Katie Glasner, one of our fearless rehearsal directors, has supplied the following notes on EIGHT JELLY ROLLS:
Dances only really, truly live when dancers dance them.
Yes, video and film capture dance, providing evidence of people moving through space and time in what we call dance.
Yes, notation symbolically captures dance, but one needs to be fluent in the notation system to both write and translate the symbols.
Yes, one dancer passes choreography on to the next dancer, the aural and physical transmission of information passing through the fragile gates of memory and physical ability.
But one dancer cannot dance an entire cast of a group work in live time and without the assistance of technology.
Twyla Tharp’s Eight Jelly Rolls, first performed in 1971 by a cast of six women to music by Jelly Roll Morton, was last performed by the Tharp company in 1987. The piece had a 20-year hiatus, coming into the light in 2007 when I set the work on dancers at Barnard College. It was performed in April, and culminated with an all Tharp concert by dancers from Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, Marymount Manhattan College, Hunter College and Juilliard a month later. I went on to stage the entire piece at George Mason University and Duke University. I began a staging at Kutztown University, but plans quickly shifted as a toxic leak was discovered in close proximity to the Dance Department and staffing needed to be reconsidered. The KU Department was working on the Torelli at the same time and decided that it was better to do less. A reigning quote of Twyla’s: “less is more.” Kutztown University embodied her axiom wisely in a stressful time. I set sections of the piece on a group of high school students under Alice Tierstein’s tutelage at Fieldston High School in NYC. Another group of Barnard dancers performed the second half of the piece at Sharing the Legacy, produced by Hunter College.
This spring, Jenny Way – amazing Tharp colleague and friend – and I are staging sections of the piece on nine Yale students participating in the Yale Dance Theater Pilot Project. Eight Jelly Rolls is a wonderfully rich piece of choreography set to eight songs of Jelly Roll Morton’s (hence the title), filled with brain bashing choreographic devices, all sorts of social dances from the 1920’s, luxurious movement to play around with and by way of extreme contrast, movement that is so fast it makes your head spin. Every time I meet this movement, something new reveals itself. Every time I meet this piece, I am grateful for the dancers who let the piece live.
Such was the case this past Wednesday evening – nine Yale dancers have had five sessions, Jenny meeting them on Saturdays, I on Wednesdays – when a section Jenny set the week before literally came to life before my eyes. The last section, danced to “If Only Somebody Would Love Me” and the only section in the piece where the entire cast does the same thing at the same time, came together in a way that made me awfully glad to see this piece up on its proverbial feet again. The Tharp movement is simultaneously highly stylistic and technically grounded. But there’s no Tharp technique – at the moment. And Eight Jelly Rolls called upon the variety of riches of the dancers making the piece 40 years ago.
What I’m most curious about at the moment is the question about movement “fitting” or making physical sense on, or to, a dancer. How is it that some choreography simply IS that person? And then how does another person who is learning and ultimately recreating (and maybe interpreting) that choreography find their way towards inhabiting what was created for someone else? I guess the best analogy I can come up with is that if you’ve had a coat for a long, long time and it is shaped by how you wear it and the kinds of demands you put on it – if you carry your bag on your right shoulder, there may be a well worn spot there – and you give it to someone else, it’s going to fit that person differently, but your shape is going to be there for a while. They carry their bag on their left shoulder, so it begins to show wear and tear there. But there’s history of the original owner’s presence in that well worn spot on the right shoulder.
When I stage Eight Jelly Rolls, I work with the bride’s mantra: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
Blue is easy – it’s in the title of one of the songs: Smokehouse Blues.
Something old is pretty obvious – the choreography.
Something borrowed is pretty easy as well – maybe the dancer learning the piece borrows a particular way of stringing movement together from another dancer who has performed the piece.
Something new – this is the challenging intersection as far as I’m concerned. New is the dancer learning the piece and putting the old, borrowed and blue stuff together to make sense for the dancer.
The moment when all this comes together is incredibly satisfying because there’s something so ineffable about the rightness of the spirit of Twyla’s work. To see that moment and to know the physical and intellectual delight in committing to work that hard is indeed a rare gift.
-Katie Glasner, February 25, NYC