Emery LeCrone Prepares For MOVE! @ PS1

Kokyat and I watched choreographer Emery LeCrone working on two very different projects this past weekend. On Saturday we went to the studio at Barnard where she was creating a new piece for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative. And then on Sunday we found Emery again at MMAC where she was rehearsing a fairly large contingent of dancers for a Halloween weekend production which is part of MoMA PS1‘s series MOVE!

MOVE! is a series of performance/installations at the Queens MoMA venue which bring together the realms of the arts and fashion. The current MOVE! project will take place at the museum on October 30th and 31st. Emery’s collaborators will be artist Tauba Auerbach and designers Flora Gill and Alexa Adams of Ohne Titel.

Emery’s piece for PS1 will be performed in a small space, so she blocked off part of the studio so that the dancers would have an idea of what to expect. Click on the above image to see Kat Carter, Erin Arbuckle, Caitlin Dieck, Stephanie Eagle, Ashley Matthews, Jen Barrer-Gall, Kelsey Coventry, Nicole Cerutti, Emery LeCrone, Sakiko Yamagata and Rebecca Azenberg. (Erin, Jen and Nicole were in the original cast of Emery’s FIVE SONGS FOR PIANO at CBC, and Erin and Rebecca are in Emery’s current CBC project). A twelfth dancer, Maddie Deavenport, will also be in the PS1 production.

At PS1 the girls will perform Emery’s ten-minute piece 6 times each day, every hour on the hour. There won’t be any music and they will be sharing the space with their audience. Emery came into the rehearsal with a whole range of ideas and she immediately started whipping up a piece that is entertaining, amusing, mysterious and that will suit the venue really well.

Kokyat and I had one of our most purely enjoyable studio visits ever watching this work come together. It was fascinating to see how quickly Emery worked and how fast the piece developed. The dancers jumped right in; they took each of Emery’s visual motifs and expanded on them, bringing their own personalities into the mix.

Emery uses the dancers’ personal attributes as part of the look…their hair became an expressive device. Erin, Kat and Stephanie, above…

…and Caitlin, Ashley & Jen.

Kokyat circled the room and came up with these images; now it remains to see how it will look when meshed with what the artist and designers have created. We plan to go out to Queens on Halloween and hopefully be able to photograph the finished performance. Meanwhile, just watching Emery and the girls in the studio was pretty much a performance in its own right.