What has Twitter done for you? I can’t answer that, but I can tell you what it’s done for me.
Thanks to Twitter, I’ve been given the opportunity to collaborate with Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) in New York City.
DTW offers a community choreography contest once a week where they have their followers tweet various words that can be translated into movement. Once all the tweets are collected they have a dancer make sense of them, shoot a video, and post the clip. As a choreographer I found this to be very fascinating, but I never submitted an entry... until recently. When DTW was looking for someone to translate the Tweets of @common_squirrel into dance, it sounded like an enticing challenge. I put myself out there and waited for an answer.
It wasn’t long before I got a reply back, and to my surprise they were stoked. I’m not too sure if they have even heard of the work I do, but it didn’t matter to them... or to me.
I looked up the Squirrel’s page and it was literally JUMP, SNIFF, SCRATCH, RUN, HOP, ACORN, and TREE. What had I gotten myself into?! I quickly emailed DTW to see if there was any timeline to get this done and they said as long as I beat the next social networking trend I’d be cool!
On the choreographic end it would have been easy for me to go with the literal translation of the Squirrel tweets, but that’s not how I roll. I wanted to put meat on those bones, develop a story, and create a dance that was funny, yet dynamic. I envisioned this project being performed live as well as being a dance film, because it would be fun to watch with lighting and all that jazz.
As luck would have it, I knew of a dancer by the name of Alex Jenkins who was born for this part (she’s my new muse). We rehearsed in Studio G and I would literally find myself laughing at what we had created; it made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Still, it was not enough. Something was missing.
In an effort to knock this one out of the park and to add another layer, I contacted Film Director Dr. Bacon about shooting the dance for us using his new Red Cam (better quality then HD). Washington, D.C. would be the setting. We discussed my vision for the piece and he mentioned building an animatronic squirrel using his motion sensor technology. I could not have been more pumped. Then we brainstormed a few ideas with a costume designer with whom I shared my vision inspired by Where The Wild Things Are and Japanimation. I was still getting the music worked out, but I already knew it was going to be an original composition.
I then contacted @TenduTV about possible involvement and they were very interested, and of course @movmnt!
I’m now done with the dance portion, and we fly out to D.C. soon for the shoot and pre-production.
Now, this lil’ dance is going somewhere and taking on a life of its own, all thanks to Twitter and its collaborative power.
Movmnt proudly sponsors this project and encourages new ways of creative collaboration.
