When it comes to making shows, my sister and I are on the same page in lots of ways (Yes, physical effort and slapstick humor! No, pulling audience members onstage! Sometimes words! Aspirationally props!)
Of course, when you’re in rehearsal with someone for eight hours a day though, and sharing a single tupperware of leftovers at lunch made from the dinner you shared the night before in the tiny apartment that you’ve been sharing for a week already that doesn’t have any air conditioning but a single fan that you use when the August heat gets unbearable, and someone forgot the second fork—then, as you’re passing that tupperware back and forth in the moments before you peel yourselves back into rehearsal, the similarities aren’t the things you notice.
When Aviva and I started working on Game Time back in 2022, we had no idea what the project might become. All we knew was that we wanted to make a show together, and that we wanted it to include the Chinese pole. Aviva’s based mostly in Brussels and I’m in the SF Bay Area, so our creation process has necessarily taken place in weeks-long periods of intensive full-day rehearsals.
We’ve always been close, but this process has demanded an entirely new kind of intimacy between us—one that blends the personal, professional, and creative. At times, this looks like unarmoring ourselves even beyond the levels we’d reached before—a kind of rigorous (desperate?) humility and self-reflection. At other times, it’s asked that we build new walls—ones we’ve never needed before—in order to find ways of unlearning what we think we know about each other, and make way for discovering each other as creative colleagues, professional collaborators.
In this brackish zone of relationship, I’ve discovered that my sister is both the same and different from the person I knew before. So am I. Most tangibly, I’ve learned a lot about how we each work as artists.
For example, Aviva likes to start with physical pathways. She wants to plan, explore, practice, and perfect precise ways of getting from point A to point B with the body. The best pathways are ones that feel novel and satisfying to her body. They generally involve some degree of upside-down-ness, feet-off-the-ground-ness, or weight-transfer. She wants to train these pathways until they’re smooth. It should feel hard and look easy.
I want to move without a plan. As I move, I follow my intuition to find the physical states, gestures, and movements that feel right today—the ones that make me smile, or cry, or go “oh yeah”, and you want to do it again and again. Then I want to mine these little starting points like hooks in a larger fabric of sense that can be discovered thread by thread. The final product should look and feel like something you always knew but didn’t know you knew, emerging organically through physical action.
Aviva craves fidelity in interpersonal and emotional interactions on stage. “But why would you be that sad all of a sudden?” she’ll say when I collapse to the ground in a fit of faux despair. “I don’t think what I did could merit that big of a reaction.”
I’m obsessed with the big-picture narrative of a thing. “But then what prompts the magnitude of the celebration that comes next?” I’ll ask. “We need a turning point—if we don’t get all the way to the depths of despair, the turnaround doesn’t make any sense.”
Aviva wants to practice our counterbalances like acrobatic tricks.
I want to practice how we listen to one another physically so that we don’t need to perfect the counterbalances, just the skill of attuning to one another’s shared weight.
Aviva wants me to tighten up then. Stop being like a noodle.
I want her to relax, and stop gripping my hand so hard.
She wants me to actually give her my weight so that she can relax.
I want her to notice that I am giving her weight—but I’ll give her more if she wants.
She wants me to, whoa, not give her that much weight unless I want her to drop me.
I want her to stop gripping my hand so hard.
She wants me to notice that if I gripped her hand a little harder she wouldn’t have to grip my hand so hard.
I want her to notice that—oh, that is true.
She relaxes her grip. I drop infinitesimally back towards my heels. She rolls her head, gives a big sigh, and shakes some of her tension from her shoulders down through her ankles, sinking into the ground.
Balance descends like a bird on our off-kilter form. Like we’re suspended in time, like the world is supporting us from below and all around. I hold my sister’s hand and notice that she is holding me and I am holding her. And I remember that this is actually exactly where I want to be. I notice that she is looking at me and, judging from the shape of her smile, she feels about the same.
Come see Game Time! Oct 4 & 5 at ODC Theater (3153 17th Street, SF).
Doors at 7p, show at 7:30p. Tickets $18-50 (NOTA) @ https://odc.dance/gametime
See more at mollyrosewilliams.com/game-time
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