I’ll be doing a workshop in Portland with the director and choreographer Jessica Wallenfels. We talked last night about how to integrate our different methods of choral work.

We have a group of 12-15 people, mostly unknown to us, showing up on Tuesday the 28th for this.

I’m going to start with my basic exercises: imitation with me controlling who the leader is, imitation with a shifting leader but only one at a time, and then imitation with the leader freely shifting.

Then Jessica’s going to attempt to incorporate a scene into it, and we’ll let the rest of the actors do my choral improv stuff as a response to the text of that scene – using the text as the backdrop instead of the music. Since they’ll all have learned the same scene, they can join in the text as easily as anything else.

I’m very excited about this – it’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been saying I’d do for years, but never have. I’m hoping this can lead to more workshops elsewhere.

Jessica’s work is really on the cutting edge of narrative choreography. She did a site-specific piece in a restroom recently, called RESTROOM, for PCS‘s JAW/West Festival, about women and drugs.