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Dec 12
Love0

Finding my voice: Quite literally.

By Midway Avenue, Uncategorized

Several recent experiences are feeding and pointing to the birth of a new voice, or at least new uses for an old voice. For most of my career I’ve been primarily working as a dancer and a silent actor. It’s true I speak in the work of others – namely Headlong Dance Theater – and yes I’ve studied acting a little – but rarely do I speak in my own work and I guarantee I’ve never sung you a song from the stage. And I certainly don’t talk in public about my life experiences. But perhaps that’s changing?

The primal gutterance of water
Theater and Neuroscience project with Dan Rothenberg – November 2011

The voice of my Mother
Women in Comedy project with 1812 productions – August 2011

The events and movements of my past as mixed with Xavier LeRoy’s past
Workshop with choreographer Xavier LeRoy – September 2011

“Diary dates” as prompted by Wendy Houstoun
and the many many wendy exercises – June 2011

Singing through barriers – vocal work with Michael Kiley
Vocal class with my collaborator and husband

P.S. Ideally I will give each of the workshops described above their own post at some point soon

Nov 22
Love0

Drawn to the Window

By Uncategorized

I’ve been rehearsing at Mascher Space co-op in Kensington and I’ve developed a warm connection to the space, a familiarity that affects the rhythm of my time there. Today I walked in and the space was different because it was set up for a performance. Black curtains blocked the mirrors and a white scrim blocked the windows. It was a sunny November day and the shadows against the white scrim created little scenes of shimmering activity. I found them utterly irresistible and spent my session dancing in relationship to this newly designed space.

I spent a long time with this window:

And then I moved on to this one:

For me dance is an art of interaction
Between performers
Between performer and her environment
Between performer and audience

When we take away some of these possible interactions we heighten others. In the same way that when you lose one of your senses the others gain strength and sensitivity.
Alone in the room my relationship to the space itself is heightened. The relationship between my thoughts and my body. The relationship between various parts of my body. These relationships always exist but without audiences, collaborators and designers new connections are fore-grounded.

Nov 02
Love0

Midway Avenue and the Haunted House of Nostalgia

By Midway Avenue, Uncategorized

this title was stirring in my brain in the wee hours of the night. and it was halloween night i should note.

i grew up on midway avenue. and when i visit this space in my mind it is crammed full of memories. Most of them are mine but many are intruders: imagined scenes from books, movies and news stories have been staged there by my subconscious… they needed a space to unfold so i placed them in the rooms of midway avenue.

as i tour the space my own memories co-mingle with characters from novels, the gory remains from a script, or accumulated information about a friend’s past. it can become difficult to parce out what is mine and what is borrowed.

midway avenue is the memory map i’m using for a structural exercise i’m exploring in my solo practice. And each time I visit I find something new.

And the title I really like is this:
Midway Avenue and the Haunted House of Indecision.

Oct 03
Love0

By Uncategorized

I just finished leading a weeklong intensive with a group of dancers here in Philadelphia. It was my intention to blog throughout the process but it turns out that when you are in your home-town it’s a little more difficult to carve the time for blogging!

Here is a synopsis:
I wanted to bring the solo explorations I’d been doing, and the discoveries and questions I’d uncovered in UK, to a group of dancers. I wanted to combine past obsessions with current concerns to see what arose. I wanted to disrupt my typical process of acting as performer/choreographer in order to remain on the outside without the intention of joining the ensemble. I wanted to take recent experiments with language and words and inject them into my ongoing work with non-verbal storytelling, partnering exercises, and ensemble work.

The dancers were: Eun Jung Choi, Jaamil Kosoko, John Luna, Scott McPheeters, Annie Wilson, Christina Zani. A playful and inspiring bunch mover/thinkers!

We did some dancing

We did some writing

We built some improvisational structures

We started with movement structures that I’ve been building over the years and then infused them with current concerns and questions about language, structure and delivery.

