Choreographed by Clouds
By Kristin Hatleberg
Choreographed by Clouds is a duet between body and sky. The work is a solo performance in the way a cloud is a solitary form. It embodies the singular but contains a multitude. The individual raindrops comprise a cloud; this solo is culled from myriad stories, memories, moments, artistic creations, and voices.
I can hear Katie Duck’s voice reminding me, “The group choses the solo.” That’s certainly true in both dance improvisation and in life. Working on this show, I have been amazed time and again, by the rich generosity we people constantly offer one another. Everything in this show has been given to me to share with you, and the parts that have made it onto the stage are just a little wisp of it all.
It is the third artistic collaboration between myself, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, and Erik Moe and something like the hundredth between myself and Fred Hatt. The project was born out of the year-long research and performance project, Half | Life, that was made in 2018-2019 with support from DC-Commission for Arts and Humanity. It has been building slowly and steadily throughout the pandemic years. I have a feeling the show will keep amassing and shifting in many more forms -- if you see this iteration, I would love to hear what was on your mind while taking it in.
While tethered to a specific geographic region, the show expands to cover the globe. Visually, the clouds compiled in it were shared by friends around the world who knew what I was up to – namely, attempting to directly transpose the cloud motion onto my own limbs to create movement sequences -- and saw a cloud that made them think of me. They pointed their phones straight up into the sky, and I tried to become the cloud as they witnessed it to be and to morph.
During the show, the body multiplies through voices. Men and women young and old regale us with stories. These stories speak on how clouds that were once here have drifted and changed and are now over far-flung places or no longer clouds. It seems to me our lives are much like clouds in this way. Our stories themselves drift, to other times and other places, to remembered sensations and unanswered questions.
We all have the extreme force of nature as our own make up. We all yield to it now and then. This yielding is what shapes our lives. I mean, that’s the point of cloud gazing, right? Sure, we all know somewhere back in our minds that clouds are incomprehensibly heavy masses of water and ice droplets and that we’d die if we were dropped into them, probably. We’ve mainly never given them a moment’s notice and yet innately know when a storm’s brewing. At some point, we all yield to the bigness of it all.
On the good days we can relax into the shapes we think we see, or into the texture against the brightness, or let our thoughts drift through our minds. That’s the point of this piece. Getting whichever thing you need a little of tonight, while you’re here. Thank you to all who have contributed to the making of this project so far: Annmarie Sculpture Gardens; Gaby Agis; Isabella Bruno; Cecilia Fontanesi; Dallas Graham; DC-Commission of Arts and Humanities; Valerie Green; Jenny Hatleberg; Steven Hatleberg; Fred Hatt; Kirsi Heimonen; Marianna Kosharovsky; Eliza Langley; Russell Langley; Mary Madsen; Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann; Rebeca Medina; Erik Moe; Sarah Moore; Next Reflex Dance Collective; Alexa Schmid; Elaine Stampalia; Ana Stegnar; Vasiliki Xrysan Tsagkari.
Someday maybe, this show would be performed in new iterations in all the places it holds: Brussels; Mantova; Mombasa; St Cloud; Vals; Washington DC; etc. In each new city, the dance would be passed on to a local performer who would recreate their own expression of the score. The stories could be retold and reformed to tether to that place in its own language. The continual morphing of the production reflects the transient nature of its original authors, the clouds themselves.