Every time we rehearse Bound, I uncover more layers of this girl I am trying to bring to life. It’s like chipping away at a person who I am both creating and discovering, as though she exists both in my mind and separately from my mind, as an eternal figure in this perpetual drama. A limbo of narrative.
And yet, this isn’t a narrative we’ve plucked from an ambiguous source. It is being conceived and directed, now in the flesh, by Samar. Yes, we are still choreographing, ascribing movements to fill out the story. Yes, we are now maneuvering huge set pieces across the stage in an effort to bring to life this world we’re describing. But within that slightly unsettling chaos of creating something out of nothing, there is the sense that it is not out of nothing. That I didn’t just pull her out of thin air. She arrived. She placed herself before me, and is still coming back, asking me to find out more about her, and to tell her story for her.
Today, Sabrina and I went through our duets together, quickly reviewing for both choreography’s sake and to keep the relationship between our two characters connected. But it became more than a breezy regurgitation of steps and set emotional responses. Every time we repeat the encounters, it’s not a redundancy of feelings, a revisiting of an already explored past. It’s new. It’s fuller. I realize more about why I feel the way I do about Sabrina’s character. I recognize why I would turn a certain direction, or move at a particular pace. My rhythm re-informs my rhythms, so to speak. The choreography, though pre-exisitng,and already known to myself, to Sabrina, starts to spontaneously unfold itself as if it could never have been any other way. We make statements to each other like “I just realized that’s why I do x, y and z,” or “You know, I think it makes sense that I do x, because…” As though we were analyzing ourselves, or someone we knew intimately. Maybe we are.
–Sara
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