It’s the image that always comes to mind when I see Young Jin and Lali demonstrate the movements. Their arms and torsos move with a sinuous grace before they, like a preying serpent, attack a pose, from which sparks appear and vanish in a matter of a fleeting instant, as if their previous movements came together like pieces of flint to create that exceptionally striking pose. And yet, that strike doesn’t signal the end of the movement, but merely a part of a continuous phrase. Like a whip, there is a kickback that keeps the movement going even after you’ve reached that the peak of a movement.

I find that to be my biggest challenge when engaging with this choreography. Another image that comes to mind is a cross between a sin curve and an EKG/ECG heart machine, such that I need  to maintain this continuous curve in my movements before and after certain peaks in the movement that are brief but powerful.

As you can see, I’ve found myself trying to understand this movement style through a lot of imagery to help me develop that texture in my movement, whereas with Reggie I found myself focusing more on following an internal monitor of my weight as it rises and falls to guide my pelvis and keep it in timing with my co-performers. But that isn’t to say that this choreography doesn’t also require an immense amount of awareness regarding weight changes. In fact, it’s more emphasized but in a less muted way that with Reggie’s choreography. For me the marked changes in weight and pivots helps me create a skeletal structure or outline of the choreographic essay before I can add the details of hands and arms.

With Reggie’s work, we were told that we needed to feel each other’s pelvises and use that as our guide to timing. I relied solely on that. With Khan’s choreography, I need to keep both an internal metronome (my mind ferociously keeping time for fear of breaking the beautifully delicate house-of-cards-like composition of our spacing), but also an external, jazz-like timing in that it changes all the time but we all remain in unison because of our breath. We develop distinct, but compatible inflections in our breath that allows us to understand the accents and transitions. Because I have to focus more on breath here, it definitely translates into a more spiritual experience for me.

 

I struggled to enter this extreme state of concentration when working with Reggie Wilson choreography, but here it seems as if it’s required in the movement,  especially w