When I first came into rehearsal for Accidental Nostalgia, Cynthia gave me a script she had written about the pros and cons of amnesia. It was my first time working with Cynthia but I immediately fell in love with the soft quality inherent in her natural way of moving and was excited by the prospect of how I could design movement for her that would add to and not hinder her character and her character’s story. She already had some moves she had sketched for herself and all that was needed was a nip and tuck for the first showing at The Whitney.

For the workshop at MASS MoCA, I did more research and a little more actual musical staging. She said she had been looking at country line dancing and The Singing Detective and there were old vaudeville references already in the script. I looked at old USO images, pictures of my grandmother dancing as well as the quality of dancers from old movie musical numbers. From the original 42nd Street to The Red Shoes to Busby Berkeley, I discovered a sort-of laissez-faire dance quality in the performers that I brought into the mix for Cynthia’s movement style. The dancers in these films look like they never got overtly physical or broke a sweat, though they often added a touch of panache to the end of their clearly consigned movements.

When D.J. Mendel came on board as the director, he had very specific ideas about where each number should take place in space and so the dances went through another evolutionary development. As the on-hand movement specialist, we also did some Pilates/Yoga training for body awareness because Jeff Sugg and Jim Findlay, set and lighting designers respectively had had no formal dance training but were dancing quite a bit in the show. Both have a strong sense of rhythm and throughout the three years of the shows construction, added nuance and dynamic range to their moves. Here are a list of the conditions that helped to define the dance design scheme and musical staging of Accidental Nostalgia:

• finding movements that Cynthia could do while singing live that were interesting and appropriate for her character
• creating a gestural dictionary that would help tell the story without mimicry
• making every gesture specific so the audience could watch the dance and listen to the lyrics at the same time
• non-dancers of completely oppositional physical proportion dancing together with ease

The show is both funny and sad, nostalgic and contemporary, upbeat and slow-motion all at the same time. These qualities are emblematic of the movement design as well. It is because of the music, the artist, the collaborators and some of the inherent limitations of the show that a new movement vocabulary was born.

This September, Accidental Nostalgia was awarded a Bessie and the entire creative team share in celebrating the show’s much deserved success!

PRESS LIST FOR Accidental Nostalgia