UC Berkeley

In September 2014 I began collaborating with choreographer Miřenka Čechová and director Petr Boháč of Spitfire Company on a new dance production called Sniper’s Lake. We started with a conversation about the body. Miřenka, who was working with refugees at the time, was searching for a physical language based on running and its variations: escape, endurance, direction, exhaustion; also fear, joy, energy, purpose. She chose six dancers from Prague, Berlin and Oslo to work with over a period of five months. Her choreography emerged gradually during that period, at first from the dancers’ bodies and personalities, and later on from their dynamic as a group of individuals entirely new to one another.

The music emerged in parallel. I chose an ensemble of six clarinets to interface with the dancers, and spent two months in Prague and Pilsn watching the rehearsals unfold while composing the first sketches. The relationship between the dance and the music was constantly in flux during that period. In some sections (like Tides) the music was the catalyst for the movement, while in others (like Loops) the music mirrored the dancers’ gestures. Miřenka’s guiding principal was the form: the dancers were to physically overexert themselves during the first thirty minutes of the performance without reaching a resolution. To achieve this progression, I decided to focus on cyclical events rather than on linear time. At the heart of each event is a cyclical rhythm that unfolds musically, then visually. These events, in turn, constitute the four sections of Part 1 of the score for Sniper’s Lake.

Part 2 presents itself in a more narrative form. Much of the sound is produced live by the dancers as they begin to explore the stage’s physical barriers: contact mics are placed on the backdrop screen, allowing them to excite the surface with their body and voice. The notated portion of part 2 consists of loose arrangements of source materials given to me by Miřenka: an iso-polyphonic folk song from Albania, and a spoken rhythmic representation of Swan Lake’s ‘Danse des petits cygnes.’ In the context of the performance, these short, rather flexible, musical sentiments serve as references to the act of escaping in its many forms.

Sniper’s Lake was premiered at Bærum Kulturhus in Sandvika, Norway, on March 26th 2015.