GOOD HANDS Cedar Lake dancers get intimate.

Nearly a year ago, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer reserved a studio at his company’s Chelsea space for Jill Johnson, a former member of Ballett Frankfurt who’s staged William Forsythe dances worldwide. The goal was to hold a weekly workshop and acquaint dancers with the Forsythe style, a task-oriented way used to generate and modify movement.

“It’s a very particular technique and a different philosophy of moving,” Pouffer says. “It’s a different world and I truly feel Jill really knows it. I wanted her to break it down, to make the dancers understand how to approach work differently. It’s not a three-hour workshop after which you will say, ‘Oh, I got it.’ This takes time.”

Once everybody got comfortable working together, Pouffer commissioned a new piece by Johnson. In her dance installation The Copier, she takes her inspiration from the flare and sound of a copy machine. “The mechanical, rhythmic timbre of something we use each day—how it could be applied to the musical and dance score for a piece was inspirational, a point of departure for the overarching idea of physical copying,” Johnson explains. “One of the pieces in the original score is a quasi-waltz using the sound of a computer printer as its metronome. This waltz of sorts triggered choreographic ideas.”

Set to an original score by David Poe that uses mechanical and natural city sounds (street traffic, the subway, phones ringing, birds, voices on the street), The Copier explores the notion of how, in a sense, we are all copiers. “We copy each other in public spaces by lining up, or sitting and standing in subways or airports,” Johnson says. “We forward e-mails and follow trends; we copy our own daily rituals. I’m interested in exploring the notion of creating iterations of one thing that someone does, then moving on to ‘copy’ something or someone else, and layering those iterations in set phrases and improvisational passages. I’m intrigued by what triggers copying and the physical alignments in the body and the space around it in order to do so.”

In terms of pure movement, Johnson’s approach can be as simple as one dancer stopping in the middle of a unison group. “What happens when we take a different path to work, or when a dancer shifts her gaze in a quartet of dancers who are all looking in the same direction?” she asks. “In my view, when we see something that breaks from the norm, it is an anomaly, and it gives us hope that we don’t have to be the same as the person in front of us. It’s not rebellion—although it could be. It is that there is room to do something else.”

Johnson is fascinated by how different states of mind can radically alter a movement phrase. She doesn’t abide by a formula; her approach is to begin with a set of ideas and parameters, music and improvisational modalities. She creates movement in collaboration with dancers, but it isn’t just noodling around. She proposes situations: “What happens when a dancer imagines that they are approaching the phrase as if they were in a long vertical space? They might be physically impeded in a certain way by this idea, and at the same time it enhances a specific quality in their body, which wouldn’t have been drawn out had they been simply moving in an open space,” Johnson continues. “Those kinds of explorations, and how the state of the body can be governed by imaginative parameters and render entirely different results, are full of limitless possibilities for choreographing and for dancing.”

Pouffer, especially, is anxious to see what transpires. “I’m very excited that she accepted this commission,” Pouffer says. “She’s been following Cedar Lake. We’ve been morphing and changing and it’s been a lot of work, but my objective is to try to show awareness of choreographers who have something to say. And to me, she definitely has something to say.”

The Copier is at Cedar Lake through Sat 23.