If your surroundings have ever impelled you to move, you can relate to Ann Robideaux’s inaugural experience aboard the Lightship Frying Pan. Dozens of choreographic images popped into her mind the instant she walked into the once-sunken vessel privately owned yet open to the public. At the time, Robideaux says she was at the ship’s NYC dock to scout a nearby conventional theater and to seek inspiration because she felt choreographically lost. With the creative awakening she needed, Robideaux called friend and kindred spirit Alexandra Shilling, who says: “We have a similar aesthetic and are interested in taking dance outside the theater, getting people out of their seats and riled up about what they are looking at.”

After spending the next two months “creeping around the pier and in the boat and learning all of the crevices,” says Shilling, they tapped their connections and held what they call semi-private auditions on the ship (they are emphatic that they never worked on the piece outside of the boat). Jamie Sporn, who attended Skidmore College with Shilling, was one of the dancers contacted. Sporn says the most striking part of the audition was being asked to work collaboratively with other hopefuls. “I got the sense that the choreographers were also watching how the dancers worked together, given the challenges presented [by the space],” Sporn explains. While the choreographers sought dancers who could meet the physical demands, those cast also demonstrated an insatiable curiosity about the space. “There were some auditions when I would turn around and someone who wasn’t being asked to do anything [at the moment] was hanging upside down from a bar. Automatic enthusiasm, and seeing spaces like choreographers themselves, [was important],” says Robideaux.

The next step was establishing a clear narrative—crucial for both the ensemble and the audience to make sense of their journeys through the ship. In performance, Robideaux and Shilling guided the audience through the chambers with flashlights. Yet, the choreographers didn’t make their story explicit—not even to the cast. “We like to sprinkle [the dancers] with bits of information, but we wanted to also get their input,” Shilling explains. Certain facts about the boat informed everyone’s interpretation. The vessel was built in 1929, and during World War II it served as a lightship (a floating lighthouse that warned other ships of rocks and lit the entrances to harbors). There were no women in the crew. It’s also one of the only remaining boats of the era that hasn’t been altered in appearance, even though it spent three years underwater. “It’s not a romantic story; it was neglected,” explains Robideaux. “I have a story that’s more romantic. "

While exploring her personal narrative, Sporn says she connected with people who lived and died during World War II. “I imagined what it must have felt like to be captured, imprisoned, isolated, persecuted during that time,” she says. But even with the complex character development, she found it challenging to follow the arc of her character’s voyage—until the choreographers revealed a critical piece of the story. “After we had developed all the rooms, the characters and the connectivity, [we told the dancers] the ship is gradually sinking,” says Shilling.

The device worked. For some audience members, the show conjured images of the dancers as memories of women the crew left behind, and for others, as survivors of a cataclysmic event. The choreographer’s favorite deciphering came from a Spanish audience member who thought the piece was about female ghosts who were upset that there were no male ghosts. The piece itself is eerie yet nostalgic, with costumes and props that evoke an era past, including an antique typewriter (the keys of which one dancer pounds) and a glass case full of preserved lizards, as well as original soundscores and a live viola performance.

With so many factors, and potential distractions, wrangling the audience proved one of the most challenging aspects of the show. Even though there were chalk lines in each room delineating where the audience was to gather, some people inserted themselves into the dancers’ space. But the choreographers didn’t dwell on whether the audience knew exactly what to do. They say it was OK with them if, at times, the audience chose to look at the boat instead of the dancers. The space is, after all, a leading player in site-specific dance.

In their piece, entitled The Sun is Over the Yardarm, the goal was not to upstage the boat but for the dancers to illuminate their surroundings. While the Frying Pan has long been a popular theater and live music venue, as far as Robideaux and Shilling know, they are the first dancers to perform there. Creating work inside a place where anybody could walk through at any time presented significant challenges, including spotty rehearsal security. If the boat was rented out for a private party, the dancers had to leave. When a Bulgarian pop band played outside the ship at top volume, the dancers had to persevere. When they were told lemon juice had leaked into the boat from a bar on the pier, the dancers avoided the slippery spots. When most Saturday morning rehearsals included picking up plastic cups and bottles left over from a party the night before, the dancers cleaned up. And when they encountered a man sleeping in one of the rooms, they moved around him.

A Journey

The Sun is Over the Yardarm had two incarnations, performed about eight months apart from each other, and the second seven-person cast included only four of the performers from the first. The cast changed, not because of problems with the first, but because of scheduling conflicts. The choreographers spent each rehearsal working in a designated room of the boat, and determined each room’s occupants by who was available to rehearse which days. The dancers were asked to improvise, were taught phrase material or given a specific task to accomplish, on top of which the choreographers layered more tasks and edited on the spot.

“It was always fairly easy to improvise on the boat when given a structure,” says Sporn. “The space is so interesting—every direction you look there are movement possibilities, architecturally and emotionally. Alexx and Ann give you a structure, then visit you during your creation process [and] pick out motifs or moments that are successful. I found myself and my character gravitating toward sustained, direct movement, almost as if I was moving underwater or in a dream.”

To establish connections, each character executed some of the same motifs in every room she danced in. The entire cast didn’t convene until the finale, which happened in the belly of the boat—the largest downstairs room, which flaunts a catwalk, exposed pipes, platforms and a staircase. Robideaux and Shilling knew early on they wanted to end the piece in this room, but the challenge was transitioning from the upstairs to downstairs. “Sometimes we’d only work the upstairs and then work the downstairs, and sometimes we’d have to journey through both in order to inform the downstairs,” explains Shilling.

Both choreographers say it’s important to be open to altering your work at every stage of creating a new dance. One dramatic change for this piece happened early on. Robideaux and Shilling were working independently of each other when Shilling looked into the room Robideaux was in and saw the work from a different perspective. “I said, ‘That’s way more interesting. Let’s flip it: Let’s take the pathway this way.’ All of a sudden our eyes were opened to other possibilities,” says Shilling.

The audience was the main factor for changing things in the second round. For instance, “the audience never wanted to leave [a particular room], and we were coming up with the lamest transitions, like someone outside making an extra noise that had nothing to do with the piece for people to leave,” says Robideaux. Their solution was simply to place the audience in a different part of the room, enabling them to see the dancers exit, and feel compelled to follow.

Perhaps the greatest change between the two versions of the show was the last few moments. “The first time around we didn’t have enough time to complete [the ending],” explains Shilling. “We had spent so much time working out the details of the upstairs.” Scheduling was also a challenge because all the dancers are in the finale, so they all had to be at rehearsal at the same time. With more time to devote to the finale the second time around, the choreographers chose not to relegate their performers to one platform in front of the audience. Instead dancers moved frenetically around the onlookers, enveloping them wholly, and at once solidifying the audience’s participation in the story.