Cassie Wang, Resilience Dance Company Guest Choreographer: St. Louis Dancescapes

So this piece, The Head Is Not the Star of the Body, is the title of it, and could you talk a bit about when it first started and kind of where the research impetus was?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I had the idea for this piece starting in, I would say, like, April or May of 2023.

There's a big residency, dance residency program at the Boston Center for the Arts, which is where I've been incubating this work for, since 2023, and they've been such a big supporter of this development.

Um, every year there's a call that goes out for their two dance residencies, and so I wanted to challenge myself to apply.

I had never made an evening length before, so that was a big goal of mine.

And this residency specifically funds work for an ensemble, so that was also another goal, is to work with, um, you know, not just on a solo or a duet, but to have the resources for-

Totally

... a larger group piece.

Um, I was, I got really into Big Thief at the time, who is the band that is the soundtrack for this whole piece, and they honestly inspired so much of this work that I'm doing.

Their music is ...

Yeah, I'm the kind of person who I think, like, when I listen to music, I hear the sounds a lot more than I hear the lyrics.

And-

Mm-hmm

... their music, you know, the sounds are lush and beautiful, but the lyricism I think is, like, really what makes the music so spectacular to me.

Mm-hmm.

I got sucked into, like, a huge rabbit hole one evening about one of their songs, Mythological Beauty- Did a whole, like, Reddit deep dive.

[laughs]

Just reading about the lyrics and the interpretations of it, and I think that's just, like, an art form that I've never appreciated fully.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but I just felt so inspired by the stories that they were telling in that song.

And the music is so moving for me.

It brought up a lot of feelings of, like, nostalgia, um, craving, like, a return to the Midwest.