We looked at structures that brought the movement language to the forefront and asked the verbal language to keep up with that. We worked on building separate structures for the words and the movement, laying them on top of one another. Asking them to maintain autonomy yet respond and influence one another selectively, creating short dances that pushed these separate tracks toward one another, bleeding, blurring and intertwining in various ways until a third thing emerged. The goal was to avoid one track wiping out the other.

One structure in particular started to become its own little dance.
One dancer describes her memory of a room while two dancers build an accumulating movement dance, the structure builds from there.
I am endlessly fascinated by this structure; the ways in which the unfolding of the memory parallels, overlaps and blurs with the building of the movement duet. Eventually the two tracks become one…but neither track is consumed by the other… they crossfade to reveal a third thing…a track that was there all along.

As we worked for an hour or so on refining the details of the structure and the skills to inhabit we also build our ability to read the intricacies of the dance. That tricky aspect of a process in which you don’t know how much delight you are gaining due to your own intimate understanding of the structure. I am hungry to share these little studies with an audience of fresh eyes to garner its impact.

– The story is a linear river that can meander amid the forest of movement.
– It is not a spring rain of poetic words / It is not an ocean that buries the terrain
– The sensitivity of the movement duet is the beating heart of the present tense and the story is the past we carry around with us and our struggle to organize and deliver.

Aug 23
Love0

On Being in the Studio Alone

By Directing my dancers / Directing myself, Midway Avenue, Uncategorized

At first I thought: it sure is quiet in here. And then I realized: Wow its noisy and its crowded. There are eyes in the walls. I’m being watched.
My own energy was bouncing around the room with no one else to interact with it and send it back to me. No audience. No collaborators. No designers. Just me. I could feel and hear my thoughts in a new way when I was the only person in the room to focus on.

During the first few sessions I also realized that the critic sneaks in more easily when I’m alone. She sits in the corner with arms folded, paces in the distance, whispers in my ear. This can be distracting and oppressive but it can also fuel a passionate drive to press onward and to move beyond the nagging doubt. Some days she doesn’t show up at all and there is a breezy ease to letting ideas tumble, letting thoughts and movements ripple out.

The most striking thing about working alone is that there is no verbal conversation at the end of an experiment or an improvisation. Instead I sit down with my pen or lay on my back to process and to remember what just happened.

All my adult life I’ve been working as a collaborator. I helmed many collaborative projects, participated as performer/choreographer on the team of countless creative processes, even the solos I’ve made have been collaborative: Fail Better was a collaboration with Director Jennifer Childs, Set Designer Matt Saunders, Sound Designer Rick Henderson, Lighting Designer Mark O’Maley… and as a team we built the work together from the ground up.

One goal with this mentorship was to temporarily step away from collaborative creation in order to hear my voice on its own, to let ideas evolve uninterrupted and to experience the echo of my thoughts.

Making a solo in this particular way is – for me – almost like building a new system. I’ve worked hard to learn how to helm collaborative projects with integrity and how to participate in dynamic group processes; how to be direct and clear with my ideas while also allowing the brilliance of my team to help shape the work. As a performer I strive to pay attention to the flow of a project, building material that suits the work and making choices that acknowledge the goals of the whole. I am inspired by the energy of a room of people all making something together.

In a collaborative team we question one another and strive for the things we are passionate about. Since we question one another we don’t need to question ourselves quite as much.

Alone in the studio I need to find ways of questioning myself. I find I start playing different roles to challenge myself; wearing a variety of hats, as if each of these selves is pushing for a slightly different vantage point. I need to push myself, encourage myself, challenge, inspire and interrogate myself.

And then I realize this is familiar. Although I am a collaborative artist in adulthood, I was an only child with working parents in childhood – “latch-key kid”. With plenty of time to myself I learned that instead of getting lonely I should get creative. Splitting myself into many became a game to cure boredom. I could be my own friend, my own foil, and things could change at any time.

Will this childhood game serve to help me as I, in effect, collaborate with myself? I have a sneaking suspicion that it may become part of the material the solo deals with…

Jul 10
Love0

By London


I’m heading back to Philadelphia this morning. Its been such a gift to experiment here in London with Wendy, Matteo, Greig and Rahel. The wealth of experiments and the conversations that sprung up in response to each experiment are invaluable.

