Morgan Beckwith: Southport, CT

Imaginary Love

I sat observing in rehearsal for Imaginary Love, wondering how passionate about dance Goran must have felt twenty years ago in order to transfer his extensive education of finance and business into dance vocabulary. However, as rehearsal progressed I realized that Goran does not rely on traditional dance lexicon to communicate with his dancers. Instead he operates in metaphors, symbolism, visualizations, and stimulating descriptions.

It is fairly obvious that some part of the patriarchal and detail oriented business tendencies have manifested themselves in Goran’s artistic coaching of his dancers. But this part of his style of working only contributes to his overwhelming appreciation for something larger and more intangible. Goran’s relationship with art and the human condition is far more important to him than any prescribed course of dictated, and transparent advice. He challenges his dancers to be active participants with each correction asking, “why are you doing this?” and “how do you feel it?”

He spent at least an hour working with Coco on her solo in this way, prompting her to delve deep into the character and the setting of the piece. A couple of times he asked her to close her eyes feeling out the movement and taking a more multisensory approach. It seems that Goran works in these layers of multisensory and multidimensional expression of movement rather than attaching a blanket statement of meaning for the entire piece of choreography. He begins by singling out steps and honing a tactile sense of feeling in each one. By process this effectively achieves stronger and more stable thematic material because the dancers possess a wealth of knowledge about their physical body and ethereal mind in relation to the choreography. Stringing these high intensity moments together produces coherent thought about the choreography, grown organically from the incredible effort of these dancers.

I saw for myself the difference of focus in Coco’s solo today. It went from Coco thinking that she was being a doll, trying to move as she thought it would and her actually embracing the qualities of a specific doll, one who is not willing to relinquish her control. She effectively became a doll through her execution of the expressive qualities of her movement and the vivid connection between body and mind rather than story and steps.