Friday March 18, 2011 - Above, choreographer Luca Veggetti photographed by Kokyat. Auditions are frazzling; since I started blogging I have watched parts of various dance auditions and it is a fascinating experience but also a very intense emotional one. It's so hard to watch excellent dancers getting cut, especially knowing that opportunities to dance seem to be dwindling. There are always far more entrants than there are spots available and with each round you know that hearts are going to be broken and hopes dashed.
When MORPHOSES announced auditions for their current season - which centers on a new work by the Company's first Resident Artistic Director, choreographer Luca Veggetti - more than two hundred dancers submitted applications. Lourdes Lopez, Director of MORPHOSES, and her staff pared the list down after reviewing resumes, photos and video clips of the applicants; a limited field of hopeful dancers were summoned to audition at Manhattan Movement and Arts Center over a two day period.
I'm planning to do extensive coverage of the MORPHOSES/Veggetti work in the coming months, but I didn't honestly expect to be privy to the audition process. After talking it over with Lourdes it was decided that Kokyat and I would come to the second day of the audition at a point when the selection would already have been made, or at least nearly so. I was relieved actually because watching the cuts can really induce the blues, even if you don't personally know the dancers involved.
We arrived this afternoon to find Lourdes, Luca and a studioful of male dancers who had made it to the final elimination round. There were about a dozen guys in practice clothes and I knew that only six or seven would be selected. Luca was working with them on a really beautiful phrase which encapsulated many elements of movement in a smooth-flowing visual paragraph. In pairs and then one-by-one the boys danced it. I began mentally picking out 'winners' from among them.
I was relieved that the news of who was cut was delivered out in the hallway; I hate seeing good dancers with dejected faces. All but one of the boys that I was sure would be chosen were picked; the 'finalists' came back into the studio with four girls and Luca began working on some partnering sequences with them.
The dancers introduced themselves to one another as they paired off and within seconds there was already chemistry in the air; one couple in particular just looked so fantastic together. As there were more boys than girls, two guys teamed up and ran the sequence together; it looked just as good danced by two men as it did with the boy/girl partnerships.
Then surprisingly Luca asked the boys to step outside and handed each girl a sheet of paper and asked them to read from it into a microphone. After getting the pacing he wanted he listened carefully to the tonality of each voice. Apparently there will be spoken passages in the score and so the women have one more element to consider.
As the dancers packed up to leave, Lourdes told me that there may still be some final changes in the roster; it may evolve that they have more boys than they'll eventually need. In addition, when the offers are finally made some dancers may not be free for all the rehearsal periods or may have other concerns that will keep them from joining the troupe. Extra dancers may be asked to stand by as a contingency. We're waiting to hear who'll be on the finalized roster and then I'll post some of Kokyat's images from today.
In the coming months, MORPHOSES will be preparing for Luca's new work based on Euripides' The Bacchae, a collaboration with the award-winning Italian composer Paolo Aralla.
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