Reinventing the dance

After getting the e-mail from Maya, I quickly wrote a new e-mail to Salman and the Sagar production team, telling them that perhaps I pulled the plug too soon and this project may still have a fighting chance. I then immediately began the search for a new choreographer.

Auspiciously enough, I simultaneously received a phone call from an old friend who used to be a dancer at the Kathak school. I told her my predicament, and she suggested I contact a friend of hers -- a dancer/choreographer who also happened to have studied some Kathak. We met and discussed the project, and she told me that although she found the project very interesting, she didn't feel that stylistically she was the right person for the job. After watching a few film clips of her work, I agreed that our aesthetics -- though similar -- did not quite match up. I’d had such high hopes for the project after hearing Maya's idea, but I was now coming to realize that finding the right choreographer might be harder than I’d originally expected.

But there was one other hopeful candidate -- Samantha Blanchard. Sam Blanchard and I had worked together twice, on the two productions of The Faith Project -- a collaborative play about religion and faith. We had done the first production in the summer of 2004. We then put the project to rest for a year, after which time we spent nine months completely reworking it and adding new cast members. We performed it again in spring 2006, and during that performance I actually delivered a spoken word poem recounting my experience at the Fort Bragg sand dunes. Having already worked closely with Sam, I had a pretty good idea of her movement style, and thought it might be just the right fit. Also, because Sam had heard my dunes poem so many times, she knew the story well.

I got a call back from Sam, telling me she was interested. I told her what I was looking for, and she said she'd see what she could come up with. Would this be the dance? Would she be the one? Only time would tell.