“They can do anything, let’s face it,” she gushed. “It’s important in my work for the dancers to also become authors, choreographers in the piece. Their ideas, their ways of manifesting a concept into physical movement is patchworked into the composition as a whole. 

“I enjoy workshopping with them,” she continued, “to develop a vocabulary of movements that I suture together. It’s more like a corporeal collage, as opposed to creating movement out of thin air. They’re really wonderful at that. They also have the ability to become pedestrian, which is very important in my work, because I want there to be a spectrum—from the everyday person walking down the street to the most explosive, spectacular unhuman performance. The technical moves they’re also able to do are wonderful and encompass both ends of that spectrum.”

In addition, Hollender’s process involved a great deal of sketching and notations, with her observing patterns and systems in the quotidian. She then created and brought these visuals to the studio, where she showed her notebook to the dancers, asking them, for example, “to look at this intricate traffic circle, or this flock of bird patter that I recorded, or this type of storm. Whatever it is, we start to interpret it with our bodies.” 

 And with “Koyaanisqatsi” meaning “life out of balance,” Hollender understands that notion on both an intuitive and physical level. “I'm a mother; I have two kids, but one's a baby, so my life has felt extremely out of balance,” she explained with a chuckle. “Really understanding that in a different way, where that's actually not a negative thing, it's something that you have to become more and more comfortable with and agile with. 

“For me, the question of when there is entropy and how do you move through that with a type of grace that is going to be inevitably out of balance—reflecting back on the film and the music—that really struck a resonant tone.”

With L.A. being so fragmented, one wonders if that was a challenge or a blessing for the choreographers. Chamblis acknowledged that it’s one of the reasons he feels attached to his adopted city. “For me, personally, it’s why I’ve been here nine years, and now that I am here, it’s also the mysteriousness of L.A. I still don’t understand what it is about and, I’m fascinated by that. 

“When I’m asked,” he continued, “I think I can’t really describe L.A., and that’s what I like. You cannot put a statement on it. I would [make] a parallel with contemporary dance, because when I discovered contemporary dance, I asked my parents, who know a lot about dance, “What is contemporary dance?” and they said, “It’s complex to give one single definition, you cannot just put a sentence telling what it is.

“It’s what you want it to be,” Chamblis opined. “I don’t understand it, and I love being a little lost. It opens so much creativity and inspiration. I love that. It’s the best gift that a city can offer.”

The performance can also offer audiences a chance to “really feel the bodies, feel the movements, and receive beautiful emotions of that huge togetherness within the context of their own city,” Chamblas enthused. “Maybe it’s a way for them to experience their city differently, because of the presence of a group or person moving with them [or] in front of them. It’s like a couple dancing together. If you see that and if you think about it, or you see that in the middle of downtown or with cars and stuff, the context is giving a different meaning to this move.”