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Steps Ahead
by Eric Lopez, Colorguard
The January Camp proved that the members of the Renegades Color Guard are having a Happy New Year. With section leaders Veronica Nickel and Misty Reese, we are well on our way to what will no doubt be a very exciting season for ourselves and of course, our audience! With it still being relatively early in the season, it is pretty incredible to see how quickly this year’s guard has improved, and how we’ve all grown just a little closer to each other as a family after this camp.
One thing I have grown to love to about the Renegades Color Guard, is that we have people coming together from really unique and diverse backgrounds and experiences, like a tree with many roots. Each of us brings a distinctive gift to the collective whole, and it’s these broad ranges of experiences that make the Renegades not only a senior corps, but an open laboratory to learn, explore, and grow as an individual and a performer.
On the Sunday of this camp, we were blessed with the presence of Shirley Dorritie. This is the first time this season we have met with Shirley, and the guard was excited (okay, hyped beyond crazy!) to see her. For the returning members of the color guard, seeing Shirley was like seeing an old friend again. For the new members, I am sure they were inspired by her just as much as we were last season. Shirley played a very important and pivotal role last year when she came to consult, and we are honored to have her with us again.
This camp, Shirley introduced us to the next level of performance. Color Guard is known as the "sport of the arts," and Shirley introduced the element of theater through a series of exercises and across-the-floor work. Drawing on characters, feelings, and emotions based on Tarot cards, the guard had a chance to develop our portrayal of different characters and feelings through movement, gesture, and flag work.
Throughout the session, our exercises became less choreographed, and more theatrical and personally expressive. As the last exercise for the day, all of us were given artistic carte blanche to create an exercise culminating in 8-minutes of improvisation.
We have been lucky the past few camps to rehearse on Treasure Island, where the guard has our own space - an airplane hangar, with a million dollar view of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. The space is huge, and true to the warehouse vernacular, there are several lofts built inside the hangar. For the last exercise Sunday, our instructions were merely to improvise our character with movement, gesture, and equipment, and to use up all the space in the hangar. With artistic license in hand, it was amazing to see 32 bodies gloriously moving through this vast space and filling it with grace and beauty. Several guard members made their way to the top of the lofts, performing and tossing on a new plane of space while several guard members danced below.
I managed to catch glimpses of this study of spontaneous choreography and was just blown away - flags carving and slicing in every conceivable direction, bodies gyrating into a frenzy, extremely high tosses and impromptu exchanges - very reminiscent of the dance scene at Zion in "Matrix Reloaded," only with our clothes on and sea foam colored flags. At the end of the exercise, we discussed how it felt and realized; to break rules, you must know them. From when the session began in a tight unison block (where all our basics were clean as a whistle) to the end of the day where there were no rules, we felt liberated at getting to experience the full range of emotions as a performer. Many expressed feelings of being in the moment, and others came to a realization that although we perform for the audience, there is inherent joy in performing for ourselves. In the larger sense, we got comfortable performing for each other, and felt we all grew just a little closer, and just a few steps closer to our goal.
-Eric
eric@renegades.org |
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