32 | BOROMAG.COM | OCTOBER 2014 BODY & SOUL D e b u t At the The Knockdo wn Center Fus ing Mus ic, Dance, Theatre, and Art ^ ^ Interview By Hayley Bridgewater This month, experimental music harmonizes with contemporary dance, theater, and art a choreographer Emily Terndrup and filmmaker Derrick Belcham unveil a collaboration that is set to blow your mind. BORO met up with the two creative forces behind the Knockdown Center project known as Debut to get the inside story. Hayley Bridgewater: Share with our readers the evolution of the Belcham/Terndrup collaboration. Emily Terndrup: We began collaborating with a series of music videos after meeting at a social engagement and finding similarities in our tastes and approach. Both videos were experimental shoots, but we connected aesthetically during the process and began discussing the idea of developed projects. This past spring, Derrick was approached by the Knockdown Center to create a series of music events for the space. He reached out to me and together we forged the idea for a new kind of show—a merging of independent music and dance that incorporates film and art installations. We saw a unique opportunity to create an event that challenges the format of a usual concert experience, to expose several different types of audiences to new genres. HB: This sounds like a piece in a much bigger picture for your artistic partnership. Do you have future plans in the works? ET: As far as future collaborations go, we have an ongoing plan to focus on films throughout the winter and then revisit the idea of live production in the seasons to follow. We have meaningfully designed the pieces to be staged in different buildings with different artists, and have an interest in taking the performances to countries around the world. The creation of interactive media surrounding the pieces is of interest as well, and we will be prototyping solutions during the upcoming residency at the Knockdown Center. We have found the partnership extremely rewarding thus far, and will continue to collaborate on work as long as that remains the case. HB: Tell us about the creation of Debut. ET: Our new work, Debut, has arisen immediately out of our previous project, The Wilder Papers. Honestly, in the bar after the show, we already had the seed of the idea that has become Debut. After spending time working out the minutia of The Wilder Papers’ narrative— that of the disillusioned marriage artists—one a composer, the other a dancer—and telling the tale in parts through our ensemble of dancers, we felt that we wanted each artist in our next piece to have their own story to tell. We drew on our own experiences from high school and discussed perspectives surrounding those emotion-rich years—especially that personal connection you feel to music in your late teens—the sense of being swept away by a voice, a suspicion that you understand the song more deeply than anyone else, a belief that it holds some secret message for you. We wanted to explore the validity of each perspective in full through the eyes of our next protagonists. We explored films, music and literature concerning coming-of-age, metamorphosis, epiphany, and the arrow of time. We discussed the make up of our memories, some which were vivid, some murky. We farmed the saturated ideals of our teenage selves and what we remembered of the group dynamics that occurred within our inner circles of friends. Finally, we ruminated on the idea of ‘turning points’ in the minds of our young selves—moments that, as they happened seemed minor, but in hindsight, turned out to be pivotal.
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