Velocity DC- Bodies in Urban Spaces

Students from TrDa 185 Trends in Performance class are working with an Austrian choreographer on site specific work for performance this weekend. Here is one of the reports:

For this entire week, we are rehearsing every day (4-6 hours per day) for Urban Bodies Velocity DC. It is a group of around 15 dancers/climbers led by an Austrian choreographer, Villy and his American assistant, Mike. Villy's ideas are about creating art by filling spaces involving the architecture of the city to form a structure or a pose. We are in the process of creating 30-40 structures with our bodies using the architecture around us. Some involve all 15 of us and some are solos.

All of us have a background in dance, some are professional, others not, but all of us are passionate enough to take the risk to injure ourselves, for the beauty behind the artform. We hold each structure for 2-6 minutes and then move on to the next. Because we are often climbing builds, squeezing into spaces and doing headstands on the ground, we have been getting very dirty and accumulating plenty of scrapes, bruises and ripped clothing. Our transitions from sculpture to sculpture consist is us running from one location to the next. However, these are not included in rehearsals, so we will be pushed even harder the day of the show.

Every rehearsal up until the day before the performance is trial and error. Villy and Mike have scoped out spaces in a 4 block radius downtown. We go up and down blocks and try to form the images he had in mind when he first saw the space. However, there is almost never a space that fits exactly to what he had in mind. The positions of our bodies and limbs are constantly being tweaked. The structures we produce also range in level of simplicity. We can spend up to an hour creating one structure or we can spend 2 minutes testing a space out. Villy and Mike have also warned us that the poses we spend an hour constructing are not necessarily the ones we are going to use for the final performance (October 5 and 6 at 5:30 pm).

Although the actual performance with Velocity DC is next weekend, every time we form a structure we receive a great deal of attention. The pedestrian reaction however is different to the one we received at the Arts on Foot festival. Tourists do stop and take pictures, but many come up to us and politely ask what we are doing and what it is for. Some homeless people, seated by our sculptures would even use our sculptures as a deal for attention, one man called individuals and guided them to see us. There are also pedestrians that are concerned and wondering if someone actually got "stuck" up there. Jeff from The Washington DC Performing Arts Society attends and travels with us during each rehearsal to hand out Velocity DC flyers to those who are interested.