At last, the Whim W’Him blog is up and running!
Format not elegant, but it will do the job for now.
Didn’t realize how easy it was to start something like this—
sometimes division of labor makes more problems than it solves.
So, countdown to showtime.
17 days, including today and opening night.
What to say to welcome the launch of Whim W’Him?
Something new each day to highlight the company’s premiere.
Begin at the beginning with WhimW’Him’s inventor/choreographer Olivier Wevers.
In Olivier’s work it’s the hands I notice first, and arms…
Clutching,
cupping,
flat against someone’s face…
Tender, sinister, classical, crazy, elusive…
arms and hands in Olivier’s work echo and express his belief in technique as only a tool.
And his desire to use these tools not just to make formal patterns, or to perfect poses, but to say something, to move viewers, to change their feelings/ ideas/ perceptions. Some time ago, when I scarcely knew Olivier, a character in a novel I was writing—a dancer-choreographer—said to a reporter of a piece he was creating:
“I am drawn to times of transition. Those moments in each of our individual stories, when one condition mutates into another—growing up, falling in love, being initiated into the trials of adulthood, aging, death—the grand or minute adjustments of balance we learn to make. In dance too I am searching out points of transformation. When heaviness in our bodies gives way to a sense of contravening gravity, or vice versa. When rest turns to motion. When stillness becomes sound. Or the clumsiness of a student grows into the grace of a dancer.”
Like that fictional dance, 3Seasons is about metamorphosis. More specifically (unlike my concocted piece), the first major work to be performed by WhimW’Him will explore how we humans change the world, how it transforms us, and the relation of our actions to the cycle of the seasons.
Stay tuned here for more on WhimWhim and the co-creators of 3Seasons…
For Olivier’s bio and much more about the company,
visit our website at: https://www.whimwhim.org
And follow WhimW’Him on Facebook and Twitter