30 Days Of NYMF: Day 10 ENCORE

Encore
By Daniel Gwirtzman, choreographer

One week to opening. Can't believe it. I'm hoping this transitional summer to fall week will feel long, that each day and hour will not race away. And why would that slowdown happen now? No time to think. Costumes to purchase!

Gold lame. Gold sequins. Red sequins too? Sure. We are re-costuming both "Summertime," all in red, white and blue, and "Indiana," the closing number. Costumer Jennifer Lee and I hit the garment district hard last week, particularly Spandex House, where we left with yards of paillettes, pinstripes, polka-dots, and quickened pulses. Oh, yes, and a large bill!

Auditions have been going on since the first week in July. New cast members mixing with the old. Maki from Japan. Chloe from London. Luke from Ireland. The joke now among the cast is that I'll audition someone during the show! And who knows? I might! Still to invite another man or two to the cast, which keeps growing. New cast knows most of the core choreography, but not yet how it all becomes a show.

ENCORE started back in 2005 with the creation of a solo set to Louis Armstrong's Basin Street Blues. From there, the program-length dance, which presents a troupe of dancers rehearsing Broadway-style numbers and depicting the life of a dancer when in the studio, grew.

From the beginning, great classic jazz music was the inspiration for the show. However there was also an interest to demystify the romantic view of production. Few audiences realize how dancers rehearse. The other inspiration was to just make dance that is what it is, with no hidden meanings, something that is pure fun, a respite from Darfur and Iraq at the time, an escape yes, to make people feel good, and to celebrate the joy of dance.

I began to storyboard "moments of performance interrupted by moments of real life," as I had jotted down on a legal-sized yellow pad, such as one sees in ENCORE. The onstage/offstage dynamic has always been of interest, and is of course a musical theater conceit, from A Chorus Line to All That Jazz, from Funny Girl to Gypsy.

Most exciting, PBS aired a segment on the Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company this past weekend in their Sunday Arts News event on WNET-Channel 13 which called the upcoming NYMF production of ENCORE a "major" event and featured footage of our ENCORE Trailer, which can be seen at www.GwirtzmanDance.org

What? Stacy can't come this Friday to rehearsal, and Tony's leaving early? Jessica's already out of town, and Corey's nursing a sore ankle. The headaches as a producer are way more than as a choreographer. But it'll come together...it always does! Been thinking of a tag line for the show when it goes to Broadway...See ENCORE... this show's got legs! All right, enough of that, back to work...