A Good Day

My absolute favorite place to be is the rehearsal room. Theatres have a special magic, but even an empty theatre has an elevated feeling. Rehearsal studios have an intimacy, but also a very "work gets done here" quality. My dad was a workaholic. His favorite saying was, "If you have to live to work, you might as well work to live." His favorite place to be was his workshop, where he would spend hours grinding and buffing castings that he had made. In many ways, I am the same, but my grinding and buffing has to do with shaping performances.

Sometimes the shaping is just repeating things over and over, so the dancers can get the steps comfortably in their bodies. Contrary to popular belief, the dancers shouldn't be thinking about which step comes next. Ideally that has become second nature through repetition. Once a dancer no longer has to worry about the sequence of steps, they can actually start to think about the presentation of the steps and relax into the discovery of the dance that is created when the steps are put together. That is actually the best part of rehearsal. 

Today, I actually got to do that for a few hours. Clean things up. Dive a little deeper into "why hat step follows the other one." Specifics of musicality. Start to make Don Juan come to life. 

So as the title says... a good day.