Thea Sachade - 20+ Blog

In my fourth and final year as a Dance Performance Major at Rutgers University,  NJ, I was encouraged by the overwhelmingly uncomfortable obstacles in my personal  life to develop self-compassion in the pursuit of healing myself in all ways possible.  Thus, my original self-choreographed solo titled “20” was born through the process of  this physical, mental and emotional personal healing.  

Due to the fact that my program was extremely intense at the time, rather than  continuing to push myself beyond my energetic limits in dance, I decided to experiment  with calmness and subtlety and the ways in which I could command an audience’s  attention with those qualities — perhaps even better than a highly energetic,  monotonously fast pace piece would.  

I’ve always naturally been inclined to choreograph without a mirror and create  solely from what felt good within, so what was unique about this process for myself,  personally, was that although I still wanted to create from within, I was also faced with  the challenge of ensuring that the audience remained willingly engaged throughout what  I planned to be a mainly slow tempo performance. Yes, there would most certainly be  key moments of significantly increased speed, however, the essence of my piece would  be embracing self-compassion through healing, and if I wanted that to translate clearly, I  knew I’d have to show the audience a fairly obvious physicalization of self-care through  dance. In addition, the only performance location available to me was one of Rutgers’  stages with the audience classically set up directly before me. Therefore, I worked in  front of a mirror and videotaped my rehearsal runs from the front of the room much  more frequently than I normally would. 

Another unique aspect of this process for myself, personally, was that I chose to  work with a musician in order to create an original piece of music for this specific solo.  This musician would sit in on many of my rehearsals and observe my process to help  him better understand the aesthetic I was aiming for, and further inspire him to create  something that matched well. That being said, later, once I moved from the United  Sates back to my home in Canada, I no longer had the privilege of working with said  musician and had to pair this piece with a different score for further performances.  

With this move and many other life changes came my thirst for artistic changes,  evolving “20” into “20+”. Once I graduated university, I no longer had access to the  beautiful Rutgers stages. In fact, as a young and upcoming individual artist, I realized  finding access to any sort of classical stage might be difficult — and this was quickly  proven to be so when I came across my first and most recent performance opportunity  after moving home. Although “20” was originally choreographed to take up a limited  amount of space, I was still forced to change the few parts of it that did travel for this  performance, as it took place in a small, local shop. With that in mind, I practiced in the  confines of my bedroom and allowed the changes caused by accommodation to guide  me, and as I began altering some of the solo’s aesthetic without compensating its  essence, I then matched a new, but similar score and costume. 

These temporarily solidified changes of this work-in-progress have created the  full effect of what I call “20+” — for now.

Prospects: an evening of dance and discussion presents

20+

Choreographed by Thea Sachade
Thursday, March 25th 2021
8PM
Hosted on ZOOM
$20 General Admission | $40 Pay it Forward | PWYC
Get tickets here!