Just got word of the launch of Chicago choreographer Brock Clawson’s new website (brockclawson.com, designed by Akio Satoh) and it’s really worth checking out. It’s a really entertaining trip through the world of a new, but already well-respected independent choreographer. This is a remarkable profession; the work of a choreographer begins with a commission from a dance company, which leads to a process that combines the extremes of completely free-form creativity with an astonishing amount of disciplined hard work.
The really free-form part comes at the start of the process. When I’ve worked with Brock, it always begins with a call from a company that wants him to set a work for them (that’s dance language for “choreograph a new work”). Most recently these have been from ThodosDanceChicago (www.thodosdancechicago.org), for “Nine”, from the Houston Metropolitan Dance Company (http://www.houstonmetdance.com) for “The Yawning”, and from Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago (http://www.giordanodance.org/company) for “Give and Take”, all of which were uncompromised successes.
Hedy Weiss, the Dance Critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote such a thorough review of Brock Clawson's new work "Give and Take" that I thought I should include all of her description of Brock's work here. You can see the rest of the review of the Giordano show at http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/1478291,CST-FTR-Dance16web.a.... Here's the part about Give and Take:
A really breathtaking Giordano show at the Harris last night, with a great company at their very best. Brock Clawson's new work Give and Take opened the second act, and seeing the company work seamlessly through Brock's perfect balance of modern and jazz styles was pretty amazing. Coming from such a different world (music and record producing) it's been a long process for me to get a sense of the difference between these two styles, but I can't think of a better way to see the different expressions that those two words "jazz" and "modern" imply than to see Give and Take.
Before I got involved with 'ohana, whenever anybody asked me if I was a musician I would tell them "yeah, but I'm way too good of a producer to ever hire me as a musician", and I still think of myself as a producer more than as an artist. "Producing" can mean all different kinds of things, and it should mean all different kinds of things, depending on the artist and the project you're producing. But it always has to mean at least two things: first, that you're trying to see clearly what this artist is trying to do right now (even while they're still discovering it themselves), and second, that you're responsible for getting it done ---- for making sure that they can finish it the way they hoped to when they started it.
