In the State of Adaptation (2019) ~7’

solo dancer

Premiered by Cyrie Topete on November 17, 2019 at National Sawdust.

In this piece, I explored the use of extramusical sounds in music; specifically, those found in contemporary dance performance. When I attended a performance and talk by Twyla Tharp in 2019, I was struck by how the sounds of the landings and shuffling of their feet in transitions, which were highly exposed, created a music, since much of her early work was without musical accompaniment. I was inspired to write a piece drawing on these sounds and similarities between choreographical and compositional processes. I envisioned a piece that would blend the two mediums of expression, dance and composition, entirely into a unified creation made of visuals, movement, sound, and time.

Shortly after this experience, in March of 2019, I received National Sawdust’s Blueprint Fellowship with support from the Toulmin Foundation and Juilliard to write a collaborative work with Cyrie Topete at Juilliard in which the dancer themself was the musician for a performance in November of 2019. Throughout the writing process, I explored how the sounds generated by the dancer’s landings, breathing, and clothing would create music. As a composer, I organized the sounds by being in the studio with the dancer and isolating sounds from improvisations that Cyrie would do based on certain concepts, such as changing levels, increasing tension, or travel. The score for this eight minute long piece became a combination of verbal markers of important points to reach in the piece and videos of the rehearsals/writing sessions.