Output details

Rushes: Fragments of a Lost Story (Dancework)

Commissioned by the Royal Ballet and premiered at the Royal Opera House, as part of a triple-bill including Balanchine's Serenade and Ashton's Homage to the Queen. Revived at the ROH in 2010 as part of a triple-bill with As One by Jonathan Watkins and Infra by Wayne McGregor. In creative-research terms, the work is based on a series of fragments of a film score by Sergei Prokofiev, arranged and elaborated in collaboration with composer Michael Berkeley, for a never-produced film by Mikhail Romm. I wanted to explore how narrative detail emerges through a process of 'imagining the gaps' in fragmentary compositions. The research premise drew on Maurice Blanchot's writing, which describes the 'fragment' as ’an unfinished separation between parts‘, which is ’in a state of preparedness: to let itself be worked on, reasonably, inexhaustibly, instead of falling silent, abandoned, as if it were the secret emptiness of a mystery that no elaboration could ever complete.' (M.Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, freely translated by S.F. Melrose, URL: http://kim.59productions.co.uk/page/rushes_programme_note_kim_brandstrup_choreographer.) Rushes constituted the world premiere of Prokofiev's score. I worked from his 30 sec-2 min fragments, combined with related fragments from Dostoyevsky's notebook for The Idiot. I devised the piece with two Royal Ballet casts, rehearsed separately. The production explored the potential for the audience engaging in a similar process of ’imagining the detail‘ from the choreography based on a series of fragments. Collaboration with two principal casts from the Royal Ballet's Corps de Ballet constituted an investigation into the respective individual detail of movement qualities as well as the qualitative impact of individual dancers' status, leading to two productions that were identical in compositional terms yet were qualitatively different in terms of choreographic detail in the separate collaborative processes. The two versions differed on the qualitative level of movement, which had an impact on the emergent narratives of the pieces.