC Theater July 28-30. There’s no telling where chance might lead this cohort of artists, and these first impressions tell me that the results will be fresh and thoroughly unexpected for choreographers, dancers, and audiences alike. While creativity is typically a mix of planned and unplanned factors, the intentional use of chance encourages these artists’ adventurous new explorations. It’s also not unprecedented: modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham is best known for his experimentation with chance.

For more on the history of chance in dance, take a deep dive as I explore Cunningham’s work and legacy from the inside.

A LOOK BACK: Merce Cunningham's Chance Dances

SKETCH 13: Lucky asks its choreographers to apply an element of chance to their dancemaking. In further considering this prompt, I took a look back at some of the history of chance in dance. Starting in the 1950s, modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham used chance to structure many of his iconic dances. Inspired by his partner and collaborator, the composer John Cage, Cunningham flipped coins, rolled dice, and threw the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text used for divination through 64 hexagrams of broken and unbroken lines.

The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. Three coins are tossed to determine the  makeup of each trigram, with the resulting hexagram’s number correlated to a specific element, or in some cases multiple elements, of the dance.

Image description: A black and white table of sixty-four numbered hexagrams, or stacked configurations of six broken and unbroken lines.

For the most part, the choreographer used these tools to prepare and create repeatable dances with set sequences and structures of steps. In this way, Cunningham’s chance procedures differ markedly from “indeterminacy,” an analogous function that uses a structured improvisational score to make a dance that has the potential to be different each time it is performed. While some of his dances involve a degree of indeterminacy, the method was more widely used by composers of the time, including Cage, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. The lineage of indeterminacy continued through the postmodern dance experiments and unbridled improvisations of The Grand Union, Yvonne Rainer, and more under the legendary roof of Judson Memorial Church. Both chance and indeterminacy contributed greatly to the evolution of dance, music, and art in the 20th century, and continue to resonate with artists today.

Merce Cunningham's choreographic notes on the continuity for the solo "50 Looks" (1979). Each set of numbers corresponds to poses from the gamut movement vocabulary and I Ching hexagrams determined by coin tosses. Image courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library, and The Merce Cunningham Trust.

Image description: A white page with black handwritten notes of a series of paired numbers. Reference notes at bottom read: "each line = 10' / 50 Looks Continuity"

Cunningham developed his chance methods in an atmosphere of rigorous experimentation. Patricia Lent, the Cunningham Trust’s Director of Licensing and a former company dancer, outlines two primary elements in the choreographer’s use of chance: the “gamut”—the collection of dance steps or phrase material—and the “continuity”—the structural operation of the dance vocabulary in space and time. By and large, Cunningham’s gamut was a function of physical invention that took place over the course of weeks or months, both outside the studio and during class time, when he would experiment with new phrases. The gamut could be composed of anything from individual static postures (as in 50 Looks, a solo composed entirely of 50), or dance phrases of varying lengths (as in Doubles, a larger dance structured around 13 phrases of 13 counts).

"50 Looks" - Session One from Merce Cunningham Trust on Vimeo.

Patricia Lent introduces and teaches Cunningham’s solo “50 Looks.”

By codifying the physical vocabulary in the gamut, Cunningham could then allow chance to determine the dance’s sequential and spatial continuity within a defined field. In his essay Four Events That Have Led to Large Discoveries, Cunningham outlines the various factors at play in structuring a dance’s continuity, including “what phrase follows what phrase, how time-wise and rhythmically the particular movement operates, how many and which dancers might be involved with it, and where it is in the space and how divided.” These many factors opened up virtually limitless possibilities for chance to function differently in each dance, from relatively simple outcomes to extraordinarily complex feats of physical and spatial engineering.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Cunningham took copious, meticulously detailed notes using his own system of notation: a dense mix of stick figures, number tables, directional vectors, and stage grids. Because he worked from notes before engaging with bodies in space, the interplay between planning and execution was, for dancers like Lent, a “re-enacting of a solved problem” that relied on the dancers’ physical ability to interpret and execute specific directives in time and space.

Notably, at the time of creation the Cunningham company dancers weren’t entirely aware of how the choreographer made his dances, and it’s often only in the restaging process that they encounter the complex web of materials behind the genesis of his work. Dozens of notebooks and scattered papers comprise a rich archive that, together with video and embodied memory, allows Trustees to preserve and reconstruct dances from the inside out. Having danced Cunningham’s work myself, the chance elements baked into the dances bring a quirky tinge and collage-like quality to his angular, athletic abstraction—I feel my complete humanity as my body and brain work together in each moment, taking new chances drawn from chances taken decades ago.

A Look Forward: Activating Chance in SKETCH 13

By expanding possibilities and challenging the creative process, chance proves itself to be an inexhaustible resource for choreographers past and present. While Cunningham had a very idiosyncratic creative process and relationship with chance developed over decades, the four SKETCH 13 choreographers have just a few short weeks to consider chance in their work.  Imagery is thrilled to present its newest set of chances in SKETCH 13: Lucky at ODC Theater July 28-30. 

Learn more about how the SKETCH 13 choreographers are using chance in their dances.

Try Your Luck: Embracing Chance in SKETCH 13

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A LOOK BACK: Merce Cunningham's Chance Dances

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A LOOK FORWARD: Activating Chance in SKETCH 13

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