As Homage to Mahler was choreographed in the year most of us were born, a time gap separated us from Holm's way of using monumental images and ideas in her choreography.  That point of view is foreign to us today but we wanted to understand it and to be able to maintain the integrity of the work.  We heard from Claudia that Holm treated the tragic themes of death and grief abstractly.  We didn't want to take liberties in conveying her subject matter even though our style of movement today is more direct and concrete.

Original casting of the group sections was for three men and four women.  In our reconstruction we used seven women and Claudia insisted that those of us who had the men's parts not imitate men but that we dance as women.  The choreography used some supports and small lifts and while mechanics and strength for these moments never posed a problem, maintaining femininity did.  The women dancing the parts originally danced by men needed to convert that movement language to their bodies while maintaining femininity.

 As Rachel taught us the blocking and phrasing we realized that Holm had used the music melodically more often than metrically and we had difficulty grasping the music-movement relationship.  Some unison phrases had to be counted and it was necessary for us to anticipate musical cues so that we would be counting together.  We had to ride over the meter to a certain point and then jump into the meter.

The music posed another problem when we took the dance to the stage.  Performance practice today dictates that Kindertotenlieder be sung slower than it was sung by Kathleen Ferrier on the recording Holm used. The musicians compromised with us, but their tempos were slower than what we had rehearsed.

Holm based many of her choices on images in the text, which is in German.  Fortunately, one of the dancers, Elisabeth Grasberger, is from Austria and when she translated the poems word-for-word we were able to understand and internalize the images and relate them to the music and movement.

When we reached the end of the reconstruction process we found that we did have the means to wed our bodies and minds to Holm's movement.  We viewed it as an achievement to have brought this lost dance back to life.  All the challenges we had overcome made the performance a cherished event.