Milka Djordjevich and Chris Peck

STAND AND DELIVER Djordjevich and Peck take on music and dance.

Photograph: Franziska Aigner

For their new shared program, Milka Djordjevich and Chris Peck pose some fairly impossible questions: Can music and dance become indistinguishable? Or can dance be so musical that it is not perceived as a dance? In “An Evening with Djordjevich and Peck,” which opens the Chocolate Factory’s fall season, Djordjevich, a choreographer, and Peck, a composer, use a series of short works to examine the relationship between the two art forms—from many odd angles.

“Right away I want to say that I don’t think it’s an original idea,” Peck says. “I think we’re tackling a big, unsolvable topic that many people have tried to tackle before. We started off with the circular question of making music and dance indistinguishable, irrelevant, and we wanted to resist making some kind of totalizing statement.”

Likewise, they hope that their method of presenting an evening of short pieces is a more open and productive approach. Using text-based scores—words are mutual ground for a choreographer and composer—Peck will move, and Djordjevich, who is actually a classically trained violist, will play instruments. Above all, the evening is a framing of an issue, rather than a conclusion. The pieces, they hope, will form a collection of cohesive ideas. “It gives us a different kind of freedom of not trying to knit them together in a big piece that has a bunch of transitions,” Peck says, before laughing. “Maybe the real answer is that we’re just lazy and that we don’t want to try to come up with transitions.”

Djordjevich met Peck, an esteemed composer who has created scores for numerous contemporary choreographers, when the pair served as curators of the 2008 Movement Research Spring Festival (along with Jeff Larson and Anna Sperber). “I studied music and abandoned it because I felt it was too rigid and that I didn’t have the space to be expressive in it,” Djordjevich says. “I felt I was going to be trained to be a robot or something. So meeting Chris was great because I felt like he encouraged me to think more about music, and we were also able to talk about this music-dance relationship that has so much baggage to it; I could understand certain things musically, and also he was so familiar with dance.”

In addition, the relationship grew out of the notion that both are intrigued by, as Peck puts it, “the gray areas between artist curation and creation.” For the program, they crafted a series of improvisational scores. Much relates to simple, repetitive movements, in which the scores give attention to different aspects of the body. In “Chris’s Score,” which Djordjevich created, the instruction starts off with the choice of one body part (for instance, the hips, hands, ribs or head), articulating that area in a “repetitive looping or binary action” and amplifying it. Gradually, more body parts are introduced. Another focuses on the electric guitar; here the emphasis is less on performing traditional sound and more the movement of the hands.

“In one piece, I just play and sing a song on the guitar, and Milka choreographs to it—it’s not even a song that I wrote,” Peck says. “If anything is difficult for me in the relationship of music and dance, I’d say it’s the use of pop music in general. I have a lot of issues with how pop music gets used in different performance contexts. That’s not to say that I never like it, but 90 percent of the time, it kind of drives me nuts. So I’m playing a pop song that hopefully can be read as some kind of comment on the use of pop songs.”

For Djordjevich, pop music’s relationship with contemporary dance is more complicated. “At first when we talked about it I thought we were joking with each other a little bit,” she says. “I think there’s also something to say about reality and the fact that we do listen to pop music and that it’s part of our life and we like it and we do dance to it; we have rehearsals and we mess around and it’s fun. Of course, there’s humor to what we’re doing, but my hope is that it becomes a sincere act.”

While Peck sings in that number, there will be plenty of other opportunities to watch him dance; Djordjevich, for one, is entranced by Peck’s skill as a mover. “I sometimes think he can do things more brilliantly than a trained dancer because he has a level of detail and awareness from his sound experience that really affects how he approaches movement,” she explains. “In general, I’ve been working with dancers and trying to get them to move in a way that’s not like a dancer, that’s breaking the trained ironing-out of action that we do as trained people. When you work with someone who’s not trained like Chris, it’s natural. It’s directing in a different way. And he’s a performer. He’s really charismatic and he likes to dance.” She laughs. “He likes to dance on the dance floor.”

“An Evening with Djordjevich and Peck” is at the Chocolate Factory Wed 9–Sept 12.

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