In the Master Class With Crystal Pite’s Company

Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM’s “Dark Matters.” Photo by Dean Bucher.

A couple weeks ago, Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM, the Vancouver, BC-based company of choreographer Crystal Pite, presented the 2009 work Dark Matters to sold-out audiences at On the Boards (where Sarah Michelson’s Devotion opens this Friday, March 10). As if the performance was not enough to put me in good spirits the rest of the season (despite all the unknowns of graduating college!), I headed to Velocity the next day to take their master class with company members Peter Chu and Jirí Pokorný.

The class was $15, or $10 with a ticket stub from the show. Make sure to RSVP to these sorts of things though; space is limited and they’re popular. Setting down my things, I noticed both female members of the company, Cindy Salgado and Sandra Marín García, were also there as well as several choreographers I’d seen a week earlier at Ten Tiny Dances (Ellie Sandstrom, Salt Horse’s Beth Graczyk, Marissa Niederhauser) plus Velocity’s own Shannon Stewart and Amy O’Neal.

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Pite has been sitting out the run of this show to be with her two-month old son, Nico, but Chu and Pokorný each took us through an hour of her improvisational methodology and an hour of learning a longish phrase of choreography, respectively, from the company’s newest production, The You Show (2010).

Both segments of the class involved Pite’s “spine and feet” methodology and the using the body’s “seven points” to initiate movement. Warming up the “spine” half of my body (guiding my movement from the top of my head—and the top of my head only—rib cage, and then tail bone) opened me up to continuous motion rather than individualized movements as I snaked back and forth. Chu emphasized looking up and out rather than down, which I caught myself doing. Though initially I thought it was a small presentational critique, it made me sense my body as a whole, somehow losing track of the parts in a way I didn’t when I was focused more internally.

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When it was time to activate our “feet”, I was reminded of the beginning of a William Forsythe solo (Pite was part of his Ballett Frankfurt). My feet became curious and mischievous, previously slumbering little bodies active in their own right. Circling and tapping, spreading toes and harshly flexing, momentarily undercut my authority and my feet became almost strangers to me.

The most profound of the “seven points” (I’m sure we didn’t get to all of them) were the elbow and shoulder–or perhaps I might more accurately say say “armpit.”

That’s right. I learned how to use my armpit in dance.

We moved from the outside of the body in, starting with the wrist on one side of the body at a time. Then we reached the elbow. Why hadn’t I ever danced with my elbow before? Swirling it, allowing it to pull me through space, slower or faster, I was aware of its folding and unfolding, much like the puppet from the first half of Dark Matters. Finally we reached the shoulder, which was the hardest, perhaps because it is most part of the core of the body, and therefore harder to imagine separate. But Chu encouraged us to open the armpit, bringing life to it as a plane along with the “space” of the back of the neck.

So imagine the power of intensely focusing on one of these points, on one side of the body, swerving and diving, letting it pull the rest of the body along with it. Now add the identical point on the other side (wrist, elbow, shoulder) and the strength present surprises even me, and the movement is coming from my own body.

The last major takeaway from the class (aside from a same-day soreness in odd places like my ankle muscles) was Pite’s “expand to contract” way of conceptualizing. If you are on the floor (and you could try this right now, if you’re not in a public place–or if you are, all the better), press yourself into the floor with whatever surfaces of your body are touching it. (For a fuller effect, try more surfaces.) Pressing into the floor, while opening and expanding your lungs, expand your body and contract that energy, kind of like a rubber band, and use it to set the new path of your motion.

I was delighted when Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep” came on as the last group of us were running the “impro” interspersed with the bits of the phrase from their newest piece that we remembered. This was the song that concluded Dark Matters, breaking from Owen Belton’s soundscape (playful and epic string and choral tones infused with rhythmic sounds of industrial processes) to score the final duet between Peter Chu and the character originally performed by Pite herself—currently played by exquisite Sandra Marín García.

In the show, García’s character peels off her black costume alone on stage, to become the pale wood-colored puppet, initiating a role reversal with Chu, reclining stiff-torsoed on his flattened hand as he guides her feet to take awkward steps.

Dancing Pite’s choreography is a bit like hearing or singing Whitacre: things that should be discomfiting, such as musical dissonance or dropping yourself to the ground and getting up gracefully, are rendered easy and natural by following lines of motion in the body already in motion.