Music/Dance Collaborations

Advice

Written for a music/dance collaboration; instruments on stage, initially guided improv, moving into notated; dancers provide speaking parts. Possible to perform music only.

Advice begins with a question and an answer. Contradictory advice is interjected and opens the door to the wide variety of options and choices available to the questioner. What to do? What path to take? It turns out, there may be no single right answer; it's simply a matter of sorting through the options and preferences and proceeding along your chosen path. Our collaboration began with an interest in using spoken words to trigger musical events and to create group textures. Zae's interest in reading advice columns suggested a storyline and initial words that would allow us to develop our spoken word interest.  

Tapestry

Composer Zae Munn and choreographer

Michele Foust wanted to create a piece that expressed the beauty of many individual strands gradually intertwining into a single tapestry. Each instrument plays a recurring single strand, which can be joined with any other strand to create harmony. As the music progresses, the harmony becomes more complete and full with each additional musical strand. Michele chose to represent this process visually by pairing each musician with a dancer. In the final tableau, the finished tapestry is represented on stage by all the musicians and dancers intertwined together. Zae and Michele collaborated last year on a piece called Play the Cards You’re Dealt, and they are planning a third collaboration for next year around the concept of improvisation.

Play the Cards You're Dealt

Play the Cards You're Dealt explores the unpredictable mobility of life events using the metaphor of a card game in which The Dealer shuffles the cards to determine who goes next: The Mourner, The Jester, or The Bully, either as soloists or with all the dancers joining. The music shares fully in the quality of each character and, like the dancers, responds to whatever The Dealer's shuffle lays out for them. Because the cards are shuffled on stage to determine the order of events, the structure of each performance will be different.