October 2017: Creating a New Version of the Etude

In October 2017, several Dancing Legacy dancers began the process of adapting Ecce Etude from a trio to something that could be danced by eighteen people at once.  They began by splitting the parts - the DAPpers, who perform a version of the movement adapted for chairs, would be the horses, most Dance Extension dancers would be the women, and the Central Falls students along with some Dance Extension students would be the spirits.  The Dancing Legacy dancers would be dispersed between the women and the spirits.  It made the most sense for the DAPpers to do an adapted version of the horse choreography because the horse is the most stationary character in the original trio, so the spatial translation to chairs was easiest.

To best maintain the original intent and spatial design of the trio,  they first mapped out the spatial design of the three different roles (on the yellow paper, pictured below).  From there, after having already decided that the horse part would be stationary chairs, they began to work out a spatial design that would allow for six horses to be on stage at the same time as the spirits and women are doing the same or similar spatial patterns as their characters do in the original trio.  The end product of this is pictured below, mapped on the blue pieces of paper. 

A large part of the planning process for this, as pictured above, was to figure out how to make pathways such that eighteen dancers can safely navigate the stage while still maintaining the spatial design of the original trio.  For example, the spirit part (which is the role that I perform) makes large, sweeping passes around the perimeter of the stage in the original version.  To translate this to a version with eighteen people, the spirits now take our path around two horses, as you can see on some of the blue pieces of paper pictured above.  Pathways were also built such that they would maintain a relationship between the moving spirits and women and seated horses, but would also allow for no collisions between the three groups.  Hours of thought and diagramming go into successful rehearsals for large restaging projects such as this one!