At several points in the process Wendy and I tested the idea of putting a few items together or developing one or two things further but that seemed inappropriate somehow. Its so rare to have the opportunity to truly explore for the sake of discussion; for the sake of mining the form and testing the ways it functions; deciphering the things that excite and the reasons you gravitate towards one thing or another without the pressure to package it up. It seemed important to stay in that mode. It quickly became clear that this was an exciting opportunity for all of us involved. The chance to keep things open, to bounce from one exploration to the next, to pull things apart and to look at their messy insides, was illuminating.

I look forward to fleshing out some of the ideas that sprung up over the last two weeks. I look forward to bringing some of these starting points to a room of dancers. But most of all I look forward to re-entering my process with a renewed perspective. My thinking about dance making has shifted and widened and I’m excited about the ways that will influence my work.

Jul 08
Love0

Sokari Douglas

By London




I met Sokari at a party in Philadelphia just before I left for London. She is a sculptor based in London, with a studio not far from where I’ve been rehearsing. I stopped by her studio / home yesterday and stayed into the evening chatting with this amazing woman. She works with metal. Most of her sculptures are larger than she is. And many of them live in her home now. Its incredible to wander around the house being eyed by the powerful energy of these works she has created. She describes sculpting a work as a conversation. I can feel that. These metal people have been spoken to, they are empowered, and they speak. Its noisy in the silence of that studio!

Jul 08
Love0

Perception is not reversible

By London


We perceive and we cannot go backwards from there. Only forward. Whether or not we consciously remember what we’ve perceived it has happened. Though the moments we perceive are forever passing us by, our perception is feeding our momentum forward. We use knowledge of the past to plunge forward into the unknowable future. Rahel Vonmoos is a Body Mind Centering Practitioner. She led a warmup the other day that focused on the kidneys as a place of power and support: a place from which to motivate movement. I had the image of a motor, a soft circular belt at the base of my ribcage pushing me gently forward; the world flying past and curling around to press from behind. The day of explorations fostered a decisiveness and listening in the three of us. Starting. Restarting. Starting in the middle. Performing as if we knew what was going to happen. The rhythm of listening and deciding.

As I near the edge of my time here in London, this phase of my creative research, I think about the ways my perception has widened. I think about these new perspectives living inside my body, traveling with me forever in some way or another. It has been two weeks of listening, absorbing, deciding, waiting, repatterning. In the dance studio, on the streets of London, in the tube, the museums, the pubs, in my quiet apartment, and in the long lovely moments alone…

Jul 07
Love0

Cassie and Frank

By London


I had a visit with Cassie Friend and her 8 month old son Frank. It was so fantastic to see an old friend amidst a trip full of newness. (Cassie, originally from the UK, lived in Philadelphia from about 1998 – 2002 as a member of Pig Iron Theater company. She’s a spunky performer and a wonderful woman and is now settled back in UK, in Reading, and has a successful theater company – Red Cape.) It was great to talk about the thrills and panic involved in running a company, performing in that company and being a Mom. For both of us running a company was never the starting goal. But in order to carry out the productions you dream up you need a structure to support it. And then you have to continue to support that structure. Balancing time between administrative and artistic work becomes a delicate tightrope act and with a baby in your arms… well… things get even more exciting. Its helpful to talk with a like minded artist and friend about the fears frustrations and joys of the scenario. And it was so good to hold that adorable Frank!! At this point in the trip I miss my son Simon quite a bit so Frank was a welcome bit of therapy.

Jul 07
Love0

Nothing Personal

By London

“Nothing Personal” – the dance Wendy and I continually joke about me making. The dance where I tell you everything that the dance is not about, listing all the things I am not going to tell you, showing you all the things I am not going to do. A place to put the things I secretly want to place in a dance but feel uneasy about including. If I arrange them as “Nothing Personal” – perhaps the structural frame allows me to slide back and forth between personal and universal / playful and dark. Who knows maybe you will see this dance at some point. No promises. And if I don’t make it… well… its nothing personal.

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