In advance of tonight’s performance at Cain Park, we sat down with Guest Artist Eric Handman to talk about how the final weeks of rehearsals have gone.
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In Handman’s words, this work is truly the result of the discovery & moment by moment choices he made with the Groundworks team. He has been very impressed by the caliber of artists within the company & throughout Northeast Ohio.
“The arts community is so very sophisticated here. After my experience in the area I was left with a confirmation of the professionalism & rigor of the Cleveland community. This is a community of the highest standards. I was able to have the type of artistic conversations that I always hope to have with the artists I work with. The artist here simply, get it.”
Handman was also very complimentary of his experience teaching a workshop at Cleveland State University’s Summer Dance Intensive. He says the experience was extremely smooth – the students were excited to participate in the same process that Handman used with Groundworks’ dancers.
“The first two days we concentrated on technique. On the third day we played a compositional game where the class was divided into 4 groups. Each group created small movement phrase. We then played a game called “Reading the Room” – each dancer connecting one body part to one architectural element of the room The groups would then add each participant’s movement together to develop a phrase. The final part is puppeting (where one participant is the puppet & the rest of group are puppeteers that move puppet through the phrase they dev as a group). This allows them to work through partnering as a group. In an hour they created 4 short studies (as 4 groups of 6).”
For Handman, the point is to build a group that can navigate initial problem & any others that come up throughout the process. This served him well while choreographing the new work – Remora – for Groundworks.
We look forward to sharing the work with you tonight at Cain Park!