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Janusphere Dance Company Artistic Director Darion Smith is hard at work in the studio developing a new work, tentatively titled AMP. In AMP, Darion explores the nature of voice and the relationship between voice and dance to communicate with and experience the world around us.
We sat down with Darion to talk about the new work, its purpose and the process of bringing it to life.
Janusphere Dance Company dancer Steven Jasso joined Janusphere Dance Company at the On the Boards Festival in Seattle, Washington June 17 - 19, performing in our world premiere of Object.
We sat down with Steven after we returned from On the Boards to talk about the Festival experience.
We Janusphere dancers literally lived together for the last 20 days of the rehearsal period leading up to On the Boards and we got to know each other on a deeper level in the artistic sense surrounding the work and in general. Because we were so close we had many discussions about the structure of the work, the meanings, feelings, that inspired the movements, and the context in the entirety of the work and the smaller pieces within it.
Janusphere Dance Company dancers at On the Boards New Works Festival
The folks at On the Boards were so great to work with. This was a very inspiring experience. It was an honor to present work there among other selected artists. I hope we can come back soon. And this was exactly what Janusphere Dance Company needed to get going out here on the West Coast.
Choreographing and dancing in a work was and is a constant challenge. You can't really ever see the whole picture with your own eyes if you're in it. Even the fact that I recorded everything and studied the footage there's a dimension that gets lost without having an external view, the same view an audience member would have. As much as I feel the work internally, I need to know the perspective from the audience. I ask myself If I was my own audience what would I want to experience.
I am enjoying finding and experimenting with ideas vs coming into the studio with a fixed image and trying to copy and paste it onto a stage. I am finding and defining my tools to communicate more and more. I believe each idea is more nuanced than the previous one and that makes me feel like I am going somewhere and building a world that I can enter into and experience a temporary fantasy.